Behind the Shock Machine (15 page)

In 1993, over thirty years after the experiments were over, Bob read about them in a local newspaper, the
Connecticut Post
. They ran a story about Yale’s Sterling Library acquiring the rights to the Stanley Milgram archives. The story gave a brief overview of the obedience experiments, explaining that the “victim/learner” was unharmed and that the subjects were debriefed at the end of the experiment. It sounded to Bob like something he’d been involved in—only he’d never realized that his victim was an actor.

Bob’s appointment for the experiments was on a Saturday morning, and the weather was perfect. Like many locals, Bob had never set foot inside Yale before, let alone one of its science labs. He had no idea what the experiment was going to be about, but the five dollars would come in handy: “In those days a beer was only twenty cents a glass, so for five dollars”—$4.50 plus transport fare—“I could have twenty beers and leave a dollar tip.”

Before I arrived, he’d drawn a diagram for me, showing the setup of the rooms in the basement lab. He’d drawn a box with stick figures, lines dividing the lab from the smaller room with the man strapped in the chair. The drawing was simple, but the explanation was confusing. According to Bob, there were half a dozen people besides himself present. Seated in front of the shock machine were two others, one who read the word pairs into the microphone, the other who announced whether the answer was correct or incorrect. “It was my job to hit a button that would supposedly shock him and he’d go, ‘Ow, oh wow,’ and the more he gave the wrong answer the more I would hit the button. More than once I complained to these people, ‘I can’t do this,’ and they said to me, ‘Would you like to switch places?’ Well, I didn’t want that, either.”

I realized as he was talking that Bob must have taken part in one of Milgram’s lesser-known conditions. Here I was once again, on shaky ground, conscious suddenly of how much I didn’t know about what went on in Milgram’s lab.

I guessed that Bob had been a subject in condition 9, and the two “teachers” sitting with him were men whom Milgram had employed. In condition 9, Milgram wrote in the obedience notebook, “two stooges obey Experimenter and if naïve subject tries to stop, they mutter their disapproval of him.”
²⁶
So, in addition to an experimenter, Bob had two other supposed teachers pressuring him to continue.

He couldn’t remember what voltage he went to or when he stopped, just that the “guy in the other room was really yelling—‘You’re hurting me, you’re hurting me,’ I don’t know the exact words. He was a little bit milder than I would have been. You wouldn’t want to put on any recording what I would have said. . . . And if I find these people, you don’t want to record that, either.”

By now, I no longer regarded outlandish stories about the experiment as an indication of poor memory. For all I knew, Bob might have been told that if he couldn’t give the punishment then he should swap places with the victim. At this point in the experimental program, with so many subjects passing through the lab, so many staff to supervise, and so many experimental scenarios to keep track of, it wouldn’t
surprise me if Milgram’s “teachers” improvised their lines to pressure people like Bob to continue along the shock board.

Bob cracked open a can of Heineken and took a sip. Whoever was in charge was “a son of a bitch,” he said placidly, taking another sip.

It was eight months since I had first met Herb Winer, and by now I knew more about what Milgram’s subjects had been through. Bob’s jokes about suing Yale, the threats of what he’d do if he found the people involved in the experiment—he reminded me of Herb. A little rougher around the edges maybe, but the same combination of humor and bravado. And the same sense of anger, a steady flame fueled by humiliation that flared up every so often. Like when Bob thought about the learner, whom he couldn’t see, but whose screams he could hear. “And he’s in there laughing at me, and that’s what it amounted to. They were all laughing at me.”

Afterward, Bob left the lab and walked through New Haven Green to a bar he knew. “I sat down and had myself a few beers and felt a little bit better. Of course, I spent all my money. Five dollars—it was a lot of money.”

I asked him if he talked to anyone in the bar about what had just happened. “The bar I was in, they wouldn’t care anyway; they certainly weren’t interested in some jerk sitting there talking about some fool experiment that they didn’t have any idea what it was about, and, quite frankly, neither did I at that moment. It was something about inflicting punishment on someone else and if you could take it.”

Before I left, he asked me, “What was it about, anyway?” And I couldn’t answer. Not in a way that would make sense. I couldn’t say that Milgram was looking to explain the behavior of the Nazis during the Holocaust. Milgram never said that to his subjects’ faces, either; he saved it for his writing. How do you look someone in the face, I thought, and explain to them why you put them through that experience? Could that have been another reason why Milgram hadn’t told them the truth at the end of the experiment?

I told Bob that Milgram was testing how far people would go to obey orders.

He leaned forward and the chair groaned. “You know, for a long
time I felt sorry for this guy. I felt bad for this guy and all the time I was the guy they should have felt bad for!”

I had no answers for Bob, but it didn’t seem to matter. I nodded and he sat back in his chair and took another sip of beer, as if being listened to was enough.

4

SUBJECTS AS OBJECTS

Hannah Bergman’s
¹
son David e-mailed me two weeks before I arrived in New Haven to say that his mother was looking forward to meeting me, so I was surprised to hear how cautious she sounded when I phoned. And when I got to the Mitchell Street library in New Haven at 10
A.M.
the following Tuesday, as agreed, she wasn’t there.

I waited on the bottom step, dodging toddlers climbing up and down the stairs as their mothers waited patiently for the library to open. After a few minutes, I noticed a silver car in the parking lot and someone sitting motionless in the driver’s seat. I thought it might be her, and it occurred to me she might be debating whether or not to get out. I tried not to stare. I didn’t want to frighten her off.

At 10:15, after the library doors had opened and the toddlers had rushed inside, she got out of her car and climbed the steps toward me. She wore cream pedal pushers; a mint green sweatshirt; and large, square glasses with brown frames. Her hair, carefully dyed, matched the glasses. “I believe you’re looking for me,” she said heavily.

We walked inside and found a couple of vacant seats at a round table in the children’s section. As we sat down, Hannah told me that she’d called Yale’s legal department to check if it was all right to talk to me; she was told it was. I felt a clutch of anxiety and had to remind myself that I was doing nothing wrong. “This town is nothing without Yale,” she said, pressing her lips together as if emphasizing that no criticism of the university would pass. Hannah and her
husband had always dreamed that one of their sons would go to Yale, she told me.

Conscious of trying to win her confidence, I mentioned David and the e-mail he’d sent me. Hannah told me that while David felt that it would be good for her to talk, her other son, a lawyer named Ronald, had urged her not to say anything or to take along a lawyer. She didn’t say so, but I guessed that Ronald’s advice had spooked her.

I asked about her life in New Haven in 1962. Hannah said that when the boys were small, she and her husband had worked hard: he ran a small grocery store and she earned money by working all sorts of night jobs, from painting toy trains to helping prepare bodies at the morgue. It was her husband who suggested that she go along to the experiment. It’s likely that he had volunteered but been excluded—perhaps because of his age or because Milgram was by then looking for women—so they had asked him to send his wife. In 1962, a dollar could buy three loaves of bread, so $5 for a memory experiment seemed easy money. “He said I could keep the money for myself, and I went to a department store in town and bought something nice.”

When I asked her what she remembered about the experiment itself, she told me about it in a clipped, staccato voice, as if she wanted to get it over as quickly as possible. Clearly, remembering was painful for her. She told me that she went through the archway and down the stairs, as directed. The other fellow seemed very nice, very friendly, but he had a heart condition. Once it began, she remembered the man in the room with her, the experimenter, telling her to go on because she was required to continue. There was something she pushed, and each time she did so the man made a noise. The screams were terrible, very loud. “Very loud,” she repeated, wincing at the memory of it.

“How did you feel?” I asked her.

She shrugged, looked away.

“Were you agitated?”

“Why would I be agitated?” she said defensively, pulling her handbag closer to her chest.

I changed tack, asking if she had learned anything from it. “You can
get anyone to do anything,” she said flatly. She was hugging the bag like a pillow, as if she needed protection.

I told her that the people who volunteered had been placed under enormous pressure to do as they were told. The experiment said more about the Yale professor behind it than it did about his subjects, I explained reassuringly. But at any talk that sounded the least bit critical of Yale, she clammed up even further. She had her guard up, and nothing I could say would bring it down. Her fear of the legal repercussions in talking to me was infectious; I felt irrationally anxious. I was both worried about pushing her too far and unsure of my own role. Who was I to ask such prying questions anyway?

I allowed the conversation to roam away from Milgram. We talked about her grandchildren and her passion for casinos. Connecticut had the best outside of Las Vegas, she told me with a hint of pride, seeming to relax a little. These days she was a wealthy woman, a far cry from the one who had worked night jobs while her husband and children were asleep. The family’s hard work had paid off, and the small corner store had multiplied into a chain. “I could buy the whole block,” she said sadly, jerking her head at the row of shops opposite the library.

Her grandchildren were proud of her for being in the experiment, and she, in turn, was proud of them because they were all interested in social justice in one form or another. But her sons were a different story: they didn’t talk much about the experiment because they thought it would upset her. I guessed this was because they remembered the night she came home from Yale. David had described it in his e-mail: “It actually is a dreadful footnote in her life and one which she talks about today as if it happened yesterday. To that extent, it’s fair to say it was a traumatic event in her life which opened some unsettling personal issues with no subsequent follow-up.”

She told me that up until that night she had always thought she was able to stand up for herself. Yet when describing to me the humiliating moment when it was revealed that a group was watching her through the two-way glass, she half-turned her body toward the bookshelves and shielded her eyes. I realized that she was still ashamed—and frightened. I felt like leaning across the table and taking hold of
her liver-spotted hands. I wanted to say that it was all right, but of course it wasn’t.

She looked away from me, down toward the front window. “I don’t know what it was for, but if it was for cancer research, then I am glad I did it,” she murmured. I opened my mouth to say that it wasn’t a medical experiment, but then I closed it. Once again, I felt caught off balance—clearly, she still didn’t know what it was all about. Later, I would hear it being explained to her on tape, and she most likely would have received the report from Milgram giving more detail, but somewhere or somehow people like Hannah Bergman and Bob Lee had either not taken it in or forgotten it. Or perhaps the debriefing had still felt like part of the experiment, and they left believing that even the explanations were part of the hoax.

Later, I kept going through our conversation in my head. I couldn’t understand, given how little she was prepared to talk about the experiment, why she’d met with me at all.

Milgram’s use of ordinary citizens in his experiment was unusual at the time. Most social psychology experiments used undergraduates, who were both plentiful and handy. Critics of the discipline had complained as early as the 1940s that the “science of human behavior” was primarily the science of the behavior of college undergraduates. By the mid- to late 1960s, surveys published in leading psychology journals found that 90 percent of subjects were college students, with 80 percent of those first-years “coerced” into participating, by either receiving extra points for taking part or being penalized for not taking part.
²
Milgram was conscious that others would argue that high rates of obedience among competitive Ivy Leaguers and indifference to the learner’s pain were hardly surprising.
³
But his primary reason for not using students was more mundane: his grant had come through at the start of the summer break, when most of them had left, or were about to leave, New Haven for the holidays.

Psychological researchers at the time generally used men as subjects, and it was common to generalize from their male subjects to society at large.
⁴
Milgram appeared to have been no different: there is no reference to using female subjects in his early plans for
the experiment, and he excluded females in his initial recruitment drive. Given that they were used only in condition 20, which came late in the program, it seems to have been more of an afterthought. Condition 20 was the second to last experiment conducted at Yale, held in the final two months. In his progress report to the NSF in January 1962, just two months before the condition ran, Milgram had made no mention of it, even though he described the other ten conditions he had planned for February, March, and April.
⁵
It’s likely that, just as he had been gathering information after each experiment about participants’ political beliefs, ethnic background, religion, and military service to see if those variables had any relationship to their level of obedience, he came to regard gender as another factor worth investigating.