Behind the Shock Machine (19 page)

Of the women who were invited to a group interview with psychiatrist Dr. Paul Errera, only four accepted. They arrived at 6
P.M.
on Thursday, April 25, 1963, for their meeting. At the beginning, the women compared notes on what household chores they had avoided by coming—washing up the dinner dishes, putting the baby to bed. Another hoped they’d be finished by seven so she could get home in time to watch
Perry Mason
. But the tone soon turned serious.

Subject 2026, a thirty-eight-year-old Jewish housewife—let’s call her Helen—was one of those attendees. Williams had noted how nervous and upset Helen had become during the experiment, hesitating at the sixth shock and having to be prompted a total of fourteen times. He noted how she sighed, put her hand to her forehead, told him that she couldn’t do it any longer, and, with a “pathetic look on her face,” pleaded with him to let her stop. Helen told the group how angry she was with herself for going to 450 volts:

I thought to myself, how cruel can I get . . . I did turn around a couple of times before I finally really rebelled. At the time, my girlfriend had died just a few days before. I was emotionally upset anyway and I was just a wreck, and when he said, “Continue,” I felt like a fool. I couldn’t understand myself . . . I questioned myself. I still don’t know why I did it. I know I didn’t want to . . . I said, “I can’t stand this. I don’t want to go on.” He kept saying, “It’s vital to the experiment” in a very authoritative and commanding tone, and I sat there like a dummy and pushed the button. Then afterwards, I went, why did I do that? After all, here I had received such a minimum amount of shock and didn’t like it, and here I was going so much further, and I wondered if I was really sadistic. At the time I—as I—it was just like a, a, a—what do they call those electric dummies? No, I was like a robot. I sat there like a robot doing what he told me to do.

Errera asked her why she had continued. Subject 2004, the forty-nine-year-old housewife Williams had described as flirting with McDonough—let’s call her Rachel—was also present.

Helen: Well, I turned around, he said, “Go ahead, go ahead.” He said, “Keep on going,” he said. I think that’s what he said. But I was very weak afterward. I had to sit down. I sat there for a while.

Rachel: I think we all did, maybe.

Helen: I sat there for about a half hour.
[laughs]
He brought me a cup of coffee. I don’t know, but I was actually shaking.

Rachel: I didn’t even want any coffee. I don’t think I could have swallowed.

Rachel had spent thirteen months in a mental hospital after the birth of a child and had volunteered for the experiment because she’d had shock treatment during her hospitalization and wanted to test her memory. She laughed nervously throughout the experiment, telling Williams, “I don’t know why I’m laughing—it isn’t funny,” and apologized constantly to the learner as she delivered the shocks, proceeding to the maximum voltage. She told the group, “I did say when I came
home that I would never again accept any of these experiments because I came here thinking I was going to learn something.”
⁴⁶

Yet by far the angriest of the women was Subject 2003—let’s call her Nancy—the most outspoken critic of the experiment in all of Errera’s sessions. Although Milgram was there when the women arrived for the meeting, he did not stay to watch, and I was sorry that he wasn’t there to hear firsthand what Nancy had to say or to come out from behind the mirror and talk to her.

Nancy was a forty-eight-year-old widow who came from a large Italian family and worked as a clerk. Williams noted that during the experiment she became “very upset” and protested, “I don’t want to go on with this,” but went to the maximum voltage. In her questionnaire, she had written, “I’m sorry untruths were used to start the experiment. Logically—based on untruths, the end results will be untrue.” She also said that she was still angry “at being fooled” and “had no sympathy with the experiment or experimenter.”
⁴⁷
In the interview with Errera, she made her feelings known early.

Nancy: A bunch of Nazis, hurting people for no good reason. That’s all I could think of.

Errera: Well, who were the Nazis?

Nancy: The people who were asking me to go on hurting.

Errera probed her feelings, asking why she was still so upset if she’d been told at the end of the experiment that it was a setup.

Errera: You say you got quite angry and I guess you still are angry.

Nancy: Yes, I am! I—

Unidentified woman: Yeah, look at how mad she is.

Nancy: I’m sorry, I don’t mean to shout.

Errera: Do you feel it’s damaged you?

Nancy: Well, I don’t like the feeling that an experiment is set up and it’s not true.

A couple of women tried to reassure her that the experiment was similar to the deception used in medical research, where one group of people “get sugar pills and another group get the real thing.” But she steadfastly maintained her anger, despite the best efforts by Errera and the other women to defuse it.

Nancy: I am an understanding person, I am an intelligent human being, speak the truth to me about it . . . I will cooperate gladly, even if it’s a bitter truth, but don’t tell me something wrong—

Errera: The purpose is you hope that it will advance science. The purpose of this is that we hope we’ll learn something.

Nancy: I know that.

Errera: In the process you get, you know, you felt your feelings were hurt.

Nancy: I was very indignant.

[. . .]

Errera: You could say that this experiment shouldn’t be done, but if you’re going to do this kind of an experiment, unfortunately you have to deceive.

Nancy: There must be—

Errera: Maybe one shouldn’t do this kind of an experiment.

Nancy: Well, deceive other people, but don’t deceive me, okay.

[. . .]

Errera: Let me tell you—I’m certain—I’m sure I’m speaking for Dr. Milgram. I’m sure he’s sorry and we’re sorry and—
[women laugh]
No, I mean it. If we went against something . . . if you try and collect knowledge for certain experiments, if you hurt certain people’s feelings . . . you always regret it when it happens.

The other women responded to this by trying to make Errera feel better, assuring him that they were unaffected, although one added that she “wouldn’t answer another ad.” Errera closed the meeting by commenting that he would have thought they would be “leery” about coming back to Yale after receiving the letter inviting them to a symposium to discuss the experiment.

First woman: A symposium. I looked it up in the dictionary. It said “coffee”—

Second woman:
[interrupts]
No coffee, huh.

Third woman: No coffee.
⁴⁸

* * *

It was a female subject in a psychological experiment who triggered the ethical outcry that eventually ended experiments like Milgram’s. While it was psychologist Diana Baumrind who first challenged Milgram publicly, she wrote later that it was her typist who had inspired her, a woman who expressed her shame and loss of self-confidence after taking part in a psychology experiment that she thought would help her but had instead turned out to be harmful.
⁴⁹

It’s likely that Hannah Bergman was invited to Dr. Errera’s group meeting but declined the invitation. She did return her questionnaire, in which she wrote that she was still bothered by it and thought about it often:

I now feel that I am not so sure of myself as I thought I always was. When I watch a television show or a movie and the heroin [
sic
] acts up and gives you the impression that an unreal thing is happening—that this once steady nerved girl is now hysterical and crying and very unsure of things—I now know this is so.
⁵⁰

5

DISOBEDIENCE

I found Joe Dimow online. An article he’d written for
Jewish Currents
magazine—even four years after publication, it “gets more hits on the website than anything else,” he says—detailed his experience as a Milgram subject. Researchers and interviewers interested in the obedience experiments appear to have generally ignored Joe, even though he’s easy to find, in favor of go-to guys like Herb Winer. Perhaps it’s because what he’s written sounds so at odds with the official version of the experiments. Joe’s account includes things that no one else has mentioned; he disputes the relevance of the results to the Holocaust; and, worse, he says he saw through the cover story. I was skeptical about this but curious to meet him.

The tall, brown retirement home on the edge of central New Haven looked an unlikely place for a political radical, but it was where Joe lived with his wife, Lill. It’s an independent and assisted-living facility run by members of the Jewish community. At the front desk, I was signed in and given a visitor’s pass by one of the three uniformed security guards. Through the lobby, I passed a room of people playing a lively game of cards, a library, and a cafeteria that, at mid-morning, smelled of baking biscuits. People passed me, some arm in arm with nurses or using walkers.

“I’m OK,” said the cardboard sign hanging on the outside handle of Joe’s apartment. You could flip it over to show the other side: “Please check on me.”

Joe seemed reserved, or perhaps cautious, and ushered me rather
formally into the living room. Likely he was aware that I might have reservations about the veracity of his recollections. The room was small and neat, no clutter, and the essentials—television, stereo, CDs, couch, coffee table, display shelves filled with china ornaments—fit easily. The smell of fresh coffee came from the kitchen, and from a room down the corridor classical music played. Lill left us to it; as she passed, Joe reached out and stroked her arm, and she made a kissing sound.

Within five minutes of meeting Joe, any doubts I had had about his memory evaporated. He was articulate and interesting, and I could have listened—and he could have talked, Lill later said—for hours. Joe told me that, while he might have retired from the workforce, he hadn’t retired from radical politics; since giving up his job as a tool-maker in 1982, he had been able to engage more fully in the political activism that had been limited to nights and weekends when he was working. At eighty-eight, he was passionately interested in what was going on in the world; he still agitated for change and hosted weekly current-affairs discussion groups. Joe rejected racial stereotyping: before moving here, he and his family had lived for twenty-seven years in an African American neighborhood of New Haven where they were the only white family.

Joe said that he hadn’t thought of the Milgram experiment in years, until a conversation at an editorial meeting of
Jewish Currents
(he is a member of the editorial board) in 2003 prompted him. “We were discussing the Israeli soldiers and pilots who had refused to serve in what we call the occupied territories, and said that it must take a lot of guts for people to refuse to serve there—especially in Israel, where the comradeship is so very important to people,” and it prompted him to remember the Milgram experiment. The others “got very enthused and very excited and they were all over me to write an article for the magazine.”

In 1961, Joe and Lill had two young children and were renting an apartment; money was tight. It was Lill who saw the ad in the paper. “She said we could use the five dollars and that I would probably enjoy doing it anyway.”

Joe was most likely in condition 2, the voice-feedback condition,
which Alan Elms and Milgram would have watched. When Joe walked into the lab one afternoon in August, they would have seen a blue-collar man in his forties, maybe tired from a hot day in the workshop, a slight man with neatly combed hair, who may have, despite his best efforts, still had some residual grease under his fingernails. He might have appeared to them a typical subject. But Joe was far from average. “I had been raised in a radical communist family. And our attitude to authority figures was unorthodox in the sense that it distinguished a benign authority—a teacher or someone in a post office or a doctor—from a soldier or a police officer. . . . Police could be either, sometimes benign and sometimes an opponent. But I did distinguish between authority figures in that way.”

As an active member of the Communist Party, Joe had been fired on numerous occasions because of his political views and union organizing. He was used to exercising authority rather than being intimidated by it, and as the party’s chairman he often taught new members—everyone from working-class men to college professors. During the McCarthy era of the early 1950s, Joe had been followed and harassed by the FBI. In 1954, he was arrested, tried, and convicted under the Smith Act on charges of conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence.

At the lab, Joe was met by “a man dressed in a white coat in horn-rimmed glasses looking like a stereotyped image of a professor” who introduced Joe to another man, also dressed in street clothes, and explained that the experiment was about the effect of punishment on learning. Joe remembered thinking at the time that this sounded strange. “I thought by then psychologists knew that punishment was not a good method of teaching people to learn.” But he didn’t say anything—instead he watched and listened as the experimenter told them what the experiment would involve, showed them the machine, and told the learner to sit in the chair. “I asked the other fellow, ‘Are you willing to do this?’ And he said yes, so I said all right.”