Behind the Shock Machine (37 page)

But surely, I argued—perhaps partly to play devil’s advocate—the
fact that the experiments are so famous was proof that they pointed to something enduring. Yes, Hank said, there was no question that experiments like Milgram’s had an impact. But “social psychologists frame them as illustrating profound issues. It’s only once you take them out of the context that social psychology gives them that you can ask questions.”

Listening to Hank, I had the strangest sense of déjà vu. It was only later that I realized why. Just about everything he had raised were things that Milgram had confided doubts about in his private papers. The torment he was putting people through; whether his ambition, rather than altruism, was his driving force; the label he had given subjects’ behavior; the tenuousness of the link to the Holocaust; even the meaninglessness of the results—Milgram had grappled with them all during his research. But none of it appeared in print, least of all in his book
Obedience to Authority
, published in 1974, twelve years after the experiments were completed. Over that time, his doubts had seemed to vanish and certainty had taken their place.

This was possible, of course. Opinions can change, and Milgram had been immersed in the research and its aftermath for more than a decade. But this explanation seemed a little too neat. How could such extreme doubts—doubts that went to the very foundation of the research—have been so effectively quelled?

The more likely explanation seemed to be that once the public criticism had erupted, Milgram couldn’t afford self-doubt. His reputation and career were at stake. With his response to Baumrind, he began rewriting the story to portray himself and the results in a particular light. By the time his book was published, his doubts that the experiments might be no more than art seemed to have hardened into a conviction that they were serious science. In his book, the Holocaust became not just a metaphor but the inevitable outcome of what he found in his lab.

Milgram chose to cast the story of his research in dramatic terms, as a moral struggle revealing a profound truth and obedient subjects as flawed and troubled figures. It seemed consistent with what I had learned about him: his ambitious personality, his love for art and
literature, and his intuitive sense of performance. In addition, he needed the book to make a splash—he had a lot to prove.
Obedience to Authority
would be the first full account of his research program. It was also the first piece of writing in which he would provide an overarching theory to explain his subjects’ behavior. It was a chance to make a comeback, to put his derailed career back on track. He would have put himself under pressure to produce something that would establish him as a serious scholar. It had to silence critics of his ethics and methodology. In addition, he wanted it to appeal to the masses.

Milgram was well aware of the power of writing, and particularly scientific writing, to establish power and authority. Judith Waters, who had been his research assistant at CUNY, said that the two of them used to play a game in which they would transform everyday words or expressions into “psychologese.” One of them would suggest a phrase such as “I guess,” and the other would have to come up with its academic equivalent—“Based on the previous assumptions as enumerated above, it is possible to hypothesize that the following outcomes will obtain under certain limited conditions.” While Milgram may have played this game to poke fun at the inflated language of academic discourse, he understood its importance. In 1964, he had written to Leon Mann from Harvard that he was writing up the data they had collected in the Yale Lost Letter study: “What I am trying to do is [a] theoretico-methodological introduction to give it intellectual underpinning and to remove it from the realm of gimmicks.”
³
He was conscious that the creativity and playfulness that often inspired his experiments could also cause them to be perceived as lightweight and used academic lingo to bolster their credentials. He clearly understood the persuasive power of some well-aimed words in the right context.

In his articles, Milgram had revealed a negative and judgmental view of his obedient subjects, an attitude that would become even more pronounced over time. In his book, any sympathy for the obedient subjects had disappeared. Although he argued, somewhat disingenuously, that the people who obeyed were not “monsters” or “sadistic types,” he did suggest that they were like Eichmann, “an
uninspired bureaucrat who simply sat at his desk and did his job.”
⁴
In the pages of his book, Milgram’s obedient “ordinary men and women”—several of whom I met years later—became America’s incarnation of Nazis.

Obedience to Authority
isn’t the the most gripping read. It begins with a chunk lifted from Milgram’s first published article, and then sets obedience against a philosophical and historical backdrop that references Plato, Sophocles’s
Antigone
, and the Third Reich. His experiment, Milgram wrote, sprang from his need as “an empirically grounded scientist” to “move from abstract discourse to the careful observation of concrete instances,” but he stressed that his study was “simple.”
⁵
Then, to establish the authenticity and believability of the experiment, Milgram devoted twenty-eight pages to descriptions of the preparations involved.

In fact, nine out of the book’s fifteen chapters are devoted to descriptions of preparations and the various permutations of the experiments. Only after that, in the following forty pages, did Milgram present his theory. Why did his subjects behave the way they did? It was neither personality nor background, according to him, but an inborn tendency to obey, and particular situations brought out this tendency. While our conscience keeps destructive obedience in check most of the time, put us in a hierarchy and strange things happen. When individuals are submerged in an authority system, he argued, they enter an “agentic state” in which they become the passive recipients of others’ orders. In this state, the person “no longer views himself as responsible for his own actions but defines himself as an instrument for carrying out the wishes of others.” It’s a kind of sleepwalking state. For subordinates in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, it was more a “profound slumber,” compared to the “light doze” of the subjects in his lab, but the process was the same. Once people merge with an authority who gives the orders, entering the twilight zone of the agentic state, they feel “virtually guiltless”—even though they might be doing inhumane things that they would never normally consider.
⁶

Was it just me, or did it sound like sci-fi, a reworking of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
or something invoking the mysterious powers of mind control supposedly wielded by the Chinese during the Korean War?

It wasn’t a very convincing explanation. The zombie-like behavior he described was at odds with the frequent protests and agonizing that he had earlier reported in journal articles. In fact, in some passages, the theory seems downright bizarre. The “agentic state” didn’t explain why some people disobeyed, nor why there was so much variation in degrees of obedience across different conditions. If it was the power of the situation that brought out destructive obedience and prompted the agentic state, why didn’t Milgram get 100 percent obedience in his research? Even Tom Blass, an admirer of Milgram’s work, agreed that his theorizing was “the weakest part of the book.”
⁷

What could explain this apparently halfhearted attempt at a theory that, even to the lay reader, seemed to be filled with holes? What accounted for the uneven structure? Was it evidence that Milgram never really developed a satisfactory theory and tried to disguise this with academic jargon, or did it show that the task of writing the book had been too daunting and, ultimately, too difficult for him? Perhaps he had enjoyed writing only the early parts of the book, and, by the time he got to the theory, he simply ran out of steam.

He certainly found the writing process difficult. While the first two chapters were relatively easy, because they were based on previously written material, the others were more demanding.
⁸
Given all the considerations he had to address, the mass of data he had collected, and his interest in practicalities rather than theories, it’s little wonder that he found writing so difficult.

But it wasn’t only these challenges that slowed his writing—he frequently got distracted by envisioning the look and feel of the finished product. In his papers are early sketches of the cover, complete with taglines, which indicate that he was aiming for popular appeal: “Obedience to authority. Here is the controversy. You decide.” Or, written in German blackletter: “Perhaps there is something in their national character that makes them follow orders unquestioningly. Perhaps this is what makes them . . . Americans. The most controversial
book of the decade.” In total, Milgram drafted over fifty taglines, such as, “Is your neighbor a potential Eichmann? This brilliant and controversial book pursues the truth to its core.” He played heavily with the Eichmann theme, trying out blurbs that focused on the individual, the community, and the nation: “Where’s Adolph [
sic
] Eichmann. Check your mirror, friend”; “Read this book, so you don’t have to change your name to Eichmann”; “a BRILLIANT, FASCINATING and CONTROVERSIAL exploration of what people do when ordered by authority to act inhumanely against an innocent victim”; “If Eichmann had read this book, he would not have become an Eichmann”; “I’m a psychologist and I need your help. Buy this book. Obey this one command and You may be free of authority for evermore”; “the Brilliant Book that ignited a controversy on the Eichmann potential in America—obedience to orders, as American as cherry pie. A brilliant probe into how Americans respond to inhumane orders”; and “‘I WAS JUST FOLLOWING ORDERS.’ The five most controversial words of the century provoke the most controversial book of the decade.”
⁹
Aware of the power of controversy to generate interest and sales, Milgram embraced the sensationalist aspect of his research, regarding it as a powerful selling point.

To get over his writer’s block, Milgram used drugs. In drafts, there are occasional notes in the margins about the effect that a drug was having on his thinking and writing. For example, “NOTE: at 10:00 pm or more exact 9:57 the effects of M are quite strong, and I hope they do not become stronger, because this seems to be about the right level for rather free thinking at the scientific level.”
¹⁰
I laughed when I saw this note. I had been taught, as Milgram had been in the 1950s, that scientific writing is marked by rigor, objectivity, and clarity. But here he was, getting high in order to let his mind roam freely—looking, perhaps, for some kind of mystical insight into his own work. The idea that Milgram, after carefully controlling for variables in his experiment, tried to write it up while high was absurd.

Perhaps this pointed to the real problem behind Milgram’s lackluster theory: he didn’t take it seriously enough. He was more focused
on presenting his subjects as potential Nazis—a desire that was in evidence early in the writing process. In an unpublished paper, he noted to himself:

Let us stop trying to kid ourselves; what we are trying to understand is obedience of the Nazi guards in the prsinon [
sic
] camps, and that any other thing we may understand about obedience is pretty much of a windfall, an accidental bonus. So we might as well write the book as if this were our purpose, and then apologize to being a hopeful poet who finds metaphoric illumination between what subjects do at Yale University and what happened in Germany.
¹¹

Milgram had strengthened the Holocaust connection over the years, and he milked it in the book. In an early draft that he sent to Alan Elms for feedback, Milgram wrote that “every man who gives himself to authority is a psychopath. He kills without shame or guilt if ordered to do so.” Although he changed the wording on the advice of Elms, who said that such comments were too extreme and “easily refuted,” his sentiment remained the same.
¹²

In the published version, he began the first chapter by drawing a parallel between Eichmann and the obedient subjects, reinforcing Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil,” as he would throughout the book.
¹³
The pressure to write something that would appeal to the public, combined with his desire to contribute to an understanding of the Holocaust, meant that Milgram focused his attention on presenting his subjects as American Eichmanns, only afterward piecing together a theory to support this representation.

As if to emphasize just how small a role personality played in obedience, early in the book Milgram argued that the kind of “destructive obedience” he studied in the lab could be traced not to an individual’s personality but to the situation they found themselves in. In a three-page chapter, he highlighted it as the reason why so many people underestimated the levels of obedience he would find: “Most people . . . focus on the character of the autonomous individual rather than on
the situation in which he finds himself. With this view, they are likely to expect few subjects to go along with the experimenter’s orders.”
¹⁴
He relegated to an appendix descriptions of unsuccessful efforts by himself and his staff to find personality traits or particular attitudes that would predict obedience levels. As proof of the unexpected nature of his results, he described how he asked a group of thirty-nine psychiatrists to predict how many people would go to 450 volts. Their verdict? Only about one in a thousand, or 0.001 percent—“a pathological fringe”—would go all the way. He noted, “Their estimates were completely out of line with what happened in the laboratory. This suggests that we have not simply demonstrated the obvious, but have learned something that goes beyond intelligent conjecture.”
¹⁵
Milgram would use the results of this exercise time and again to demonstrate that he had discovered something counterintuitive, something that even psychiatrists could not have predicted.