Behind the Shock Machine (41 page)

After the preparations were complete, there was a tight two-and-a-half-week window in which to get the filming done. Burger lost eight pounds during it because he “didn’t have time to eat.”

Burger’s involvement in organizing the experiment led him to be impressed with the “genius” of Milgram’s research design. He had clearly had a good understanding of what it would take to get people to follow instructions. “Milgram claims he was surprised as anybody at the results, and he said this in answer to ethical charges that he hadn’t intended for people to have these experiences. But I think he also had an idea it wasn’t going to be a failure because obviously it wasn’t going to be very interesting if people stopped at the first scream. I think he had an intuition—he knew that if you started at 100 volts it wouldn’t work, so [he devised] things like using the 15-volt increments, telling the experimenter to say, ‘I’m responsible if anyone asks.’”

But he found that Milgram’s story of the experiment wasn’t as straightforward as he made it seem. The process of administering the memory test, for example, was more complicated and confusing than he had expected. “It’s much more difficult than it seems from the subject’s point of view. You have to keep track of what the response is, what that aligns with in terms of which item you’re on, you have to give the right answer, you have to press the right button—there’s a lot to do in a long sequence, so for a lot of our participants, they needed help for the first few times. . . . I am sure that when Milgram said, ‘These are the only things my experimenter said,’ that that’s not correct.
It really isn’t. There are all kinds of questions that people asked. I’m sure his experimenter had to do a lot of off-the-cuff comments that deal with confusion and questions and problems that surface, which of course adds a lot of variance to the whole process. So even though we tried to follow as tightly as possible exactly what his person did, I realized that’s probably not possible.”

While Burger could see how brilliantly Milgram had set up the dilemma for subjects, he hadn’t appreciated how difficult a struggle it was until he watched it firsthand. “It’s not as clear-cut as it seems from the outside. When you’re in that situation, wondering should I continue or should I not, there are reasons to do both. What you do have is an expert in the room who knows all about this study, and presumably has been through this many times before with many participants, and he’s telling you here’s nothing wrong. The reasonable, rational thing to do is to listen to the guy who’s the expert when you’re not sure what to do.”

Burger had been worried from the start about the levels of distress his subjects might experience. “I can say honestly that I was prepared to pull the plug if, after the first few subjects, the reaction was stronger than I’d anticipated. I was going to tell the ABC, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not going to participate in this if people are going to have a bad reaction.’” But after that anxious first day, it was clear to him that the people he had recruited weren’t showing signs of extreme stress. As soon as a subject refused to continue or reached 150 volts, the experiment was stopped, and Burger debriefed each subject immediately. He was amazed at how positive most people were. He could think of “one or two” who weren’t happy afterward, but 90 percent of people, when asked, said they would be happy for their parts to be shown on television and “nowhere did I pick up anywhere that anyone had a problem.” “I think our people had the benefit of being able to say they were about to stop. And I did a debriefing that gave them credit for that. I did my best to make them feel they weren’t monsters, that they didn’t do anything wrong. They’ll never know what they would have done. They were able to tell themselves they would have stopped. There’s comfort in that.”

The replication was successful, and the program aired on January 3,
2007. Burger wasn’t surprised to find he got similar results to Milgram and believed it shows that it was about the situation, rather than personality.

It took two years for his results to be published, finally appearing in the January 2009 issue of
American Psychologist
. As they had with Milgram, the media were all over the story. “The reaction was huge. I did nothing but interviews for days afterward. Everybody everywhere was calling.” He couldn’t get over the professional boost he had gotten since. He was invited to give talks on the research both inside and outside academia. A self-described shy person, Burger told me, “It seemed that when I went to conferences, people who wouldn’t normally come up and talk to me were coming up and talking to me. Some of the big shots in the field, whom I’d never met, acted like we were old friends, and they knew me. I was going to say, you know, ‘We’ve never actually been introduced, but that’s fine with me if you want to schmooze.’ So I think it’s really been a plus professionally.”

I thought about Don Mixon telling me how actually conducting the experiment had revealed the full cruelty of it to him. Did it challenge Burger’s thinking about the Milgram experiment? “I used to give the usual spiel about how it tells us a lot about Abu Ghraib and the Holocaust, but what I’ve come to understand is that in some ways Milgram was thinking too big, and in some ways he wasn’t thinking big enough. With a complex phenomenon like the Holocaust, you need to be cautious in drawing that parallel. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s unrelated. It helps us understand the Holocaust experience, but it’s a little piece of it. But I don’t think he was thinking big enough. I may not commit Nazi atrocities, but I’m certainly capable of doing things that surprise me and disappoint me, so I think that’s the bigger message.”

And there’s no arguing with the importance of Milgram’s study, Burger said. “Everybody understands the ethical questions. Fifty years later, who else in social psychology are people still talking about? It’s got a place in the history of social psychology and psychology that’s well respected.” He paused, perhaps waiting for me to agree. “All of us [psychologists] have criticisms of his interpretations
and the way he describes things, but we all recognize the importance of his study.”

Do we? I wondered as I followed him out of his office. He was taking me to see his shock machine. We went down a flight of stairs and into the basement, then through a door and into a windowless waiting area facing two rooms. Burger took me into the larger of the rooms where under a heavy plastic cover was the machine.

“Here,” Burger said, pulling back the chair. “Take a seat.”

I sat down. From this position, it seemed bigger. It looked slick, almost industrial, with its red lights, levers, and dials. It looked authoritative and powerful, certainly not fake.

“Go ahead,” he said, as if sensing that I needed his permission.

I pulled the chair closer to the desk. I pressed the first switch and a light came on, a low buzz sounding. Even though I knew what to expect, I could feel my shoulders tensing. I pressed the second switch, and then the third. I knew the drill—it wouldn’t be until the fifth switch that I would hear the first noise, a grunt of pain. But when I reached the fourth, a voice suddenly screamed, “Let me out of here! My heart’s bothering me—let me out, let me out, let me out!” I jumped and let go of the switch, but the voice kept going, on a continuous loop. “I told you, let me out. [
Screams
] I can’t stand . . .” The cries ran into one another, a jumbled mishmash. Burger darted over. “The computer’s playing up again,” he said, flipping the next switch so that the voice stopped.

Even though I knew it was just a recording, I felt startled. My heart was beating faster. In the sudden silence, I did something, in what should have been a solemn moment, that I still can’t explain. I don’t know what drove me—a mix of fear, surprise, foolishness, relief, or sheepishness at my gullibility. Whatever it was, I couldn’t help myself. I laughed.

Thirty-three years before Burger’s replication, Milgram’s documentary
Obedience
had brought his research to the attention of audiences when it screened on
60 Minutes
. It was the first visual representation of the experiment and set the benchmark for subsequent films, TV movies, and plays.

Milgram shot the film over the final three days of his experiments, on May 25, 26, and 27, 1962, with staff from Yale’s AV center as cameramen and a freelance sound engineer. He shot five reels of eleven men, including one pair of friends who took part in condition 24, over that weekend. But it took another three years before the editing would be complete.

Milgram knew when he shot the film that further research funding was unlikely; the NSF had made that clear. But it’s probable that he wanted to capture a record of his work, as well as gather proof of the procedure and his subjects’ behavior. Perhaps it was three years before he got around to finishing the edit because his job at Harvard kept him particularly busy, or perhaps Baumrind’s article in 1964 and the ensuing controversy gave him fresh impetus. Milgram hired aspiring filmmaker Christopher Johnson to edit the footage and record a voice-over to accompany it. He had been given some funding by the NSF in June 1963 to analyze his results and report his research, and he may have used the last of this in July 1965 to cover editing costs.

Milgram had already noticed that explaining the experiment was not the same as seeing it. He told one interviewer that no matter how many times he tried to explain it to colleagues, most of them looked “puzzled.”
³
From his early applications to the NSF onward, he had used photographs to illustrate and offer evidence of what he was trying to describe. Privately, he guessed that his experiments were more successful as drama than as science:

Several men of intelligence, having observed the experiments, felt that the procedures bared for them profound and disturbing truths of human nature . . . three young Yale professors, after witnessing an evening session, declared that the experience was a brilliant revelation of human nature, and left the laboratory in a state of exhilaration. Similar reactions were forthcoming from other observers. Whether all of this ballyhoo points to significant science or merely effective theater is an open question. I am inclined to accept the latter interpretation. One reason is that almost all witnesses say to their friends: “You have to see it to understand it,” or “You can’t imagine what happens unless you see it yourself; words simply won’t do.” This is precisely the kind of talk one would expect to hear in connection with a play or some other artistic performance. In genuine science a mathematical or verbal description of the phenomenon is good enough. But the truth or significance of music, or a theatrical performance, or a painting, depends on direct confrontation and experiencing of the event. So the drawing power of the experiments stem in part from their artistic, non-scientific component. This makes them more interesting; it does not necessarily make them more valuable for a developing science of man.
⁴

He wanted the film to be arresting. In Milgram’s film folder, there are detailed notes analyzing Hitchcock’s technique in
Strangers on a Train
. He noted that the intrigue of Hitchcock’s film took place “on two planes—the physical and the moral,” giving insight into his thoughts about the purpose of the film.
⁵

Before passing the footage to Johnson, Milgram did his own edit. He chose seven of the eleven men, cutting the other four. The film, like his book, had to function as proof of his scientific credentials, to show that subjects believed the setup and that the results were real. His handwritten notes on the unedited footage read like a screen test. He noted that the first man on the first reel “reeks of obedience” and “is not bad at all.” The second, Milgram wrote, had potential: he was “animated and alive.” But the subject said, “I didn’t believe the experiment was real. The groans and moans were not real.” It was these doubts that let his performance down, in Milgram’s view: “At one point he said he didn’t believe it—at another he said he believed completely.” Unreliable subjects might cast doubt on the experiment’s believability. The next one was “fair”; the next, Milgram noted glumly, was “not very convincing,” although the next man showed promise, demonstrating “considerable tension throughout.”

By the fourth reel, Milgram’s excitement was palpable. It was an “excellent” reel. One man was “excellent on tension,” and another was “brilliantly anti-authority” and “a good laugher.” The next man, who was in fact Jim McDonough’s neighbor, the one who would later try
to revive him after his fatal heart attack, received an “IN,” indicating he had made it to the final cut.

The man that Milgram would call Fred Prozi came next and was termed “brilliant” not just once but three times because of his “complete abdication and excellent tension.” Milgram had found his star: “He should be used in the final film as a demonstration of our obedient subjects.”
⁶

Milgram’s excited comments about Prozi reminded me of the notes he had made when he first met Jim McDonough: “Excellent as victim. A+ victim.” Only Prozi hadn’t been acting.

Among those left on the cutting-room floor were a pair of friends, one of whom was still agitated after the debriefing. He said to Williams, “I was sweating bullets. I’m still jumping!” while his friend, who seemed much younger, stood in the background, looking uncomfortable.

Chris Johnson edited the film to depict one run-through of the experiment in its entirety, splicing together clips of different male subjects from different conditions. We see one man listening to Williams’s instructions and then watching as the learner is strapped in, another receiving a sample shock, another refusing to go on at 150 volts, another laughing, another telling Williams to take the money back, and another reaching 345 volts before refusing to continue. Then we get to Fred Prozi. The only one who goes to 450 volts, he dominates the narrative: he is allocated more time than the other subjects combined. And it’s a riveting performance.