Behind the Shock Machine (6 page)

Perhaps it was here, in equating humans with animals, that the seeming carelessness about the welfare of human subjects began. Watson and his assistants, for example, plunged babies into cold water; hit metal bars with hammers to make loud noises beside them; asked one carer to drop them and another to catch them; held their heads, arms, and legs tightly so that they couldn’t move; jerked blankets out from under them as they were falling asleep; and placed them alone in dark rooms to demonstrate that fear, love, and rage were learned and that you could vastly improve a child’s prospects by what you taught them.
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It was no coincidence that in the 1920s and 1930s
the unwitting human subjects of psychological research were often orphaned babies and children, mental patients, prisoners, and minority groups—those who were disempowered and did not enjoy the same rights as others.
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North American social psychology remained largely behaviorist in orientation until the 1930s, when the Gestaltists arrived from Germany. The influx of Jewish psychologists fleeing Nazism prompted one social psychologist to observe that “the one person who has had the greatest impact on the field . . . [is] Adolf Hitler.”
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The new arrivals brought with them the tradition of Gestalt psychology, which dictated that in order to understand an event one had to know how it was understood and perceived by the person experiencing it.
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Wundt would have approved, as it mirrored his focus on the individual’s experience as a legitimate object of study. The Gestaltist interest in thoughts, feelings, and perceptions was in direct opposition to North American behaviorism. It was a clash between two psychological traditions that, until then, had developed in parallel on two different continents. On the same soil, conflict was inevitable.

The arrival of leading German-Jewish psychologist Kurt Lewin transformed the field. Lewin had a passion for meaningful science that could provide answers to pressing real-life problems and effect social reform; he was committed to finding ways to help in overcoming prejudice and group conflict. While behaviorists argued that an individual’s behavior could be explained by her or his personal history of rewards and punishments, Lewin argued that behavior is shaped by interactions with the environment (a person’s “life space,” as he termed it). By changing a person’s environment, you could change their behavior. In Lewin’s view, psychology had the potential to alter the behavior of whole societies as well as small groups. He coined the phrase “action research” to emphasize the crucial link he aimed to forge between experimental findings and the alleviation of social problems.
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Lewin’s engagement with social issues drew students from across the United States to the University of Iowa and, later, to MIT, where he established the Research Center for Group Dynamics. He and his students adopted the maxim “no research without action, no action
without research,” applying their findings in a range of settings, including factories and local communities.
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In one famous study of how leadership styles shape individual and group behavior, which Lewin saw as a parallel for the impact of the differing political ideologies of Germany and the United States, Lewin and two students studied the effect of autocratic and democratic leadership on groups of eleven-year-old boys. The boys, who had been told they were taking a mask-making workshop, met with their workshop leader over a period of weeks. One group was run by a person with an autocratic, domineering leadership style and the other by someone with a democratic, inclusive style. While the boys were making masks, five observers recorded how they interacted with one another. They found that the boys in the autocratic group were hostile and aggressive, while the boys in the democratic group showed greater group spirit and were more cooperative, friendly, and supportive of one another.
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Ironically, although he was to be dubbed the “conscience of social psychology,” it was Lewin who made deception a hallmark of social psychological research. For Lewin, who had experienced anti-Semitism and racial hatred firsthand under the Nazi regime—and whose relatives, stranded in Germany, were still in danger—the possibility of finding ways to combat prejudice and brutality far outweighed any stress or upset that his experiments may have caused to his subjects.
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He advocated setting up elaborate experiments where those being studied were unaware that they were under observation and became completely engaged in the situation, so that their natural and spontaneous behavior could be observed from a hidden vantage point. The closer to life the experiment was, Lewin argued, the more the results could be applied to the world outside.
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Lewin’s students, in turn, disseminated his approach through their teaching and mentoring. (One of Lewin’s research assistants at Cornell University was a young Allen Funt, creator of
Candid Camera
.) Throughout his life, Lewin had been able to balance the research and applied aspects of his psychology, but after his unexpected death in 1947 one of his students, Leon Festinger, became particularly influential at propagating his version of Lewin’s ideas. For Festinger, a
scientist rather than an applied researcher, research became an end in itself.
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It was Festinger who perfected the art of social psychological research as a kind of theatrical stage production. It required, according to him, making props, playwriting, casting, acting, and rehearsing. He said that such research was like “being afflicted with a psychosis. . . . You become involved in it, addicted to it, and it just becomes a way of life.”
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Prominent American psychologist Elliot Aronson described the exhilaration and thrill involved in his apprenticeship to Festinger, who was driven less by a desire to improve the human condition than by an intense and voracious curiosity about human nature: “He approached research in social psychology as a puzzle to be solved, the way a chess master approaches a chess problem: trying to understand human behavior and doing good research (not doing good) were more than enough to keep him excited.”
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Festinger, Aronson said, was renowned for his ability to construct experiments in which “the participant gets caught up in a powerful scenario that is compelling, believable, and fully involving. Every details [
sic
] of the construction and performance is terribly important.” Aronson recalled the “hours and hours” of rehearsal and preparation that Festinger put him through: “Leon was a regular Lee Strasberg, and we graduate students felt that we were a part of Actors Studio. Art and craftsmanship in the service of science: it was an exciting process. It was very hard work, but we considered it a vital part of doing research.” The goal of such research was, according to Aronson, delivering surprising findings that were likely to attract attention and follow-up research.

During World War II, social psychology proved particularly useful to the military, which was interested in a science that had the potential to offer practical strategies and manage a host of psychological problems posed by war. Festinger and Lewin, like many social psychologists, contributed their research skills in support of the war effort. Their research, and that of their colleagues, provided insight into how to convince people to eat unpopular, nonrationed foods; improve troop morale; and improve the selection and training of soldiers.
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Research became increasingly sophisticated over time, using complex cover stories and highly realistic scenarios that employed any number of confederates. For example, a group of army
recruits were convinced midair that their plane was about to crash, and others were led to believe that they had triggered an explosive device that had injured, and likely killed, people.
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Debriefing was conducted afterward, in the belief that any potentially harmful psychological effects would be prevented by full disclosure, and any stress or trauma experienced by subjects would be justified by improvements in combat training, reduction of casualties, and a foreshortened war.

This military funding continued to flow after the war. To prove its continuing usefulness, social psychology became increasingly experimental and laboratory-based. But peacetime brought changes in the types of psychological problems that interested the military—the continuing tension and brinkmanship of the Cold War prompted the army, navy, and air force to fund research on the psychology of groups and the roles of leadership, cooperation, and competition. In particular, they were interested in determining how small, isolated groups, cut off from the world in the event of a nuclear attack, could function effectively. The late 1940s and 1950s saw a surge of interest in psychological warfare, conformity, and obedience, as the capture and supposed brainwashing of U.S. prisoners during the Korean War prompted funding into differences in national character. Throughout the 1950s, the surreal, disturbing specter of mind control dominated the U.S. public imagination, fueled by anticommunist propaganda and representations in popular culture—including a rash of sci-fi movies such as
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
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Milgram would have known that psychological research exploring these issues was more likely to attract government funding.
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The use of deception in social psychological research, which had been relatively rare before World War II, became common practice afterward.
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By the late 1950s and early 1960s, full-scale theatrical laboratory experiments involving elaborate deception techniques were common. Social psychology handbooks promoted experiments with a high degree of “experimental realism,” scenarios that were “so striking and believable that subjects forget they are in an experiment.”
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The psychological discomfort that participants experienced—such as feelings of embarrassment, annoyance, or anger—were seen as regrettable
but necessary. To study anxiety, subjects had to panic; to study insecurity, subjects had to feel vulnerable; to study humiliation, subjects had to be shamed. For example, in order to study anger and aggression, individuals were insulted by another “subject,” whom they could later choose to punish; to study low self-esteem, students completed a series of personality tests and were told that they had homosexual tendencies, regardless of the test results; and, in order to study how group bonds form between strangers who have shared the same painful initiation practices, young women were forced to read sexually explicit material aloud to male experimenters.
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According to Benjamin Harris, before 1964 social psychologists rarely revealed the deception to subjects once the experiment was over. Attempts to relieve participants’ distress were often patchy and inadequate, and researchers rarely checked with subjects to see what they believed had happened. Psychology textbooks were largely silent on the topic of the ethics of experimentation.
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Solomon Asch, back in the 1950s, had been the exception rather than the rule.

Philip Zimbardo’s description of this era makes social psychology sound as if it were the Wild West. He, Milgram, and others like them were cowboys of the psychological frontier. They were men, often from minority groups, who had grown up in urban ghettos where they’d observed firsthand the power of “white lies and a bit of deception here and there . . . to get what they wanted.”
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Their brand of social psychology was “a kind of surreptitious game playing in which the research subject was the pawn pitted against the intellectual might of the researcher armed with deception as his most powerful weapon.” According to Zimbardo, comparing present-day social psychology to the “streetwise, ethnic” version he practiced was like comparing a Big Mac to a corned beef and pastrami sandwich.

Reading accounts of these experiments now—experiments that were described in detail in my own psychology textbooks—it’s remarkable that there wasn’t more criticism of the situations to which research participants were subjected. With their elaborate scenarios, trickery, and manipulation of subjects, it’s hard to see altruism or a desire to change the world as the motivation; instead, they seem designed to showcase the cleverness of the experimenters. Some of them
read as little more than sophisticated stunts, more like
Candid Camera
than serious science. I find it hard to believe that I didn’t question them back then, that I accepted it all as a standard part of the science.

Stanley Milgram’s widow, Alexandra, still lives in the apartment the couple shared with their two children in Riverdale, New York. When I arranged to meet her at her home, she offered to pick me up from the local train station, Spuyten Duyvil. I had seen a painting of the station among Milgram’s drawings, a watercolor looking down on the roof from the steep steps that led to the platform.
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The apartment itself looks out to the wide, gray Hudson River, which Alexandra told me freezes solid in winter. The day I visited, it looked sluggish in the heat.

It wasn’t until I met Alexandra Milgram, a slight, brown-haired woman in her late seventies in a pea green skirt and a pretty floral blouse, that I realized I’d been expecting a female version of her husband—someone feisty, opinionated, even prickly. Yet she was a rather shy woman with slow-blinking brown eyes and a hesitant manner of speaking, as if she were not used to giving her point of view. In fact, I learned that her career was in some ways the opposite of his. While Milgram would probe the minds of Nazis, Alexandra, a social worker, would assist Holocaust survivors—an irony not lost on Milgram, who wrote to his friend Larry, “Sasha [as he called her] is really cut out for this kind of help-the-poor activity, and her positive contributions to social welfare are a healthy counterbalance to my own destructive efforts.”
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