Behind the Shock Machine (7 page)

Alexandra told me that she met Milgram at a party in January 1961: “Stanley never left my side . . . we just seemed to click.” She was a dancer who lived in the Village, which would doubtless have appealed to the artist in Milgram. Her ease with people, too, would likely have attracted him, considering that he could be socially awkward, abrupt, and abrasive at times.

The night the couple met, Milgram had been at Yale for just four months. He had an upcoming article in
Scientific American
about his PhD research and was finishing an application for funding of his obedience studies. Milgram had been careful to frame his research to suit the interests of relevant government bodies. In his initial approach
to the Office of Naval Research, he had described it as an investigation of how the Red Chinese had so successfully gained compliance from American POWs.
⁴⁰
But their application deadline was months away, so he had instead written an application for the National Science Foundation (NSF). Just weeks after the party, in late January 1961, Milgram and Alexandra would race up the steps of a New York post office together to get his NSF application in on time.

Milgram and his wife-to-be could not have known then that the research he was hoping to conduct would make his name but cost him his reputation, or that the techniques that would make his research unforgettable to all would make it objectionable to many.
⁴¹
At the time he applied, Milgram had little reason to expect controversy. His research was a product of an intellectual tradition absorbed from his mentors, texts, teachers, and training. His research certainly wasn’t the first to deceive and manipulate or to subject participants to intense stress. Until Milgram’s first article was published in October 1963, there had been little, if any, public criticism by social psychologists about the treatment of human subjects in their research. But all that changed when Milgram’s research was eventually published and psychologist Diana Baumrind objected publicly to the way that Milgram had evoked intense emotional distress in his subjects and induced them to behave cruelly. And she touched a nerve: her criticism sparked an intense debate about the ethics of research with human subjects that continued throughout the 1960s. Milgram’s obedience experiments, which writer Ian Parker described in
Granta
as the most “cited, celebrated—and reviled” in the history of social psychology, helped to provoke a redefinition of what was acceptable in psychological research.
⁴²
It led to the introduction of ethical guidelines that prohibited the use of deception and other measures that caused undue stress to human subjects—guidelines that make Milgram’s research unrepeatable today.

The scientific foundation upon which North American experimental social psychology had based itself became its downfall. The adoption of manipulative techniques such as deception and the cold, dispassionate eye of the observer fixed on scientific progress, combined with an apparent lack of concern for the welfare of volunteers, caused
much soul-searching among social psychologists, many of whom lost confidence in the experimental methods of their own discipline.
⁴³
Little did he know it, but Milgram’s experiments marked the end of a research tradition and the end of an era.

2

GOING ALL THE WAY

I was nervous about meeting Bill Menold. We had exchanged e-mails and talked on the phone; he had even helped me to book a room at the Holiday Inn in Palm City, Florida, for my visit. On the phone he had sounded warm, helpful, but I couldn’t think of anything other than the fact that he had continued to shock a man he thought might be dead.

I met Bill in the lobby of my hotel on the morning of a sweltering day in August 2007. He was a tall, bearlike man, with muscular legs like a tennis player’s emerging from baggy beige shorts. Sandy hair, a reddish complexion. A big, ready laugh. He looked so different from what I had imagined that for a moment I felt unsure of what to say.

I had come to Florida to find out what had driven people to continue to the maximum voltage on Milgram’s shock machine. But how could I phrase the question? How could I ask how it felt to torture someone without showing how much it horrified me?

We introduced ourselves. The lobby was noisy and we went to my room to talk. Bill told me that he hated Florida and hated Bush even more, which put him on the outs with most people he knew. He had spent most of his working life farther up the East Coast or on the West Coast and would have moved away from Florida if he hadn’t met Barbara, his third wife, who has strong ties to the state.

We soon got to talking about the experiments. Back in 1961, Bill, a newly married twenty-five-year-old, commuted the eight miles each day
from his home in Milford to his job at a New Haven credit union, which was just a short walk from the Yale campus. When he was a student at the University of Connecticut before military service interrupted his studies, he had never set foot inside Yale. “I was inquisitive, maybe I was a little shy. I was intimidated—this was being done at Yale University, and having grown up in that area, Yale was like God.” Curiosity drove him to answer the ad for volunteers in a memory and learning test. “I thought it would be fun to try it. I thought, well, let me find out how smart I am.”

Still, Bill was nervous when he arrived at Yale’s Linsly-Chittenden Hall, a rather forbidding gray building. At 6:45
P.M.
, he was right on time. He saw a sign on a post outside stating that the memory and learning experiment was downstairs, in the basement. “One of the Yale students had written ‘don’t forget’ on it in pencil. I thought it was funny.” Still smiling at the joke as he walked down to the basement, Bill had no idea of the threshold he was about to cross or that he would emerge forty-five minutes later, shaken, distressed, his world tipped on its axis.

Inside, Bill was met by a stern man, John Williams, in a gray lab coat—“very straightforward and professional, just what you’d expect from Yale”—and soon after a second volunteer arrived, introduced as Mr. Wallace. He was Jim McDonough, the actor that Milgram had chosen to play the role of the learner. “He seemed like a nice guy, genial, friendly. He was probably twenty years older than me.”

After Williams had introduced the two men, he paid each $4.50 and said that whatever happened from then on, the money was theirs simply for showing up. He then began to explain the experiment: “Psychologists have developed several theories to explain how people learn various types of material. Some of the better-known theories are treated in this book.” Here, Williams gestured to a book on the table, titled
The Teaching–Learning Process.
¹
Milgram had chosen this book because the title seemed to add legitimacy to what Williams was saying. Williams mentioned that one theory held that people learn better whenever they are punished for making a mistake, and parents often applied this theory by spanking children
whenever they did something wrong. Then he said, “Actually, we know very little about the effects of punishment on learning because almost no truly scientific studies of it have been made in human beings. For instance, we don’t know how much punishment is best for learning—and we don’t know how much difference it makes as to who is giving the punishment, whether an adult learns better from someone older or younger than themselves, and many things of that sort.

“So what we’re doing in this study is bringing adults of many different occupations and ages and we’re asking some of them to be teachers and some of them to be learners. We want to find out what effect different people have on each other as teachers and learners. And also what effect punishment will have in this situation. Therefore I’m going to ask one of you to be the teacher here tonight and one of you to be the learner. I guess the fairest thing would be to write ‘teacher’ on one piece of paper and ‘learner’ on the other and let you both draw.”

The draw was rigged so that Bill would draw the role of teacher, which he did, and McDonough was taken into a room next door. Williams exuded an air of confidence as he instructed McDonough to take off his jacket and matter-of-factly strapped him into the chair. But when he started connecting electrodes to McDonough’s arms, Bill began to feel apprehensive. “I was kind of, holy mackerel, what is going on here?”

McDonough, Bill remembers, seemed a little apprehensive too, mentioning that he’d been at the VA hospital some time back with a heart problem. But the experimenter reassured him that this was nothing to worry about. “He said something like, ‘We do this sort of thing all the time, nothing to be upset about.’ Just another day at the office, you know.”

Williams led Bill into the main room and resumed his monologue. “Now please pay attention to the instructions. This machine generates electric shocks. When you press one of these switches all the way down, the learner gets a shock.”

In the script that Williams was following, Milgram had typed stage directions in capital letters.

PRESS FIRST SWITCH.

“When you release it the shock stops.”

RELEASE SWITCH.

DEMONSTRATE AGAIN—QUICKLY.

“The switch will remain in the middle position after you’ve released it to show you which switches you’ve used on the board.

Of course if you were to press it down again the learner would get another shock.”

TURN ON GENERATOR.

“The machine is now on. To give you the teacher an idea of the amount of shock the learner is getting we feel it is only fair that you get a sample shock yourself.

Are you agreeable?

May I have your right arm?”

SLIP BRACELET ON ARM. ADD PASTE.
²

This shock was genuine. It was the only real shock given during the experiment, delivered by a battery rigged up at the back of the machine specifically for this purpose.

For naive volunteers such as Bill, the whole experience must have suddenly felt a bit like stepping onto a fast-moving escalator. When he heard about the shocks, his first thought had been of one of those joy buzzers advertised on the backs of comic books, along with Whoopee cushions and X-Ray Specs—you hid the buzzer in the palm of your hand and used it to play a prank on your friends, giving them a mild tingle that felt more like a tickle than a shock. But by now Bill had received a real shock, which was not as mild as he’d been imagining, and he’d had a chance to look at the machine. “I was taken a little bit aback by how complex it was. It was a large white panel with many switches . . . at least a dozen from left to right . . . and you could see there was a degree of severity as you went up the line. I just said to myself that these people know what they’re doing and I’m just going to go along with it and see what happens here.”

Williams told Bill that once the test began the learner would communicate his answer by pressing a switch, which would light one of four numbers in a box on top of the machine. If the learner gave a
wrong answer, Bill should say “wrong,” tell him the number of volts he was about to receive, administer the shock, and repeat the right answer before moving on to the next line. With every wrong answer, Bill should move up one switch. “It’s very important that you follow this procedure exactly,” Williams told him.

Little did Bill know that, as he was being seated in front of the machine and listening to Williams’s explanations, McDonough, alone in the adjoining room, was already unstrapping himself and setting up the tape recorder that would broadcast his cries.

The test began. Bill read the list of word pairs into a microphone so that McDonough could memorize them.

Bill: Blue: boy, girl, grass, hat?

[McDonough buzzes correct answer]

Bill: Correct. Nice: day, sky, job, chair?

[McDonough buzzes correct answer]

Bill: Correct. Fat: man, lady, tub, neck?

[McDonough buzzes correct answer]

To Bill’s relief, McDonough got the first few right. When he got one wrong, Bill gave him 15 volts and did not hear any reaction. Bill kept going, and it wasn’t until the fifth shock, 75 volts, that he heard anything. “I think the first sound that I heard—and I can’t tell you how far in it was—but it was like ‘oooh,’ like he felt something. It wasn’t a scream, I don’t think; it seemed to me that it was an indication of discomfort.”

Bill began to feel uncomfortable, but Williams urged him on. McDonough gave an even louder cry the next time. Williams seemed unperturbed and again urged Bill to continue. He began to dread McDonough’s answers. The test didn’t seem that difficult, and Bill knew that if he were the learner he would be sure to get more right. “I tried everything that I thought I could get away with, accenting the
right word . . . like dog, cat,
chair
, rabbit, and like, ‘I’m giving you the hello there, I’m giving you a hint,’ and time after time he’d still get them wrong.”

The test continued. Wrong; 90 volts. Then McDonough got one, then two, correct, and Bill felt himself relax. But the next one was wrong; 105 volts. A noise that sounded like “uugh.” And the next; 120. “When he yelled out . . . that’s when I started to feel really uncomfortable . . . and I thought, oh God. . . . What the hell am I doing here? What is this all about?”

McDonough’s sounds of discomfort grew louder with each shock. Then he mentioned his heart problem.

Bill: White: cloud, horse, rock, house?