WEARING a neat suit and tie, Adolf Eichmann brought the horror of Nazi concentration camps into American living rooms, making a new generation aware of the second world war’s atrocities. Eichmann was a high-ranking officer of the Third Reich, and his trial for war crimes was televised nightly across the US from April to August 1961.
Stanley Milgram was riveted. He was a 26-year-old assistant professor at Yale University with childhood memories of the war, such as gathering around the radio with his family in their Brooklyn apartment for news of Jewish relatives in Eastern Europe. As the trial unfolded, Eichmann insisted he was merely following orders. This gave Milgram an idea for a research project that would become one of the most controversial experiments in the history of psychology.
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Milgram’s exploration into the limits of obedience to authority captured the public imagination, not least because of his chilling conclusion: that the majority of us could become torturers with just a few words of encouragement from a single authority figure.
I arrived at Yale in 2007, excited to take a close look at this classic experiment and its recently released archive material. But what I found revealed a disturbing, twisted tale. This landmark research is as misunderstood as it is famous.
In the early 1960s, social psychology was still an emerging discipline, one that quickly gained a reputation for experiments that concealed their true nature so as to trick people into behaving naturally. Pioneers like Milgram were expected to develop storytelling, acting and stagecraft skills as part of their research toolkit.
Milgram advertised in the local paper for paid volunteers. Each one was met in the laboratory by the experimenter, “Mr Williams”, who explained the ostensible trial. To explore the effect of punishment on learning, the volunteer was to be the teacher in a memory test, training and quizzing a learner. Whenever the learner gave an incorrect answer, the teacher was expected to give them an electric shock, increasing the voltage with each mistake.
Next door, Williams strapped the learner into a chair, attached electrodes to his wrists and showed them how to indicate answers by flipping a switch to illuminate a light in the other room. Once the test started, if the teacher hesitated or protested about administering shocks, Williams would urge them to continue with four increasingly authoritative commands, ranging from “Please continue, teacher” to “You have no other choice, teacher, you must go on”.
At 75 volts, the learner could be heard through the adjoining wall, grunting in pain; at 120 there were loud complaints; at 150 the learner demanded to be released; at 285 they screamed in agony, then fell silent – presumably unconscious, or even dead. Yet the majority of volunteers pushed the voltage up to the maximum, Milgram reported.
In reality, both Williams and the learner were actors, the shock machine was a prop and the learner’s cries were a tape recording. No one was physically harmed.
Banality of evil
In the opening paragraph of his first journal article on obedience, Milgram referenced “death camps”, “gas chambers” and “daily quotas of corpses”. All of these things, he argued, would not have been possible without mass obedience to orders. The link between the perpetrators of genocide and his volunteers gave the experiment immediate resonance, and the article made headlines around the world. Milgram, it seemed, had recreated “the banality of evil” in the lab. Media reports of his research, with the shocking fact of his duped volunteers’ obedience, quickly brought Milgram fame and infamy in equal measure. Some hailed his research as a profound insight into human nature; others decried it for disregarding the potentially traumatised volunteers’ welfare.
To explain his volunteers’ reported behaviour, Milgram formulated a theory of a what he called the agentic state, in which people become like sleepwalking automatons, their consciences evaporating in the face of an authority’s instructions.
The dramatic experiment, and its bleak reflection of human nature, has been absorbed into our culture and reproduced in countless textbooks, articles and films. But many aspects of Milgram’s work have been forgotten, or were airbrushed out by Milgram himself. Fortunately, he audiotaped his 780 experiments, and produced 158 boxes of paperwork. When I began listening to his recordings, interviewing his volunteers and trawling through the papers, it dawned on me how much had been left out of the official narrative. I was struck by the flimsiness of the claims the world came to accept as fact.
Take Milgram’s most famous conclusion, that 65 per cent of us will follow an authority’s orders and continue with torture, despite evidence of a victim’s pain. That statistic was drawn from his first journal article on obedience, which involved just 40 male volunteers. Could he fairly claim to have discovered a universal fact about human nature based on the actions of just 26 men?
In fact, Milgram conducted 23 variations of his experiment, each with different actors and scenarios. In one, the learner made no noise at all until 300 volts, at which point they pounded on the wall then fell silent; in another, the learner refused to participate, so the experimenter played both roles, crying out in pain and instructing the surely nonplussed volunteer to continue to shock him. In more than half of the variations, the majority of volunteers disobeyed the experimenter and refused to continue. These facts have been largely forgotten.
“Significant science or effective theatre? I am inclined to accept the latter”
In published accounts, Milgram comes across as a thorough, neutral scientist who publicly professed surprise at the results from the outset. It was his volunteers who behaved in a “shockingly immoral way”, as he put it in his first full-length account, the 1974 book .
But privately, in an unpublished note in the archives, Milgram worried whether his experiments were “significant science or merely effective theatre… I am inclined to accept the latter interpretation”.
That makes sense, because Milgram’s team shaped the results he wanted in a decidedly unscientific way. Early in the research, volunteers who resisted four times were classed as disobedient and the experiment was ended; later, that same behaviour was ignored. And the actor playing Williams increasingly went off-script. In the one variation with female volunteers, Williams insisted 26 times that one woman continue. Another volunteer, a 46-year-old woman, argued heatedly with Williams, then got up and turned off the shock machine. But Williams turned it back on, insisting she continue, which she reluctantly did. Listening to the tapes, you could be forgiven for thinking it was research into bullying and coercion, not obedience.
In fact, the archive reveals that volunteers tried all sorts of strategies to avoid shocking the learner. Some offered to swap places; others emphasised the right answer, hoping the learner would notice and get fewer wrong; some cheated by giving lower shocks than they were supposed to. Many pleaded, argued with and challenged Williams. A few even threatened violence.
If the ethical transgressions weren’t problematic enough, methodological criticisms accumulated. In 1968, arguing that subjects in social psychology experiments are not passive vessels but are sensitive to cues and incongruities. How feasible was it, he asked, that Milgram’s volunteers believed the scenario? How many truly thought that a reputable institution like Yale would permit experiments in which people were physically harmed, tortured or potentially killed?
Milgram’s funders, the National Science Foundation, had expressed similar doubts in 1962. They refused Milgram’s funding request for more experiments, and instead gave him money to do a follow-up survey gathering evidence of volunteers’ interpretations of what happened in the Yale lab.
The sceptics had a point. Conclusions drawn from a deceptive experiment like Milgram’s are built entirely on the assumption thatthe volunteers had no clue they were being tricked. Take that foundation away, and everything collapses.
In fact, the archive is littered with volunteers’ descriptions of their suspicions, how they found it hard to believe that a learner who in one case warned of a heart condition would agree to be shocked anyway, or the unrealistic disregard Williams had for the learner’s apparent agony. Milgram’s experiment was, for many volunteers, just too bizarre to be credible.
The archive also revealed that in 1962, Milgram had done a detailed analysis of his follow-up survey data – and then suppressed the results for a decade. Only tucked away in the last chapter of Obedience to Authority did he finally confess that just 56 per cent of his volunteers fully believed that the shocks were causing the learner pain. That alone should have been enough to undermine his sweeping conclusions about human nature.
But it’s worse than that. Milgram’s earlier, unpublished, analysis had found that in most experimental variations, the people who were most likely to disobey were those who said they believed someone was genuinely being hurt. On the flip side, the 44 per cent of people who doubted the shocks were real were the ones most likely to pump up the voltage. The house of cards he built had no foundation, even if it still stands in our collective cultural memory.
In 1963, still freshly famous, Milgram bagged a job at Harvard University, hoping it would be a fresh start. But the controversy dogged his career, and when his contract at Harvard ended, they let him go. He continued in academia but fell forever from the Ivy League.
Looking back, it is easier to see Milgram’s obedience experiments as a misguided echo of Eichmann’s alibi – an excuse rather than an explanation for humanity’s capacity for atrocity. Indeed, scholars of the Holocaust have largely abandoned Milgram’s ideas, recognising his flawed methodology and the inadequacy of his theory.
Milgram fashioned a powerful tale of saints and sinners, a morality play cloaked in the language of science that captured a particular view of humankind at a specific time and place in history. But in reconstructing Eichmann in his lab and ignoring evidence that didn’t fit his narrative, Milgram deprived us of a richer, more hopeful story.
The archives offer a portrait of people not as one-dimensional followers of orders, but as active searchers-for-meaning who make sometimes clumsy, sometimes clever and largely successful attempts to resist the cruel demands of an unyielding and enigmatic authority figure. Humans are built to obey? Don’t buy it.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Fifty shades of obey”
