Theirs not to reason why
Jonathan Sumption
THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD: THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF STANLEY MILGRAM by Thomas Blass Perseus, £19.99, pp. 360, ISBN 0738203998 Stanley Milgram was an academic psychologist at Yale who achieved a brief moment of fame in the early 1960s as the creator of 'obedience experiments'. The idea was to discover how far people will act against their own most basic instincts if they are following someone else's orders. A large sample of ordinary and superficially decent 'subjects' were persuaded to participate in what they believed to be experiments designed to establish the educational value of punishment. They were sat in a glass cubicle next to a room in which an actor pretended to go through a sequence of simple word tests. In front of the 'subject' was an impressive looking piece of electric gadgetry, which apparently enabled him to administer progressively more powerful electric shocks every time the 'learner' made a mistake. The 'learner' pretended to react with mounting discomfort and pain, and finally, at several hundred volts, began to plead with the 'subject' to stop. About two thirds of 'subjects' went on administering the shocks on the experimenter's instructions until the limit of credibility was reached, at 450 volts.
The experiments aroused much interest among academic students of such matters. They also struck the imagination of the public, many of whom felt that Milgram had discovered the roots of the concentrationcamp guard mentality. But there was
always, among both groups, a faint sense of disgust at the experimental method used and at the uncomfortable conclusions. Bruno Bettelheim thought Milgram's work 'so vile that nothing these experiments show has any value'. Others praised his contribution to knowledge and denounced his critics as people afraid of the truth. But in the committee rooms in which American academic careers are made, they quietly coldshouldered him. Milgram went on to run a variety of eccentric experiments: on people who gave up their seats on the subway, or failed to steal from open boxes of dollar bills left in empty buildings, or binned letters found on the pavement addressed to the Elect Goldwater Committee. But he never achieved a tenured position at a top American university, and encountered increasing difficulty in getting academic funding for his projects. He was always branded by the obedience experiments.
The experiments pointed to two unremarkable conclusions. One was that power corrupts. The 'subjects' were prepared to inflict pain on others who were entirely at their mercy. But the more important lesson, and the real point of the exercise, was about the impact of authority. The 'subject' obeyed the instructions of the experimenter who told him to keep on administering the shocks. Authority is a form of absolution. It relieves those over whom it is exercised of personal responsibility for their actions and transfers it to the person who gives the orders. The law may not recognise this. Our moral teaching may not recognise it. But that is because there are some facts about ourselves which it is necessary to ignore in the interests of social discipline. The facts themselves are plain enough. 'Don't blame me — I only work here', is the standard human reaction to most things that go wrong, however terrible. It is already emerging as the Abu Ghraib defence.
One might wonder why it was necessary to carry out Milgram's obedience experiments in order to highlight these particular aspects of human behaviour. They are already familiar enough to any one reasonably well read in human history. All that Milgram did was to add percentages. And at what cost. For Bettelheim was surely right about one thing. There is something distasteful about tricking people into behaving in a manner in which they would not normally behave, and then announcing that they lack the strength of character to stand up for their own moral values.
There is also, it must be admitted, something odd about writing the professional biography of an academic psychologist whose life was lived in seminar rooms, and who passed most of it devising elaborate and statistically quantifiable practical jokes on the American public. Yet Thomas Blass Ph. D. appears to have passed much of his own life engaged in the study of Stanley Milgram's observations of the odder byways of human behaviour. He is the author not just of this book and one other about
Milgram, but of more than 40 articles and papers on the same subject. Every one should know about the obedience experiments, if only for the windows that they open on the world of academic psychology. But it is not strictly necessary to know more than that about Stanley Milgram. Intellectually, you can get by without reading this book.
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