Some of psychology’s most famous experiments are those that expose the skull beneath the skin, the apparent cowardice or depravity pooling in almost every heart.
The findings force a question. Would I really do that? Could I betray my own eyes, my judgment, even my humanity, just to complete some experiment?
The answer, if it’s an honest one, often gives rise to observations about the cruelties of the day, whether suicide bombing, torture or gang atrocities. And so a psych experiment — a mock exercise, testing individual behavior — can become something else, a changing prism through which people view the larger culture, for better and for worse.
Consider the psychologist Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies of the early 1960s that together form one of the darkest mirrors the field has held up to the human face. In a series of about 20 experiments, hundreds of decent, well-intentioned people agreed to deliver what appeared to be increasingly painful electric shocks to another person, as part of what they thought was a learning experiment. The “learner” was in fact an actor, usually seated out of sight in an adjacent room, pretending to be zapped.
Researchers, social commentators and armchair psychologists have pored through Milgram’s data ever since, claiming psychological and cultural insights. Now, decades after the original work (Milgram died in 1984, at 51), two new papers illustrate the continuing power of the shock experiments — and the diverse interpretations they still inspire.
In one, a statistical analysis that appears in this month’s issue of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, a postdoctoral student at Ohio State University verifies a crucial turning point in Milgram’s experiments, the voltage level at which participants were most likely to disobey the experimenter and quit delivering shocks.
The participants usually began with what they thought were 15-volt shocks, and worked upward in 15-volt increments, as the experimenter instructed. At 75 volts, the “learner” in the next room began grunting in apparent pain. At 150 volts he cried out: “Stop, let me out! I don’t want to do this anymore.”
At that point about a third of the participants refused to continue, found Dominic Packer, author of the new paper. “The previous expressions of pain were insufficient,” Packer said. But at 150 volts, he continued, those who disobeyed decided that the learner’s right to stop trumped the experimenter’s right to continue. Before the end of the experiments, at 450 volts, an additional 10 percent to 15 percent had dropped out.
This appreciation of another’s right is crucial in interrogation, Packer suggests. When prisoners’ rights are ambiguous, inhumane treatment can follow. Milgram’s work, in short, makes a statement about the importance of human rights, as well as obedience.
In the other paper, due out in the journal American Psychologist, a professor at Santa Clara University replicates part of the Milgram studies — stopping at 150 volts, the critical juncture at which the subject cries out to stop — to see whether people today would still obey. Ethics committees bar researchers from pushing subjects through to an imaginary 450 volts, as Milgram did.
The answer was yes. Once again, more than half the participants agreed to proceed with the experiment past the 150-volt mark. Jerry Burger, the author, interviewed the participants afterward and found that those who stopped generally believed themselves to be responsible for the shocks, whereas those who kept going tended to hold the experimenter accountable. That is, the Milgram work also demonstrated individual differences in perceptions of accountability — of who’s on the hook for what.
Thomas Blass, a psychologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of a biography of Milgram, The Man Who Shocked the World (Basic Books, 2004), said establishing the demand by the subject to stop as the turning point was itself a significant achievement. “It’s a simple but important discovery,” Blass said. “I had been mining this data for years and somehow missed it.”
He added that extrapolating Milgram’s findings to larger events like the Holocaust, as Milgram himself did, or Abu Ghraib was a big leap. “The power of the Milgram work was it showed how people can act destructively without coercion,” he said. “In things like interrogations, we don’t know the complexities involved. People are under enormous pressure to produce results.”
The Milgram data have unappreciated complexities of their own. In his new report, Burger argues that at least two other factors were at work when participants walked into the psychologist’s laboratory at Yale decades ago. Uncertainty, as it was an unfamiliar situation. And time pressure, as they had to make decisions quickly. Rushed and disoriented, they were likely more compliant than they would otherwise have been, Burger said.
In short, the Milgram experiments may have shown physical, biological differences in moral decision-making and obedience, as well as psychological ones. Some people can be as quick on the draw as Doc Holliday when they feel something’s not right. Others need a little time to do the right thing, thank you, and would rather not be considered sadistic prison guards just yet.
“The most remarkable thing,” Burger said, “is that we’re still talking about the work, almost 50 years after it was done. You can’t say that about many experiments.”
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