Criminal - "The experiment requires that you continue."

Episode Date: December 3, 2021

1. Please continue. 2. The experiment requires that you continue. 3. It is absolutely essential that you continue. 4. You have no other choice, you must go on. Gina Perry's book is Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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so the switches ranged from 15 volts at one end to 450 volts at the other, and they were labelled in clumps, really, from mild shock through to danger, severe and extreme shock. In 1961, a 25-year-old Connecticut man named Bill Mennold answered a newspaper ad for volunteers to participate in a study at Yale University. He arrived at Yale's campus just before 7 p.m. and followed a sign directing him down into a basement. He said he didn't know what to expect. The ad said the experiment had to do with learning and memory. He later said, I was intimidated,

having grown up in that area. Yale was like God. He was greeted by a man in a lab coat, referred to as the experimenter. And then a second volunteer arrived. The two volunteers shook hands, and the man in the lab coat paid them each $4.50, and then he explained what was going to happen. He told them the experiment would be used to study the effects of punishment on learning. One of them would play the part of the teacher, and the other would play the role of what they called the learner. And the learner is strapped into a chair in another room and hooked up to wires.

This is science historian and psychologist Gina Perry. And the teacher is seated in front of a shock machine. And the teacher's job is to teach the learner pairs of words and then to test their memory of those word pairs. If they got the answer right, the teacher would move on to the next one. If the learner gets the answer wrong, the teacher is instructed to give them an electric shock. Here's how it worked. There was a long list of word pairs. Blue girl, nice day, fat neck, rich boy, fast bird, blunt arrow, soft hair, cool cave, brave woman, sharp needle, slow dance,ame Bear, Sweet Taste, True Story.

The teacher was told that after the learner heard the list, the teacher would then quiz the learner on which words paired together, offering multiple choices, giving the right answer along with three wrong ones. For example, the word soft, followed by the choices rug, pillow, hair and grass. If the learner didn't give the correct answer, the teacher was instructed by the experimenter to use one of the 30 switches on the machine in front of them. They were to press a switch on the shock machine and with every wrong answer, the teacher had to advance a switch up the shock machine so that the levels of shock increased over time. Bill Manold later told Gina Perry that at 105 volts, he heard the learner make a noise. At 120 volts, the learner yelled. Bill said,

I thought, oh God, what the hell am I doing here? What is this all about? He remembered doing everything he could to read the words in a way that would make it obvious which one was right. He says he asked the experimenter if he and the learner could switch places. He thought he wouldn't have so much trouble remembering

which words went together, and he would prefer to be the one getting shocked. But he was told no. He remembered sweating and shaking and not knowing what was going on. He later said, It sounds really strange, but it never occurred to me just to say, You know what? I'm walking out of here, which I could have done.

At this point, I was just soaking wet. I was just so disturbed by all this. After 330 volts, the man volunteering as the learner stopped responding, but Bill Mennold was instructed to keep going, and he did, to the maximum. He was one of hundreds of volunteers who participated in the study between August of 1961 and May of 1962, and who continued to do as they were told and administer shocks. Their participation was framed as important to the research, important to science, sanctioned by experts at Yale.

It was reported that if they resisted, the experimenter would tell them to keep going. With this series of responses, 1. Please continue. 2. The experiment requires that you continue. 3. It is absolutely essential that you continue. And 4. You have no other choice. You must go on. When the results of the study were published, one headline read, 65% in test blindly obey order to inflict pain. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. The experiment was conducted by a 28-year-old psychologist named Stanley Milgram.

He'd accepted a job at Yale in 1960 as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology. Milgram started work on a project with one of his classes where they were looking at how you could measure degrees of obedience to authority. And Milgram came up with the notion of devising a shock machine and his initial idea was how you could persuade people to give someone that they didn't know electric shocks and the participants were told that the study was an experiment in memory and learning so the rationale that they were given was that the electric shocks would punish the learner, obviously, for giving the wrong answer. But the implication was that would also motivate them to retain information. It wasn't spelled out in a lot of detail. Only when they saw the ad in the newspaper, it was described as a learning and memory experiment.

And then they would arrive and see this shock machine. Exactly. So they got more than they bargained for in the sense that it wasn't until they got to the lab that they were told that there was punishment involved in this experiment. There was a lot that the volunteers acting as teachers, like Bill Mennold, did not know. First of all, they were the ones being studied.

Everyone else, the experimenter in the lab coat and the other volunteer they'd met when they arrived, who'd been assigned to the role of learner, had all been hired to play their parts. No one was actually being shocked. The yelling was all for the benefit of the teacher. And the whole experimental scenario was like a mini-dramatic play where only the teacher was the one who wasn't aware of what was really going on. And they were being observed by Stanley Milgram from behind a two-way mirror.

He had the learner in the room next door crying out in pain at particular points during the experiment so that the learner's cries became more intense as the shock voltage increased and at one point the learner complained that he had a heart problem and that he was feeling ill until if the teacher went to the maximum voltage on the machine, which was 450 volts, by that stage the learner had fallen silent. So after hearing the learner's cries and complaints and pleas to be freed, there was silence by the end of the 450 volts. Could the teacher, the study participant, see into a room where the learner was hooked up to this machine, or could they just hear the screams, or was there actual visual? The teacher couldn't see the learner once they were seated in front of the machine.

This is in the general description of Milgram's experiments. In the most famous version of the experiment, the one that's depicted in textbooks, the teacher did not see the learner. The teacher did, however, see the learner at the very beginning of the experiment seated in the chair in the adjoining room being strapped in and connected. So the teacher was under the impression that the learner was definitely connected to that machine. And the textbook accounts of the experiment, the conclusion was that 65% of teachers went all the way on the shock machine and administered 450 volts.

The Milgram obedience experiment, one of the most famous social psychology studies of the 20th century, has been held up for generations as an illustration of our willingness to inflict pain under the direction of an authority figure. Milgram wrote, For many people, obedience is a deeply ingrained behavior tendency, indeed, a potent impulse, overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct.

He conducted 24 versions of the experiment. Most variations had 40 volunteers. Some had 20. In total, it's estimated that there were 780 participants. In one variation, the teachers were all women. 65% went to the maximum voltage. In another, there were people pretending to be fellow teachers in the room with the person volunteering for the experiment,

applying pressure to conform. Rates of obedience went up. They also tried this with people pretending to be fellow teachers and refusing to continue, one by one. And in this variation, rates of obedience went way down to 10%. They tested the relevance of the study being held at Yale, and so they relocated to Bridgeport, Connecticut, where about half of participants went to the max. In that variation, two volunteers walked away altogether.

There was one variation where the experimenter was not physically present in the room watching the teacher. Rates of obedience dropped to about 20%. Some teachers lied about increasing the voltage when they hadn't. When the teacher was allowed to choose what level of shock was administered, only one person went to the max. In the final variation, volunteers were asked to bring a friend or relative. One would act as teacher and the other the learner.

The person volunteering as the learner was strapped in and then privately told what was going on and told to make noises and shout as if they were in pain. In this variation, where the teacher is led to believe that they were hurting someone they knew, the number of people who went to the maximum number of volts dropped to 15%. One man, who was assigned to act as the teacher

and inflict shocks on his son, refused to continue past 165 volts and said, We'll give you back your checks. You can have your money back. I'm not that hard up. I'm not going to have him get hurt. Gina Perry says that when she began researching Milgram's work

she was surprised to realise that the best known version of the experiment where 65% of participants went to the maximum was only one of these 24 variations And it's the one that is used for the argument that we have a very troubling and dark side to our human nature. But the actual experiment only involved 40 people. And I was very shocked to discover that this thing that is presented as a truth about us

as humans was based on such a tiny sample. And the conclusion of the experiment that Milgram came to was that we will blindly obey the instructions of an authority figure, even when it conflicts with our conscience. And we are, according to Milgram, almost programmed to commit evil at the commands of a figure in authority. Adolf Eichmann, who was a leading Nazi, and his trial was televised in America just around the same time that Milgram was making very early preparations for this experiment. Eichmann's defence attorneys argued

that he had simply been following orders. Writing a letter asking for clemency, Eichmann wrote, There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me, forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders. There was this whole notion that ordinary people could be monsters without you knowing. And Milgram's experiment was really inspired by that idea

and he argued that he actually proved that that was true, that despite their distress and despite their reluctance and despite their consciences telling them that what they were doing was wrong, most people in his experiment, Milgram argued, went all the way on the shock machine and delivered what they believed were extremely dangerous levels of electric shocks to someone they never met.

And Milgram published the results of one of his first variations of the experiment in 1963 and it really touched a nerve because it seemed to demonstrate that the Holocaust was not a result of anything specific to the German psyche, that he'd found something in America that people had only, until that time, associated with German behaviour during World War II. Stanley Milgram told CBS's 60 Minutes,

quote, If a system of death camps were set up in the United States, of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town. To be continued... they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters,

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These experiments, when the articles were published, what did this do for Milgram's fame and career? The experiments were a real mixed bag for Milgram. At the same time that he was credited with discovering something counterintuitive and shocking about human nature, he was also regarded as someone who had breached the ethical guidelines for what you should ask subjects to do in psychological research. So what the teachers were actually showing was that they were okay

basically administering pain and torture. That's what Milgram would have us believe, but the evidence from the archival material does paint a different picture. Stanley Milgram had said that each volunteer was fully debriefed after each session and reassured that they had not done anything wrong. Milgram called it a de-hoaxing. and that the purpose of the experiment was explained in a way so that they would leave the laboratory feeling like they'd learnt something useful about themselves and with their minds at rest. That was certainly Milgram's explanation

of what occurred after the experiment. I can't imagine being in that position after the experiment if I had been told I was a teacher and then had administered these shocks. Even if I had been told that it was all fake, I can't imagine how I'd feel about myself walking out of that Yale laboratory. Yes, it's hard to believe, isn't it, that people could walk out of that laboratory feeling okay about what they'd just been part of. But Milgram argued that 84% of people who took part said later that they were glad to

have been involved. So that seemed to add weight to his argument that he was able to diffuse any tension and restore their sense of wellbeing before they left. But as you say, it seems hard to believe, doesn't it? When Gina Perry met with Bill Mennold, the volunteer, he told her that he left Yale that day, not knowing that the shocks hadn't been real. He remembered that after the experiment, the learner walked into the room and said,

hello, how are you? They talked for a couple of minutes and then walked out of the building together. He said, We got out onto the street and he went one way and I went the other. I was in this crazy situation, he said. I was just going to walk out of there. Nobody was going to shoot me or put me in a prison cell. I still didn't know what had happened. He described how conflicted he felt during the experiment, but also he described how confusing the whole situation was because he didn't know which cues he should be paying attention to.

Should he be listening to the man who was calling out or should he be listening to the experimenter? Was it him being tested or was it the man in the room next door? None of these things were presented in the official accounts of the experiment. And so that really fascinated me. The other thing that Bill told me was that afterwards, the first thing he did when he got home was he went straight next door to his neighbor's house his neighbor was an electrician because Bill was absolutely wanting confirmation from someone about what damage he could possibly have inflicted on the man in the

room next door with those voltage levels on the machine. So suddenly I was presented with this account of the experiment that was very much at odds with what I'd been led to believe. So it really forced me to go back to the archives and start to double check the descriptions, the published descriptions that Milgram had given and start to compare them with the audio recordings of the experiments themselves. You listened to about 200 hours of them. I listened to those tape recordings with a heavy heart

because they were very hard to listen to. It was very difficult to hear the anguish of the teachers. It was very difficult to hear them pleading with the experimenter. It was very difficult to hear the pressure that they were put under to continue during the experiment. And none of these things were included in official accounts. Milgram did talk about people being under stress. He did talk in his first journal article about how a poised businessman had been reduced to a twittering, stuttering wreck as a result of being the teacher in the experiment.

But actually hearing it unfold in the audio was very disturbing and it really was a revelation in the sense that the experimenter was bullying and often coercing people into continuing. So Milgram's description of the experiment, for example, was that if the teacher refused to continue four times, that is, the teacher would say that they wanted to stop, the experimenter would give what Milgram called four separate prods, each one increasing in intensity. From teacher, you must go on, through to the fourth and final prod, which was you have no other choice. You must continue.

Now, if the teacher still refused after that fourth prod from the experimenter, Milgram said the experiment was terminated and the teacher was deemed a disobedient subject they'd refused four times and the experiment was called off if you like but what I heard on the tapes was the experimenter going over and above four prods, improvising, making up reasons for why they should continue. I also heard teachers bargaining. I heard teachers asking the experimenter to go and check on the learner before they'd go any further. The roles of experimenter and learner were often played by the same two men.

They weren't psychologists, or even affiliated with Yale. They'd answered ads in the paper. The experimenter was played by a 31-year-old high school biology teacher named John Williams. Milgram described him as impassive and stern. And the learner was a 47-year-old man named Jim McDonough. He was an auditor for a railroad company. And when Milgram met him, he wrote, quote, excellent as victim, A plus victim. Gina Perry wondered about the impact of the experiments on these two men.

She interviewed their children. In the case of Jim McDonough, who played the role of the learner in many variations, his son Bob said that his father died a few years after the experiment, when Bob was very young. Bob hadn't even known his father had been involved until he saw a segment about it on TV. He said that seeing the video of the experiment and hearing

clips of him sounding like he was in pain are some of his only memories of his father. Are you looking to eat healthier, but you still find yourself occasionally rebounding with junk food and empty calories? You don't need to wait for the new year to start fresh. New year, new me. How about same year, new me? You just need a different approach. According to Noom, losing weight has less to do with discipline and more to do with psychology.

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and Ash's research interest was in conformity, what it was about people in groups that meant that some people would change their point of view or alter their judgments in order to fit in with people around them. So Milgram worked with Ash on those kinds of experiments and Ash was famous for his own work in conformity, but Milgram wanted to give it his own particular twist and his specific flavour, if you like. He was teaching in Yale's psychology department around the same time Philip Zimbardo was teaching

there. Zimbardo designed the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, and he and Milgram had attended the same high school. The Stanford Prison Experiment took place in 1971. Zimbardo placed an ad in the newspaper that said, Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life. More than 70 students answered, and he chose about 20 to participate. They were promised $15 a day for one to two weeks

and were assigned to one of two roles, either prison guard or inmate. They were given uniforms and set up in what was basically a prison set, six-by-nine-foot cells in the basement of the psychology building at Stanford. After six days, some of the volunteers acting as guards had become so abusive that Zimbardo canceled the experiment.

It was said to have illustrated that when someone is in a position of power over another person, like a prison guard, that they may exhibit shocking cruelty. Zimbardo has said, quote, evil situations make most people evil. But in recent years, journalists and researchers have interviewed some of the men who participated, and just like with Gina Perry's research into Milgram's study,

found that that shorthand takeaway of the study doesn't tell the whole story. Some of the volunteers have said they were coached. They've said they were trying to do what they thought the researchers wanted them to do. Critics have pointed out that we should all be a bit less willing to trust studies that generalise about human behaviour. Even back in 1964, a developmental psychologist named Diana Baumreind published a critical review of Milgram's experiment.

Criticising him on ethical grounds, but also criticising him because she said there was no way that you could say that what happened in 45 minutes in a laboratory in New Haven was equivalent to what happened in Nazi Germany. She was critical of the way he treated the people volunteering to be in his study. He himself acknowledged that it was a, quote, nerve-shattering experience for them. Over the years, people have said that that kind of deception and theatricality was at odds with science.

And he's been criticized for not being more forthcoming with his data. For instance, he'd collected data from his participants indicating that not everyone was convinced that the shocks were real. Some people said they felt sceptical, and Milgram performed an analysis of how those people behaved toward the learner. In one unpublished analysis that Milgram did, over 50% of people had doubts about the believability of the experiments and what he found when he analysed that by comparing how much they believed that the experiment was real with the amount of shocks that they gave. In this unpublished paper Milgram found that there was a relationship so that people who believed that the experiment was real and that

the learner was actually in pain were likely to give lower levels of shock than people who had doubts that the thing was real. And there was such an outcry from some quarters, particularly amongst his colleagues, about the ethical issues involved in the experiment, that in a way he doubled down about the importance of the experiment, its relevance to the Holocaust, and the lack of harm that was involved for people who took part. So he airbrushed a lot of the ambiguity out of the official accounts. And really, the really key thing I think I took away from the experiments is that we've always relied on the scientist's account of the experiment, as we do in all research. But when it's an experiment that involves human subjects,

what did they make of it? What could they have told us, quite apart from what Milgram told us, about what happened in that lab? Finding out as much as she could about the people who participated in Milgram's study, Gina Perry found evidence of disobedience. Men and women arguing with the authority figure, saying, this isn't right.

One man, when given the fourth prod by the experimenter, you have no other choice, you must go on, replied, I do have a choice. Why don't I have a choice? I came here on my own free will. I thought I could help in a research project. But if I have to hurt somebody to do that, or if I was in his place too, I wouldn't stay there. I can't continue.

I'm very sorry. Of the 24 variations of Milgram's experiments, in the majority of those variations, people disobeyed the experimenter. So it's actually very exciting to me that in unearthing this material, we can say what we thought we believed, what we were told, was based on one variation out of 24. If you look not just at the behaviour of 40 people,

but you look at the behaviour of 780 people that went through Milgram's lab, the picture is much more optimistic than we've been led to believe. In the main, people were disobedient. That is a much more hopeful note about human nature. The shock machine itself is now in the archives of the History of American Psychology at the University of Akron in Ohio and was included in an exhibition for the 100th anniversary

of the American Psychological Association. To see it, you'd have to walk down a hallway with a black and white checkerboard floor, and a sign said, attention, please walk on the black squares only. Apparently, 90% of visitors followed the direction, and at the end of the hallway, they arrived at the shock machine inside a plexiglass box. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Susanna Robertson is our producer.

Engineering by Russ Henry. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Special thanks to Lily Clark. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com or on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show. Gina Perry's book is Behind the Shock Machine, the untold story of the notorious Milgram psychology experiments. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation.

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