Elephants on Acid (25 page)

Human nature has two sides—good and evil. What causes one side to grow stronger than the other? For Robert Louis Stevenson’s character Dr. Henry Jekyll, it was a salt containing an “unknown impurity.” When Jekyll mixed this salt into a solution and drank it, he transformed into the murderous Mr. Hyde. Many real-life researchers have shared Jekyll’s—and Stevenson’s—fascination with humankind’s wicked ways. They have studied what causes people to become rude, antisocial, overly aggressive, and cruel. Unnervingly, the answers they come up with rarely involve anything as elaborate as crystalline salts. Scientists have discovered that to bring out the worst in a person, it usually suffices to place him or her in the right situation. As Philip Zimbardo, whom we shall meet later in this chapter, once observed, “Any deed that any human being has ever done, however horrible, is possible for any of us to do—under the right or wrong situational pressures.” Of course, the same is true in reverse. Given the right situation, any person can be turned into a saint. And many researchers do study the causes of altruistic behavior. But let’s be honest—the villains are always more interesting.

A nervous-looking man in a tight-fitting white T-shirt leans forward and speaks into the microphone. “Learner, what is your answer?”

There is no reply. After a few seconds, the man repeats the question more forcefully, “Learner, what is your answer?”

Suddenly a voice shouts through the wall, “I refuse to answer. Let me out of here.”

“You’ve got to answer, otherwise you get a shock.”

“I won’t answer. You can’t hold me here. Get me out. Get— me—out—of—here.”

The man turns in his chair and gazes imploringly at the lab-coat-wearing researcher seated behind him. “I don’t think he’s going to answer.”

The researcher calmly replies, “If the learner doesn’t answer in a reasonable time, consider the answer wrong.”

“But he’s yelling in there. He wants out.”

“Please continue.”

“Maybe we should check in on him. He said that he had a weak heart.”

“The experiment requires that you continue.”

The man sighs and turns back around. He stares at the instrument panel in front of him. The panel displays a row of thirty switches. Each switch is marked with a voltage level, from 15 volts on the far left, progressing upward in increments of 15 to 450 volts on the far right. Beneath the switch marked 315 volts is a warning:
EXTREME INTENSITY SHOCK
. The man carefully places his finger on this switch. Then he removes it. Once again he turns to face the researcher.

“I don’t want to be responsible for killing a man.”

“The responsibility is mine. Please go on.”

The man shakes his head as though unsure. A hollow, fearful look flickers through his eyes. He shrugs his shoulders, turns back around, and mutters, “Well, that’s that.”

He leans forward and speaks into the microphone, “Learner, your answer is wrong.” Then he presses the switch. A bloodcurdling scream shakes the walls.

Would you torture or kill an innocent victim on the command of a stranger? When asked this question, almost everyone says no. But almost everyone is wrong. Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment, conducted at Yale University in the early 1960s, demonstrated that the average person is capable of doing horrendous things, especially when told to do so by someone wearing a white lab coat.

Milgram dreamed up his experiment while thinking about the Holocaust. Why was it, he wondered, that German citizens obeyed orders to send millions of Jews to death camps? Was there some quirk in the German character that made these citizens peculiarly obedient to authority? Or is such obedience a common feature of human psychology? If ordered, would Americans have done the same thing? To find out, Milgram decided to place randomly chosen subjects into a situation in which an authority figure would ask them to commit increasingly repellent acts of cruelty. The researcher would not coerce them. Subjects could stand up and leave at any time without consequence. Only a verbal command would be given: “Please go on . . . The experiment requires that you continue . . . You have no other choice, you must go on.” How would people respond to this request?

Milgram’s subjects were utterly ordinary people—postal clerks, teachers, salesmen, factory workers. He recruited them by placing an ad in a newspaper, offering four dollars to anyone willing to participate in an hour-long “scientific study of memory and learning.”

When a subject showed up at the Yale Interaction Laboratory, where the experiment was conducted, he was led through a series of elaborately staged events. First, a young, serious-looking researcher met him and introduced him to a man described as a second volunteer—a pleasant-looking, round-faced accountant in his late forties. Both the researcher and the second volunteer were actors who had carefully rehearsed the parts they would play during the next hour. Milgram was hidden behind a one-way window, observing everything that happened.

The young researcher provided the subject with a false explanation of the experiment. He said it was designed to examine the effect of punishment on learning. One volunteer would serve as a “learner.” He would attempt to memorize a series of word pairs. The other would be a “teacher.” He would read the word pairs to the learner. The researcher stressed the next point—the teacher would operate a shock generator. Each time the learner gave a wrong answer, the teacher would administer punishment by flipping a switch on this machine and giving the learner a shock. The shocks would increase in intensity each time an incorrect answer was given.

The two volunteers drew straws to determine who would be the learner and who the teacher. The fake volunteer always got to be the learner. The researcher then made a show of strapping the learner into an electric-chair apparatus—applying electrode gel to his wrists and tightening the restraints to prevent movement. Looking nervous, the learner asked whether the shocks could aggravate a heart condition he had. The researcher dismissed this concern: “Although the shocks can be extremely painful, they cause no permanent tissue damage.”

Next, the researcher led the subject into an adjacent room where the voltage panel was housed and showed him how to operate the machine. The teacher settled himself in front of the panel. The researcher sat behind him, across the room, and the experiment began.

It always started calmly. The teacher read out a series of word pairs:
blue/box
,
nice/day
,
wild/duck
. Then he read the first word of one of the pairs along with four other terms.
Blue: sky, ink, box, lamp
. He waited for the learner to identify the corresponding term.

The learner aced the first few pairs. The subjects must have imagined there would be no need to explore the horrors waiting at the far right of the panel. But the word pairs became more challenging, and the learner began making mistakes. One error followed another. “Incorrect,” the teacher would say, and flip a switch on the voltage panel. Next time the shock was slightly stronger. The time after that it was stronger still.

When the teacher pressed the 75-volt switch, the learner let out a distinct “Ugh” that could be heard through the wall. At 120 volts the learner’s reaction became more animated. “Hey, this really hurts,” he shouted. By 150 volts the learner was screaming to have the experiment stopped and to be let out. The cries of the learner came from a tape recorder. No one was actually being shocked. But the teachers didn’t know that. For them, the screams were terrifyingly real.

Many of the teachers began to sweat and tremble. They bit their lips and dug their fingernails into their palms. Some of them laughed hysterically. All of them looked to the experimenter for guidance.
What should I do now?
The researcher offered calm reassurances and urged them to proceed. “Please go on,” he would say. “The experiment requires that you continue.”

This was the moment of truth. How far up the panel would the teacher progress? Would he go to 200 volts? 300? 400? When would he push back his chair and say, “No more”? Or would he never do this? Would he press the switches all the way up to 450 volts?

Before he conducted the experiment, Milgram anticipated that virtually no one would go all the way to the end of the panel. Psychiatrists he polled agreed with this prediction. They forecasted that only one subject in a thousand would administer the highest shock. But the actual behavior of the subjects shattered these expectations.
Almost two-thirds of the teachers never disobeyed the experimenter
. They agonized and sweated and shook, but they kept pressing the switch. They pressed the switch after the learner started screaming, after he yelled out that his heart was weak, and after he screamed in agony to be let out. They kept pressing the switch after the learner received 330 volts and fell into an eerie silence, apparently unconscious or dead. They pressed the switch all the way up to 450 volts, and then they kept pressing it until, finally, the researcher told them to stop. These were not serial killers or sadists. These were just average Americans, who were apparently willing to kill an innocent person because a man in a white lab coat told them to. Years later, during a CBS
60 Minutes
interview, Milgram glumly concluded:

I would say, on the basis of having observed a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that 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
⁶⁵
to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.

Milgram tried numerous variations of the experiment, searching for the limits of obedience. He discovered that the proximity of the victim had a powerful effect on compliance. If subjects could neither see nor hear feedback from the victim, obedience was almost total. If they could hear only a thumping on the walls, compliance was 65 percent. But if the two people were in the same room, and the subject had to physically press the victim’s hand onto a metal plate to give him a shock, compliance dropped to 30 percent. Of course, 30 percent is still dismayingly high. Other variables, such as gender, had little effect on the results. Women proved just as willing as men to shock the victim.

Milgram’s obedience study offers a depressing view of human nature. The average person seems all too willing to follow orders, no matter how cruel or unjust. But humanity’s stock sinks even lower when you consider a similar experiment conducted in Chicago during the same period. The Chicago researchers locked rhesus monkeys in cages. To obtain food, the monkeys had to pull on a chain. But there was a catch. Pulling the chain also caused a monkey in a neighboring cage to receive a high-frequency shock. After witnessing the agony of their neighbors, the majority of the monkeys refused to pull the chain again. They starved, some for as long as twelve days, instead of inflicting pain on another. The monkeys, in other words, did something most humans could not: They said no. Apparently we still have much to learn from our primate cousins.

When Stanley Milgram published the results of his obedience experiments in 1963, they sent (figurative) shock waves through the scientific community. Other researchers found what he was reporting hard to believe. Could subjects really be so easily manipulated? They were sure Milgram must have made a mistake. Researchers conducted numerous follow-ups to his experiments, searching for ways to bring his results back in line with expectations. One experiment, carried out by Charles Sheridan and Richard King in 1972, easily stands out from this crowd.

Sheridan and King theorized that Milgram’s subjects suspected the victim was fake. This would explain their remarkable obedience. They were just playing along with the game. To test this possibility, Sheridan and King decided to repeat Milgram’s experiment
using an actual victim who would really get shocked
. Obviously they couldn’t use a human for this purpose. So they used the next best thing—a cute, fluffy puppy.

The experimenters placed the puppy inside a box that had a shock-grid floor. The interior of the box contained a signal light. Subjects—all volunteers from an undergraduate psychology course—were told the puppy was being trained to distinguish between a flickering and a steady light. The dog had to stand either to the right or the left depending on the cue from the light. If the animal failed to stand in the correct place, the subjects had to press a switch to shock it. As in the Milgram experiment, the shock level increased fifteen volts for every wrong answer.

⁶⁶
The human subjects could not see the light from where they stood. They could only see the position of the puppy. They judged its responses based on a chart they were given.

Sheridan and King stressed the importance of this research, claiming they were attempting to measure “critical fusion frequency (CFF) in puppies,” but they also assured the volunteers that they would receive their compensation, which was course credit, simply for having shown up.

The experiment began, and the puppy immediately got a lot of wrong answers. In fact, there was no right answer for the puppy to get. There was no correlation between the signal light and the answer sheet that had been provided to the students. From the puppy’s point of view, it was getting shocked randomly.

As the voltage increased, the puppy first barked, then jumped up and down, and finally started howling with pain. The volunteers were horrified. They paced back and forth, hyperventilated, and gestured with their hands to show the puppy where to stand. Many openly wept. Yet the majority of them, twenty out of twenty-six, kept pushing the shock button right up to the maximum voltage. This finding validated Milgram’s results.