Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [272]
Zimbardo and his colleagues had not expected so rapid a transformation in either group of volunteers and later wrote in a report:
What was most surprising about the outcome of this simulated prison experience was the ease with which sadistic behavior could be elicited from quite normal young men, and the contagious spread of emotional pathology among those carefully selected precisely for their emotional stability.
On the sixth day the researchers abruptly terminated the experiment for the good of all concerned. They felt, however, that it had been valuable; it had shown how easily “normal, healthy, educated young men could be so radically transformed under the institutional pressures of a ‘prison environment.’ ”
That finding may have been important, but in the eyes of many ethicists the experiment was grossly unethical. It had imposed on its volunteers physical and emotional stresses that they had not anticipated or agreed to undergo. In so doing, it had violated the principle, affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1914, that “every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body.”31 Because of the ethical problems, the prison experiment has not been replicated; it is a closed case.*
Even this was bland in comparison with another experiment, also of major value, and also now a closed case. Let us open the file and see what was learned, and by what extraordinary means.
Obedience
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, many behavioral scientists sought to understand how so many normal, civilized Germans could have behaved toward other human beings with such incomprehensible savagery. A massive study published in 1950, carried out by an interdisciplinary team with a psychoanalytic orientation, ascribed prejudice and ethnic hatred to the “authoritarian personality,” an outgrowth of particular kinds of parenting and childhood experience.32 But social psychologists found this too general an explanation; they thought the answer more likely to involve a special social situation that caused ordinary people to commit out-of-character atrocities.
It was to explore this possibility that an advertisement in a New Haven newspaper in the early 1960s called for volunteers for a study of memory and learning at Yale University.33 Any adult male not in high school or college would be eligible, and participants would be paid $4 (roughly the equivalent of $25 today) an hour plus carfare.
Forty men ranging from twenty to fifty years old were selected and given separate appointments. Each was met at an impressive laboratory by a small, trim young man in a gray lab coat. Arriving at the same time was another “volunteer,” a pleasant middle-aged man of Irish-American appearance. The man in the lab coat, the ostensible researcher, was actually a thirty-one-year-old high school biology teacher, and the middle-aged man was an accountant by profession. Both were accomplices of the social psychologist conducting the experiment, Stanley Milgram of Yale, and would act the parts he had scripted.
The researcher explained to the two men, the real and false volunteers, that he was studying the effect of punishment on learning. One of them would be the “teacher” and the other the “learner” in an experiment in which the teacher would give the learner an electric shock whenever he made an error. The two volunteers then drew slips of paper to see who would be which. The one selected by the “naïve” volunteer read “Teacher.” (To ensure this result, both slips read “Teacher,” but the accomplice discarded his without showing it.)
The researcher then led the two subjects into a small room, where the learner was seated at a table, his arms strapped down, and electrodes attached to his wrists. He said he hoped the shocks wouldn’t be too severe; he had a