Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [274]
Milgram validated his interpretation of the results by varying the script in a number of ways. In one variation, a phone call would summon the researcher away before he said anything to the teacher about the importance of continuing to ever higher shock levels; his place would be taken by a volunteer (another confederate) who seemed to hit on the idea of increasing the shocks as far as needed and kept telling the teacher to continue. But he was a substitute, not the real authority; in this version of the experiment only 20 percent of the teachers went all the way. Milgram also varied the composition of the team. Instead of an affable, pudgy, middle-aged learner and a trim, stern, young researcher, he reversed the personality types. In that condition, the proportion of teachers going all the way decreased but only to 50 percent. Apparently, the roles of authority and victim, not the personalities of the persons who played the parts, were the crucial factor.
A disturbing adjunct to Milgram’s results was his investigation of how people thought they would behave in the situation. He described the experimental set-up in detail to groups of college students, behavioral scientists, psychiatrists, and laymen, and asked them at what level of shock people like themselves would refuse to go on. Despite the differences in their backgrounds, all groups said people like themselves would defy the experimenter and break off at about 150 volts when the victim asked to be released. Milgram also asked a group of undergraduates at what level one should disobey; again the average answer was at about 150 volts. Thus, neither people’s expectations of how they would behave nor their moral views of how they should behave had anything to do with how they actually behaved in an authority-dominated situation.
Milgram’s obedience study attracted immense attention and won the 1964 award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for sociopsychological research. (In 1984, when Milgram died of a heart attack at fifty-one, Roger Brown called him “perhaps the most gifted experimentalist in the social psychology of our time.”) Within a decade or so, 130 similar studies had been undertaken, including a number in other countries. Most of them confirmed and enlarged Milgram’s findings, and for some years his procedure, or variations of it, was the principal one used in studies of obedience.35 But for more than two decades no researcher has used such methods, or would dare to, as a result of historical developments we’ll look at shortly.
The Bystander Effect
In March 1964, a murder in Kew Gardens, in New York City’s borough of Queens, made the front page of the New York Times and shocked the nation, although there was nothing memorable about the victim, murderer, or method. Kitty Genovese, a young bar manager on her way home at 3 A.M., was stabbed to death by Winston Moseley, a business-machine operator who did not know her, and who had previously killed two other women. What made the crime big news was that the attack lasted half an hour (Moseley stabbed Genovese, left, came back a few minutes later and stabbed her again, left again, and returned to attack her once more), during which time she repeatedly screamed and called for help, and was heard and seen by thirty-eight people looking out the windows of their apartments. Not one tried to defend her, came to help when she lay bleeding, or even telephoned the police. (One finally did call—after she was dead.)
News commentators and other pundits interpreted the inaction of the thirty-eight witnesses as evidence of the alienation and inhumanity of modern city dwellers, especially New Yorkers. But two young social psychologists