The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [43]
If the learner fails to remember a word pair correctly, you are to administer the punishment by flipping one of the thirty switches on the shock generator, sending a momentary current to the electrode on your partner’s wrist next door. Each of the switches is labeled with a voltage designation ranging in 15-volt increments from 15 to 450 volts. The lowest four are labeled “slight shock.” The next four are “moderate shock,” then “strong shock,” “very strong shock,” “intense shock,” “extreme intensity shock,” and finally “danger: severe shock.” The final two switches are labeled simply “XXX.”
To show the reality of the shocks, the researcher gives you a “sample shock” by applying an electrode to your wrist and flipping the switch corresponding to 45 volts, a “slight shock” according to the diagram on front of the generator. A light above the switch flashes, an electric buzzer sounds, and you feel a shock that makes you sit up and take notice. It does not make your teeth clatter, but it is not pleasant. Incentive enough to get an answer correct.
So the experiment begins, and you read the word pairs, and you hope the learner is concentrating. You begin the multiple choice portion of the experiment, and the learner has difficulty remembering the proper responses. He gets more wrong than right. With the first wrong answer, the researcher instructs you to flip the first switch—15 volts. On each subsequent wrong answer, you are told to move up the board to the next switch: 30 volts; 45 volts; 60 volts. At 75 volts, you hear a little grunt come from the learner next door. Another mistake leads to a 90-volt shock, and another grunt.
By this time, you are probably not feeling confident about the research project. You certainly don’t think it’s cool to go around shocking someone just because they failed to remember a pair of words correctly. You turn to the researcher, sitting at a desk nearby, and ask whether you should continue. He says, “Please go on.” So you do.
At 120 volts, the shock you administer is equivalent to sticking a fork in a household outlet. The learner shouts out that the punishments are getting painful. You hesitate again, and the researcher says, “Please go on. The experiment requires that you continue.” At 135 volts, you can hear painful groans. At 150 volts, labeled a “strong shock,” the learner shouts out, “Experimenter, get me out of here! I won’t be in the experiment any more! I refuse to go on!” You look at the researcher and he says, “It is absolutely essential that you continue. You have no other choice, you must go on.”
What do you do?
If you haven’t done it already, you would call off the experiment, insist on freeing the learner in the next room, and walk out. You would then call the police and report the mad scientist to the authorities. At least, that’s what I would hope I would do, and no doubt you do too. But we probably wouldn’t.
1.
The experiment just described was the work of Yale scientist Stanley Milgram, who conducted hundreds of such tests in New Haven in the early 1960s. He was not actually testing the effect of punishment on learning. That was a ruse. The real subjects of the experiment were the teachers: Milgram wanted to see how willingly they would inflict pain on others when instructed by a person in authority.
The design of the experiment was brilliant, if ethically troubling.2 The learner was in on the ruse and the role selection was rigged—both slips of paper in the hat said “teacher” so that the real volunteer would always become the teacher. The electrode attached to the learner’s wrist in fact carried no current, and the learner’s responses, both his mistakes and his reactions to the supposed shocks, were precisely choreographed. The researcher’s instructions were also exact: any time a teacher hesitated or questioned the procedure, the researcher responded with a sequence of increasingly