The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [45]
Group pressure worked the other way, too. In one design, the teacher-subject worked with another teacher—in on the ruse—who seemed to be administering the shocks. The teacher-subject performed subsidiary acts necessary for the experiment to proceed, but never administered the shocks himself. In this design, more than 90 percent of the teacher-subjects willingly participated in an experiment they had reason to believe was causing lethal harm to an innocent person. Fewer than 8 percent rebelled.
One remarkable thing about Milgram’s experiments is how constrained the subjects reported feeling. The teachers were not physically compelled to participate and could have left at any time. If they objected to administering the shocks, they only had to face the stern voice of the researcher, telling them to go on. Yet in interviews after the tests, many explained their actions by saying they had no choice. One subject said that he “had to follow orders,” another said she “had to do it,” another noted he felt “totally helpless” and in an “impossible situation.”7
Milgram’s experiments have become famous because of their obvious implications for our thinking about the role of authority in decision making. His motivation for this study was the still-fresh memories of Nazi Germany. How could so many seemingly good people acquiesce in the mass murder of millions of Jews and others? In our own day, we cannot study Milgram without thinking about the role of authority in the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, or in the use of terror against innocent civilians in London, Madrid, or New York City. (Milgram died in 1984, at the age of fifty-one, before seeing these modern implications of his work.)
In the words of Milgram’s former colleague Jerome Bruner, who wrote the foreword to the 2004 reissue of Milgram’s book Obedience to Authority, Milgram showed us “that there are predisposing conditions in our culture, perhaps in any culture, that prime us to ‘follow orders,’ however those orders may seem on second thought. Not all of us go along, to be sure, for there are always competing impulses to stick to one’s own inner convictions—as there were in Milgram’s experiments. But for all of that, we follow orders.”8
One might think that Milgram’s test would not work today. His experiments were performed before the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, before Watergate, before the nation’s fixation on personal responsibility and autonomy. But two present-day researchers (working under modern ethical guidelines) confirmed his basic findings in separate studies at Ohio State and Santa Clara University.9 A British television special also reconstructed the experiments in 2006 and came up with largely similar results. While television should never be mistaken for science, the episode did make for interesting viewing because it showed its subjects administering what they believed to be extreme shocks to another person. In 2010, a French documentary filmmaker staged a fictitious game show in which “contestants” posed questions to a man strapped in what looked to be an electric chair. Neither the contestants nor the raucous audience knew the electric chair was a fake, but nearly 80 percent of the contestants continued to shock the man for wrong answers even after he begged to be released. Some participants shocked the man until he appeared to die, all the while being egged on by the audience.10
“The most remarkable thing,” wrote Dr. Jerry Burger, who headed the Santa Clara study, “is that we’re still talking about [Milgram’s] work, almost 50 years after it was done.” His experiments are both troubling and enlightening. Most people obeyed, but some did not. Obedience