Four Decades After Milgram, We’re Still Willing to Inflict Pain

Editorial Observer
The New York Times
Four Decades After Milgram, We’re Still Willing to Inflict Pain
By ADAM COHEN

In 1963, Stanley Milgram, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale, published his infamous experiment on obedience to authority. Its conclusion was that most ordinary people were willing to administer what they believed to be painful, even dangerous, electric shocks to innocent people if a man in a white lab coat told them to.

For the first time in four decades, a researcher has repeated the Milgram experiment to find out whether, after all we have learned in the last 45 years, Americans are still as willing to inflict pain out of blind obedience.

The Milgram experiment was carried out in the shadow of the Holocaust. The trial of Adolf Eichmann had the world wondering how the Nazis were able to persuade so many ordinary Germans to participate in the murder of innocents. Professor Milgram devised a clever way of testing, in a laboratory setting, man’s (and woman’s) willingness to do evil.

The participants — ordinary residents of New Haven — were told they were participating in a study of the effect of punishment on learning. A “learner” was strapped in a chair in an adjacent room, and electrodes were attached to the learner’s arm. The participant was told to read test questions, and to administer a shock when the learner gave the wrong answer.

The shocks were not real. But the participants were told they were — and instructed to increase the voltage with every wrong answer. At 150 volts, the participant could hear the learner cry in protest, complain of heart pain, and ask to be released from the study. After 330 volts, the learner made no noise at all, suggesting he was no longer capable of responding. Through it all, the scientist in the room kept telling the participant to ignore the protests — or the unsettling silence — and administer an increasingly large shock for each wrong answer or non-answer.

The Milgram experiment’s startling result — as anyone who has taken a college psychology course knows — was that ordinary people were willing to administer a lot of pain to innocent strangers if an authority figure instructed them to do so. More than 80 percent of participants continued after administering the 150-volt shock, and 65 percent went all the way up to 450 volts.

Jerry Burger of Santa Clara University replicated the experiment and has now published his findings in American Psychologist. He made one slight change in the protocol, in deference to ethical standards developed since 1963. He stopped when a participant believed he had administered a 150-volt shock. (He also screened out people familiar with the original experiment.)

Professor Burger’s results were nearly identical to Professor Milgram’s. Seventy percent of his participants administered the 150-volt shock and had to be stopped. That is less than in the original experiment, but not enough to be significant.

Much has changed since 1963. The civil rights and antiwar movements taught Americans to question authority. Institutions that were once accorded great deference — including the government and the military — are now eyed warily. Yet it appears that ordinary Americans are about as willing to blindly follow orders to inflict pain on an innocent stranger as they were four decades ago.

Professor Burger was not surprised. He believes that the mindset of the individual participant — including cultural influences — is less important than the “situational features” that Professor Milgram shrewdly built into his experiment. These include having the authority figure take responsibility for the decision to administer the shock, and having the participant increase the voltage gradually. It is hard to say no to administering a 195-volt shock when you have just given a 180-volt shock.

The results of both experiments pose a challenge. If this is how most people behave, how do we prevent more Holocausts, Abu Ghraibs and other examples of wanton cruelty? Part of the answer, Professor Burger argues, is teaching people about the experiment so they will know to be on guard against these tendencies, in themselves and others.

An instructor at West Point contacted Professor Burger to say that she was teaching her students about his findings. She had the right idea — and the right audience. The findings of these two experiments should be part of the basic training for soldiers, police officers, jailers and anyone else whose position gives them the power to inflict abuse on others.

Reviving Camelot?

Obama's appeal transcends race and party. His Iowa victory suggests that it may be possible to reclaim the national unity America has lost.
By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Jan 4, 2008

When John F. Kennedy sought the presidency in 1960, Lyndon B. Johnson, the seasoned Senate leader who would become his running mate, looked down on the young upstart and complained he hadn't done anything to warrant such lofty ambition. Kennedy was an undistinguished senator, but he had been in the Senate for eight years after moving up from the House, where he was first elected in 1947. Imagine what LBJ would say about Barack Obama, who has barely three years in the Senate, one of which has been spent running for president.

The Senate is not an institution eager to accommodate people who want to make a fast start, and Obama has gained the endorsement of only two colleagues, Richard Durbin, the senior senator from his home state of Illinois, and Kent Conrad of North Dakota, a state no Democrat will carry. By contrast, Hillary Clinton, who's paid her dues on Capitol Hill, has 10 endorsements from Senate Democrats. We can only guess what earthy expression LBJ might employ to assess Obama's meager accomplishments in the Senate, but it's beside the point because that's not how the voters are sizing him up.

What Obama has is Kennedy's ability to inspire and to play the generation card. When Obama talks about "the fierce urgency of now" and warns against those counseling patience, he's dissing a return to the Clinton years, but he's also echoing JFK's Inaugural declaration, "The torch has passed to a new generation of Americans." How can we know whether Obama--now buoyed by his victory in Iowa--will prove comparable in substance and actual performance to the figure that lives on in our collective imagination? Bill Clinton, on the Charlie Rose show some weeks ago, said a vote for Obama is a "roll of the dice." It was characterized as a negative attack, but it's true.

In the Senate gallery, tourists hang over the balcony to catch a better view of the junior senator until the cops shoo them back. Obama represents the possibility of reclaiming the national unity America has lost, and his appeal transcends race and party. Republicans are more fearful of him than Hillary Clinton as the nominee because they don't know how to run against him any more than Hillary does. Portraying Obama as too liberal is an old saw that has lost its resonance. As for experience, it fell flat for Hillary in Iowa. Ted Sorensen, the venerable wordsmith who advised JFK, asks, "What experience? Just because she lived there? I have three boys who played hide and seek in the White House."

Sorensen has overcome age (he'll be 80 in May) and disability (he's lost much of his sight but not his vision) to campaign for Obama. It is the first time in more than 40 years that he has gotten this excited about a candidate. He recalls that Kennedy was not yet 40 years old when he began exploring the possibility of becoming president. Obama is 46. It's not how many years you live in the White House, or your contacts with foreign leaders, or even your personality, he says, that make a great president. "What matters is judgment." The first chapter of Sorensen's upcoming memoir is about the Cuban missile crisis and those 13 days in June of 1962 when the world teetered on the edge of a nuclear exchange. Kennedy broke with conventional thinking to negotiate with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at the height of the crisis. Soviet missiles were withdrawn after an exchange of personal letters.

Sorensen's memoir is due out in May with the title "Counselor: A Life on the Edge of History." He recalls with wonder that JFK hired him, a Nebraska boy who had not gone to Harvard, who hadn't served in World War II, and who was untested by Washington standards. His admiration for Kennedy is undiminished by time, and what he sees in Obama is a similar willingness to have an open presidency, to consider new ideas, and to break with Washington groupthink. "I don't want this book to be a partisan screed, but I do reflect on what happened to the Kennedy legacy and why I'm taking part in this campaign despite age and disability." Sorensen believes that electing Obama would represent such profound change in the image America presents to the world that it would help regain much of the ground lost these last seven years.

Unaccustomed to writing in the first person and struggling with his diminished sight, the result of a stroke, Sorensen took almost six years to complete the book. He promises a fuller account of familiar events, some new correspondence from Jackie Kennedy, and perhaps more light on the widely held belief that he wrote Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Profiles of Courage." He jokes that if there's another book in him, it would be titled, "I'm Not the Author of 'Profiles of Courage,' But If I Were, This Is How I Would Have Gone About It." For now, he's settled into a familiar role as counselor to another young upstart whose sense of possibility rekindles a time long past but never forgotten.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/84399
© 2008 Newsweek.com