A Personal Account of the Milgram

Obedience Experiments (original) (raw)

The experiment was repeated in other venues away from the university in Hartford and Cambridge. Results were worst (that is, the highest percentage of testers went all the way to 450 volts) with a group of nurses in Bridgeport. The experiments were also repeated in Princeton, Munich, Rome, South Africa and Australia, with levels of obedience registering even higher than in New Haven. (In Munich, 85 percent of the subjects were obedient to the end.) Before the experiments began, Stanley Milgram sought predictions from a variety of people, including psychiatrists and college faculty and graduate students. "With remarkable similarity," he wrote, "they predicted that virtually all the subjects would refuse to obey the experimenter. The psychiatrists, specifically, predicted that most subjects would not go beyond 150 volts, when the victim makes his first explicit demand to be freed. They expected that only four percent would reach 300 volts, and that only a pathological fringe of about one in a thousand would administer the highest shock on the board (The Perils of Obedience).

Many social psychologists were critical of the experiment. Diana Baumrind, in the American Psychologist, 1964, complained that there was no informed consent and that even if valuable information were gleaned, it would not justify the risk that real [emotional] harm [would be] done to the subject. Milgram maintained that a followup questionnaire showed that 84 percent of the subjects were glad to have been involved, 15 percent were neutral and only 1.3 percent were sorry or had negative feelings. Milgram also had a psychiatrist interview subjects thought most likely to have suffered consequences, and the doctor found no evidence of traumatic reactions. I don't remember if I answered this questionnaire, but I would have been in the neutral group.

In retrospect, I believe that my upbringing in a socialist-oriented family steeped in a class struggle view of society taught me that authorities would often have a different view of right and wrong than mine. That attitude stayed with me during my three and one half years of service in the army, in Europe, during World War II. Like all soldiers, I was taught to obey orders, but whenever we heard lectures on army regulations, what stayed with me was that we were also told that soldiers had a right to refuse illegal orders (though what constituted illegal was left vague).

In addition, in my position during the late 1940s as a staff member of the Communist Party, in which I held positions as chairman in New Haven and Hartford, I had become accustomed to exercising authority and having people from a variety of backgrounds and professions carry out assignments I gave them. As a result, I had an unorthodox understanding of authority and was not likely to be impressed by a white lab coat.

In the early 1950s, I was harassed and tailed by the FBI, and in 1954, along with other leaders of the Communist Party in Connecticut, I was arrested and tried under the Smith Act on charges of "conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence." We were convicted, as expected, and I was about to go to jail when the conviction was overturned on appeal. I believe these experiences also enabled me to stand up to an authoritative "professor."

This is not to say that membership in the Communist Party made me or anyone else totally independent. Many of us, in fact, had become accustomed to carrying out assignments from people with higher positions in the Party, even when we had doubts. Would I have refused to follow orders had the experimental authority figure been a "Party leader" instead of a "professor"? I like to think so, as I was never a stereotypical "true believer" in Party doctrine. This was one of the reasons, among others, that I left the Party in the late 1950s. In any event, I believe that my political experience was an important factor in determining my skeptical behavior in the Milgram experiment.

I think the experiment had only limited relevance to our understanding of the actions of the German people under Nazi rule. In the experiment, the professor had no power to enforce his orders. In Nazi Germany, the enforcement powers went from simple reprimand all the way to imprisonment and death. In addition, the role of the learner in the experiment was markedly different from the victimized Jews, Gypsies, gay men and others under Nazism, who had not volunteered to be in an "experiment" and had no ability to stop their suffering.

The results of the Milgram experiment should not surprise us. Most people unquestioningly obey orders from authorities, and refusal is unusual. As children, after all, we are taught to obey our parents, teachers, employers and law enforcement officers. Perhaps that is why examples of refusal to obey immoral orders excite my admiration. This is especially so of the Israeli soldiers and pilots who are currently defending the morality of their country and of the Jewish people by refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories. Some are paying a high price in lost jobs, destroyed careers and jail time for their actions. Their situation cannot be directly compared to that of us who were tested in the Milgram experiment, for they are not being explicitly ordered to injure innocent people (although they know that the "collateral damage" of their military actions includes innocents), nor are the people being killed and injured voluntarily participating in an experiment. Still, the results of the Milgram experiment demonstrates how rare and heroic is the "Courage to Refuse" (as one of their organizations is named). These are people who deserve to be honored.