Stanley Milgram's Experiment: a Critique

You've probably heard of Stanley Milgam's experiment, in which subjects were deceived into thinking they were administering a You've probably heard of Stanley Milgam's experiment, in which subjects were deceived into thinking they were administering a teaching program to "subjects" (actually, actors). The implication of the experiment was that most people are putty in the paws of authority:

It’s one of the most well-known psychology experiments in history – the 1961 tests in which social psychologist Stanley Milgram invited volunteers to take part in a study about memory and learning. Its actual aim, though, was to investigate obedience to authority – and Milgram reported that fully 65 percent of volunteers had repeatedly administered increasing electric shocks to a man they believed to be in severe pain. 

In the decades since, the results have been held up as proof of the depths of ordinary people’s depravity in service to an authority figure. At the time, this had deep and resonant connections to the Holocaust and Nazi Germany – so resonant, in fact, that they might have led Milgram to dramatically misrepresent his hallmark findings.
(Gina Perry, "The Shocking Truth of the Notorious Milgram Obedience Experiments," Discover Magazine Blog, 2 Oct 2013)

Milgram hardly resisted this inference. Indeed, he insisted to anyone who would listen that his subjects were practically fully-accredited Nazi death camp guards.

In a television interview in 1979, Milgram said that he eventually came to the conclusion that "If a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town."

Soon after his results were published, child psychologist Diana Baumrind published a criticism of Milgram's experiment in which she objected to the trauma Milgram's subjects probably underwent. I imagine that Milgram's repeated comparisons of his subjects to Nazi prison camp guards could only have made matters far worse.¹

Anyway, it later has emerged that there were a few problems with Milgram's experimental methods.

The statistical story of the obedience experiments is not nearly as straightforward as you’d think. The 65% headline figure, of people who followed the experimenters’ orders and went to the maximum voltage on the shock machine, implies that there was a single experiment. In fact there were 24 different variations, or mini dramas, each with a different script, actors and experimental set up.

It’s surprising how often Milgram’s 24 different variations are wrongly conflated into this single statistic. The 65% result was made famous because it was the first variation that Milgram reported in his first journal article, yet few noted that it was an experiment that involved just 40 subjects.

By examining records of the experiment held at Yale, I found that in over half of the 24 variations, 60% of people disobeyed the instructions of the authority and refused to continue.
(Gina Perry, 2013)

In sympathetic accounts of the experiment (e.g., here), writers will only quote the subjects' side, not the experimenter's bullying and cajoling. But here's the reality:

In listening to the original recordings of the experiments, it’s clear that Milgram’s experimenter John Williams deviated significantly from the script in his interactions with subjects. Williams – with Milgram’s approval – improvised in all manner of ways to exert pressure on subjects to keep administering shocks.

He left the lab to “check” on the learner, returning to reassure the teacher that the learner was OK. Instead of sticking to the standard four verbal commands described in accounts of the experimental protocol, Williams often abandoned the script and commanded some subjects 25 times and more to keep going. Teachers were blocked in their efforts to swap places with the learner or to check on him themselves.
(Ibid)

It's impossible to believe that a legitimate psychologist can entrap 40 people into an experiment, bully them into doing something they're morally distressed by, then publicly and gravely liken them to Nazi killers and declare that they deserve to be "morally confronted" (as Elms does on Milgram's behalf). That's not psychology; Elms believes that the subjects were part of an unbiased experiment that therefore revealed something about human nature; yet he then approves of them being exposed as morally repugnant. It's as if the job of a psychologist is identical to that of Satan in the Book of Job:

8 Then the Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.”
9 “Does Job fear God for nothing?” Satan replied.
10 “Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has? You have blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are spread throughout the land.
11 But now stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face.”

But if Milgram had discovered anything about human nature, it was rank cruelty to use this discovery to demonize the tiny sample who had the misfortune to be his test subjects; his collaborator, Alan Elms (and Milgram, too, in defenses of his own work) felt the experiment's detractors were merely offended by the results—and indeed, Milgram's rebuttal to Diana Baumrind was to pretend to be a mind reader, insisting that what really upset her was the dark picture of human nature the experiments proved.

I have noticed a trend of defenders of Milgram impugning the character of the critics and attributing motives to them that are plausible but unsubstantiated. Elms mocked Baumrind's ethical concerns "she is a child psychologist," Elms sneers, "and the volunteers are all children at heart, unable to resist the experimenter's wiles and therefore needing protection by someone who knows better, namely Dr. Baumrind." 

THE MILGRAM EXPERIMENT SINCE MILGRAM

Milgram's obedience experiment has been replicated about a dozen times. One replication was performed by a Prof. Jerry Burger at Santa Clara University (PDF), and Prof. Blass—a big admirer of Milgram—has published a survey of Milgram's obedience research and its replication (PDF-see p.12).

Blass's article actually (in my view) goes a long way to redeeming Milgram's experiment; he seems to have a rare ability to defend the experiment without attacking and belittling anyone disturbed by its methods. Contrary to careless summaries, the outcomes vary greatly (although only two versions of the experiment resulted in any sex differences in full obedience; one had a higher male obedience rate, and the other a higher female obedience rate). Obedience rates ranged from 28% to 91%, although differences in experiment design were large enough that making a direct comparison would be invalid; and the sample sizes were always very small.

One point that strikes me as very strange is that champions of Milgram's work seem to believe that it is somehow essential, or supportive of, or somehow linked to, politically progressive political views.  I honestly have no clue what Milgram's political opinions were, and I know from ample experience that people could take totally opposite interpretations of his conclusions. Liberalism, however, relies on basic presumptions of human dignity that the Milgram fan club rejects violently; while defenders of Milgram insist that his critics are arguing in bad faith to defend a barbaric police state, it seems more likely that the police state is actually defended by enthusiastic, committed, unambivalent supporters. 

That includes, of course, Milgram's authority.  Reviews of Gina Perry's books included vituperative denunciations, as if Ms. Perry were an actual heretic with evil motives.  It was pretty rare for critical reviewers to just disagree, and cite reasons for doing so.  Instead, they would rail at the author as if she was defending the Holocaust itself.   The irony, in other words, is that practically no intellectual in the social sciences has a fraction of the authority Stanley Milgram has, and Gina Perry had the temerity to challenge it; for that, Milgram's fan club said with a single voice, she should burn. 

WHY THIS MATTERS

The Milgram Experiment has entered popular consciousness and is extremely well-known; it seems to validate those inordinately fond of the word "sheeple." Peter Gabriel even entitled ones of his songs, "we do what we're told—Milgram's 37." The experiment is supposed to reveal something about people's susceptibility to Nazi control, or any other atrocity (the My Lai massacre, the Rwandan genocide, etc.)

What bothers me about the people invoking it is their pretensions to some higher moral ground. Critics of the experiment are supposedly unable to handle the truth (of total human depravity?). Milgram, as mentioned, pounded the Nazi theme pretty hard, and his admirers did so as well. He denied that he was characterizing his subjects to Nazis but undeniably invited everyone else to do so. In many respects, one of the things I got out this was the Milgram Faction—the large cadre of social scientists around him who defended his research—was an act of psychological projection. Milgram and Elms (most specifically Elms) regarded the subjects of the experiment as sharing a moral community with the experiment's ethical critics, like Baumrind. The critics have argued that the subjects were unfairly "convicted" by Milgram of attempted murder, and the Milgram faction has ridiculed them for treating the subjects like helpless children, unable to act nobly when put to the test. It is only fair to presume that you would flunk the moral challenge, if you only faced it—so of course you get your panties in a twist (Milgram & Elms seem to say). With this logical step, Milgram equates his critics with his morally bankrupt subjects.

Perhaps I am misreading Milgram, et al., but it seems as though he was like a Matthew Hopkins of the Human Soul, hunting down witches and stopping at nothing to do so. Matthew Hopkins claimed to be the witch-finder general of England (1644-1647) and was famous for instruments like a pricker with a retracting blade; he could publicly pretend to gouge suspects, without drawing blood—thereby "proving" their guilt. While Nazis are real and witches are not, plagues are also real, and what both Hopkins and Milgram purported to do was identify the cause of both.

I chose the word "cause" here carefully; no doubt Milgram would accuse me of having taken complete leave of my senses. It's a stretch to say (as I do, unrepentantly) that Milgram practically, i.e., within the constraints imposed by legal liability and the need to cultivate test subjects who later sided with him, accused his subjects of being Eichmanns manque; it's saying a lot more to say he accused his subjects of causing atrocities like the Holocaust. I make this claim mainly through inference: Milgram, et al. (mainly others) insisted that the experiment showed us how the Holocaust could have happened.

The death camps in which Jews were systematically tortured and killed were efficiently organized and managed by well-trained administrative personnel. These administrators were not extraordinarily vicious savages running amuck. On the contrary, the Germans who ran the death camps seemed to be ordinary "decent" citizens, with consciences no different from those of any of us. How could they have blinded themselves to the clear injustice of what they were doing? More generally, what motivates the unethical acts of ordinarily decent people?
Manuel Velasquez, Claire Andre, Thomas Shanks, & Michael J. Meyer, "Conscience & Authority" (1988; emphasis added—JRM)

Velasquez, et.al., in the quote cited above, seem to be saying that the Germans who ran the death camps need no further introduction: they're ordinarily decent people, just like the subjects in Milgram's experiments. Margarita Tartakovsky, M.S., "Stanley Milgram & The Shock Heard Around the World," Psych Central (2011), lards her effusive praise for the Milgram Experiment with accounts of Milgram's early interest in the Holocaust—which happened when he was growing up. What the broader implications are, she refuses to say. Milgram himself, in Obedience to Authority, makes explicit analogies to Eichmann's claim to "be just following orders" at least four separate times in his book (not counting references by co-authors like Philip Zambardo), making it irrefutably clear that he believes there is no moral difference whatever between Eichmann and his test subjects. The only difference is one of fate: Eichmann was "ordered" to organize the final solution, and his test subjects were ordered to administer shocks to the "learner."

But this is not quite accurate: the perpetrators of the Holocaust were enthusiastic killers, not tormented conscripts. Eichmann was not impassively following orders under duress; he was completely convinced that the Jews were conspiring to destroy Germany, and declared to a colleague as Soviet forces closed in on him, that he "would jump laughing into his grave" because he had slain five million of Germany's enemies (Dieter Wisliceny, Nuremberg Tribunals; Wisliceny was himself executed in Czechoslovakia for his role in the Final Solution). Defenders and supporters of Milgram's conclusions may acknowledge that there is a world of difference between enthusiastic killers like Eichmann, on the one hand, and people who "kill" because they were bullied, cajoled, and cornered into doing so. But they dismiss it, or ignore it. I cannot cite examples of this being done, because I cannot find examples of Milgram's partisans even hesitating to deliver the maximum possible blow to the test subjects: accusing them outright of being the reason why atrocities occur at all. Milgram does not, Elms actively loathes his subjects, and attacks Baumrind vituperatively of attempting to protect them, like a child psychologist. Elms believes his subjects deserved to be tried as adults (so to speak—but why else the insistence on their legal majority?).

A reader might at this point accuse me of writing a very boring, inept piece for The Onion, linking Stanley Milgram's assassination of his subjects' moral characters to their own alleged² willingness to administer an (actually lethal) shock to a test subject. Milgram does include various nuances just to show that he actually is not just a vandal, but his nuances are wholly absent from his final analysis. The fact that test subjects had no idea what to believe, for instance, he dismisses out of hand as self-serving. The idea of moral confusion being linked to cognitive confusion is something he understands, of course, but he refuses to allow that to get in the way of a "valid" result: the subjects are moral scum, with no mitigating traits. He creeps up into steadily more egregious crimes, such as the My Lai massacre, which occurred on a battlefield.

So this is why I go out on a limb and say that Milgram chose to focus not on someone like Goebbels or Heydrich, who instigated the actual murder, but on Eichmann, who passed himself off as a helpless bureaucrat while on trial in Jerusalem: the real perpetrator, in his mind, was the cooperative bureaucrat who exposed humans as morally vile, not the fanatic who exposed nothing about non-fanatics. There is admittedly something to this logic, but it's perverse: it inherently favors the least enthusiast, least informed, and least powerful agent as the worst agent.

And hence the Hopkins analogy: Milgram was intent on exposing human nature itself as "the Eichmann in the machine," and relentlessly devised ways of putting human nature "to the pain." I remain unconvinced that this did anything to prevent further atrocities, although his conclusions have molded psychology ever since.

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NOTES:

1. For a defense of Milgram published in 1972, see Alan C. Elms, "Experiemental Ethics." From Alan C. Elms, Social Psychology and Social Relevance, Chapter 4, pp. 146-160. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972. Elms's attitude appears to be, "The subjects suffered humiliation? Good! Serves them right. Maybe we all need a little more moral panic." Elms, by the way, had worked with Milgram to design the experiment.
2. I say alleged because, contra Milgram, I think his subjects didn't know what to believe. Milgram needed to have it accepted that the subjects were categorically guilty of attempted murder, and insisted on the false dichotomy that they either were completely convinced the experiment was a huge fake, or else completely convinced it was totally real and involved life and death. But of course, they were suspended between two incompatible realities—one in which the arrangement was faked, and one in which they really were torturing a test subject; but in the latter case, why was it so important that they push the switches? And in the former case, the incessant bullying and cajoling—and cornering—made more sense, but to what purpose?