Milgram experiment, 50 years-plus old and still of dubious value

Cori Romm reports on a professional psychological study that fairly quickly morped into some like an urban legend in One of psychology's most infamous experiments on the dark side of humanity is back under the microscope Business Insider/The Atlantic 02/07/2015.

I say "something like" an urban legend because the latter are more typically sourced from "a friend of a friend." Or, in a more recent variety, from anonymous e-mail chain letters.

The experiment in question took place in 1963 and involved participants in an experiment being asked to shock another subject. The participants were told that the shocks were real but would not cause permanent tissue damage. The results seem to show a horrifying number willing to continue administer shocks under orders even when the person was crying in pain or even became unconscious.

Milgram's paper on the results of the study was published as Behavioral Study of Obedience by Stanley Milgram The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67:4 Oct 1963.

I've blogged about this before in : The Milgram Experiment 03/19/2010 and More critical perspective on the Milgram Experiment 03/19/2010. As I explained in those two posts, I'm highly skeptical of the value of the study, relying on observations from Erich Fromm in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973) and Charles Helm and Mario Morelli, "Stanley Milgram and the Obedience Experiment: Authority, Legitimacy, and Human Action" Political Theory 7/3 (Aug 1979).

Romm reports that Milgram's study is still attracting critics:

One of the most vocal of those critics is Australian author and psychologist Gina Perry, who documented her experience tracking down Milgram’s research participants in her 2013 book Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments. Her project began as an effort to write about the experiments from the perspective of the participants—but when she went back through the archives to confirm some of their stories, she said, she found some glaring issues with Milgram’s data.

Among her accusations: that the supervisors went off script in their prods to the teachers, that some of the volunteers were aware that the setup was a hoax, and that others weren’t debriefed on the whole thing until months later. “My main issue is that methodologically, there have been so many problems with Milgram’s research that we have to start re-examining the textbook descriptions of the research,” she said.

As Romm notes, the Journal of Social Issues published a September 2014 Special Issue: Milgram at 50: Exploring the Enduring Relevance of Psychology's most Famous Studies 70:3.

The final article in that volume (Jolanda Jetten and Frank Mols, 50:50 Hindsight: Appreciating Anew the Contributions of Milgram’s Obedience Experiments) includes this in its Conclusion section:

While Milgram may not have provided all the answers to questions one can ask about his participants’ behavior, he did develop a paradigm that has kept many a social scientist intrigued to this day. Yet while his experiments seemed initially to provide very simple and intuitive insights into human behavior, today these insights no longer appear that obvious (or even compelling). Indeed, the more one delves into his work, the more one faces questions and the more difficult they become to answer. [my emphasis]

More critical perspective on the Milgram Experiment

Erich Fromm (1900-1980)

The Milgram Experiment really has established itself in American folklore, and even in science to some extent. In the last few days, iI've seen Jason Linkins (Torture's Clear Lessons Go Unlearned Huffington Post 03/17/10) and Juan Cole (French Television Demonstrates Cheney Effect Informed Comment 03/18/10) both cite it seemingly uncritically.

People embracing the stock interpretation of the Milgram Experiment should recognize the implications that Milgram himself drew from it. And his conclusion argue strongly that "I was just following orders" is a valid excuse for people committing crimes, even one deeply rooted in human biology. As I mentioned in my earlier post on the subject, Milgram concluded:

... the capacity for a man [sic] to abandon his humanity, indeed, the inevitability that he does so, as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures.

This is a fatal flaw nature has designed into us, and which in the long run gives our species only a modest chance of survival. [my emphasis]

Milgram postulated a condition that he called the "agentic state" in which a person regards himself as "an agent for carrying out another person's wishes."

Charles Helm and Mario Morelli in "Stanley Milgram and the Obedience Experiment: Authority, Legitimacy, and Human Action" Political Theory 7/3 (Aug 1979) described Milgram's concept of the "agentic state" as follows:

The figure of authoring in the form of the experimenter triggers an agentic state. The individual is no longer an autonomous actor: "once the person has moved into the agentic state, [the] evaluative mechanism is wholly absent." [my emphasis]

Milgram was not talking about extreme conditions such as the coercive persuasion applied to cult members. He was talking about the normal functioning of authority.

I don't see any way his conclusions about the biologically-rooted "agentic state" don't validate "I was just following orders" as an excuse for crime, cruelty and atrocities. This is also known as the "Nuremberg defense" after the Nuremberg war crimes trials in which Nazis charged with crimes used this defense, which was rejected as a valid defense by the Tribunal.

(The Milgram quotes above were taken from the Helm/Morelli article, which they cite to Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View [1974].)

But even Milgram's intermediate conclusions on the way to this drastic assumption are questionable. Erich Fromm in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973) argues:

I do not think that this experiment permits any conclusion with regard to most situations in real life. The psychologist was not only an authority to whom one owes obedience, but a representative of Science and of one of the most prestigious institutions of higher education in the United States. Considering that science is widely regarded as the highest value in contemporary industrial society, it is very difficult for the average person to believe that what science commands could be wrong or immoral. ... For the believer neither God nor his modern equivalent, Science, can command anything that is wrong. For this reason, plus others mentioned by Milgram, the high degree of obedience is not more surprising than that 35 per cent of the group refused at some point to obey; in fact this disobedience of more than a third might well be considered more surprising—and encouraging. [my emphasis]

Drawing on his own experience and perspective on how people process psychological conflicts, Fromm believed that Milgram misread the signs of resistance. Misread them to the point that his conclusion may have been the opposite of what a more carefully constructed experiment with results analyzed in a less superficial way might have concluded:

I believe that the most important finding of Milgram's study is the strength of the reactions against the cruel behavior. To be sure, 65 per cent of the subjects could be "conditioned" to behave cruelly, but a reaction of indignation or horror against this sadistic behavior was clearly present in most of them. Unfortunately the author [Milgram] does not give accurate data on the number of "subjects" who remained calm throughout the experiment.

Since Fromm doesn't explain why the data on those subjects was inaccurate, it appears from the context that he probably meant the data on those subjects was not "sufficient", rather than not "accurate".

For the understanding of human behavior, it would be most interesting to know more about them. Apparently they had little or no feeling of opposition to the cruel acts they were performing. The next question is why this was so. One possible answer is that they enjoyed the suffering of others and felt no remorse when their behavior was sanctioned by authority. Another possibility is that they were such highly alienated or narcissistic people that they were insulated against what went on in other people; or they might be "psychopaths," lacking in any kind of moral reaction. As for those in whom the conflict manifested itself in various symptoms of stress and anxiety, it should be assumed that they are people who do not have a sadistic or destructive character. (If one had undertaken an interview in depth, one would have seen the differences in character and even could have made an educated guess as to how people would behave.)

The main result of Milgram's study seems to be one he does not stress: the presence of conscience in most subjects, and their pain when obedience made them act against their conscience. Thus, while the experiment can be interpreted as another proof of the easy dehumanization of man, the subjects' reactions show rather the contrary — the presence of intense forces within them that find cruel behavior intolerable. This suggests an important approach to the study of cruelty in real life: to consider not only cruel behavior but the — often unconscious — guilty conscience of those who obey authority. (The Nazis had to use an elaborate system of camouflage of atrocities in order to cope with the conscience of the average man.) Milgram's experiment is a good illustration of the difference between conscious and unconscious aspects of behavior, even though no use has been made of it to explore this difference. [my emphasis]

Fromm writes that Milgram's experiment and his conclusions took insufficient account of the "difference between behavior and character". Fromm says, "It is one thing to behave according to sadistic rules and another thing to want to be and to enjoy being cruel to people." Milgram reporting the discomfort of a majority of the participants. But this distinction that Fromm makes goes to the heart of deciding what the determinants of the behavior were in the experiment.

Fromm expresses another reservation about the Milgram Experiment. In discussing how people understand game situations, he writes:

If in psychological experiments the "subjects" were clearly aware that the whole situation is only a game, everything would be simple. But in many experiments, as in that of Milgram, they are misinformed and lied to; as for the prison experiment it was set up in such a way that the awareness that everything was only an experiment would be minimized or lost. The very fact that many of these experiments, in order to be undertaken at all, must operate with fakery demonstrates this peculiar unreality; the participants' sense of reality is confused and their critical judgment greatly reduced.

Tags: erich fromm, frankfurt school, milgram experiment

The Milgram Experiment

Stanley Milgram (1933-1984)

Glenn Greenwald opened his post today, Those authoritarian, torture-loving French Salon 03/17/10, with this description of a French game show based on the famous Milgram Experiment:

French documentarians conducted an experiment where they created a faux game show -- with all the typical studio trappings -- and then instructed participants (who believed it was a real TV program) to administer electric shock to unseen contestants each time they answered questions incorrectly, with increasing potency for each wrong answer. Even as the unseen contestants (who were actors) screamed in agony and pleaded for mercy -- and even once they went silent and were presumably dead -- 81% of the participants continued to obey the instructions of the authority-figure/host and kept administering higher and higher levels of electric shock. The experiment was a replica of the one conducted in 1961 by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, where 65% of participants obeyed instructions from a designated authority figure to administer electric shock to unseen individuals, and never stopped obeying even as they heard excruciating screams and then silence. This new French experiment was designed to measure the added power of television to place people into submission to authority and induce them to administer torture. [my emphasis]

Glenn's point in his piece was about the strangeness and hypocrisy of American media reaction to this. But he seems to accept the premise that the game show mimics the Milgram Experiment.

But is it surprising that contestants did this? It was a game show, people! Pure show business! It tells us nothing, zero, zilch, nada about the human inclination to inflict pain. It's entirely possible that the show's producers explained the whole thing to the participants ahead of time. The most obvious assumption to make about this French game show experience is that everybody participating most likely assumed there was nothing even remotely harmful in what they were doing.

The Milgram Experiment has achieved the status of conventional wisdom, though urban legend might be closer to the right word for it. The experiment itself was real. And many participants in the experiment did contine administering "shocks" to the "victims" while the victims were feigning pain or even unconsciousness.

But the conclusions that can legitimately be drawn from Milgram's actual 1961 experiment are much more limited than the popular understanding of it reflected in Glenn's comment. The participants in the experiment knew they were participating in a scientific study at Yale University. (Though Milgram did shift the actual location of some of the experiments to run-down offices in a neighboring town.) The experiment itself was set up with familiar trappings of Science which presumably conveyed to participants an air of legitimate scientific authority. Milgram's own account of the experiment notes:

To improve credibility the experimenter declared in response to a question from the learner, "although the shocks can be extremely painful, they cause no permanent tissue damage."

In other words, although the experiment was set up to test who obedient the subjects would be in inflicting pain, the participants who thought they were administering shocks to the "learners" also had reason to assume that there was nothing actually harmful in what they were doing.

While it's disturbing to see that so many people would continue when they were hearing their supposed victim crying out that he was in pain and demanding to be released, it's highly questionable to what extent Milgram's experiment actually modeled how deference to authority is likely to work in real organizational settings.

Erich Fromm in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973) points out that a large portions of the participants showed signs of significant distress at the thought that they were really inflicting pain on the "learner" who was feigning, despite the scientific atmosphere and repeated assurances from an instructor that they were causing pain but doing no real harm. Fromm suggests that it would be plausible to see those reactions as a sign that normally socialized people are very reluctant to inflict pain on others.

Charles Helm and Mario Morelli in "Stanley Milgram and the Obedience Experiment: Authority, Legitimacy, and Human Action" Political Theory 7/3 (Aug 1979) note that Milgram in evaluating his results effectively assumed that authority was a generic attribute. But many of the participants likely had some more-or-less conscious sense that the "authority" in the experiment was not actually someone who had legal authority to encourage them to administer shocks to someone that could be dangerous to his health or deadly.

And the drastic conclusions Milgram drew from his experiment are nearly Calvinistic in their pessimism. But his experimental results can't carry the weight of such a sweeping conclusion:

... the capacity for a man [sic] to abandon his humanity, indeed, the inevitability that he does so, as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures.

This is a fatal flaw nature has designed into us, and which in the long run gives our species only a modest chance of survival. [my emphasis]

Helm and Morelli also write:

Milgram's explanation of the dynamics of the psychology lab- "binding factors"-is subtle and shrewd. An individual enters the lab to participate in an experiment on memory and learning. He is desirous of cooperating and fulfilling the experimenter's requests. The individual is a voluntary participant and makes, in effect, a contractual obligation to complete the experiment by his acceptance of money. He is struck by the capability of the experimenter and the scientific character of his equipment. It is emphasized that while painful, the shocks are not dangerous. The experiment begins uneventfully until it reaches around 150 volts, whereupon the "learner"/victim demands to be released. When the subject turns to the experimenter for guidance, he is "ordered" to continue. He dislikes the situation intensely as is evidenced by his nervousness, but accepts the words of the scientist that the experiment is important and that the victim is not really being permanently hurt. The individual has made a commitment and perseveres to the end. Milgram's analysis catches quite nicely the dynamic of the situation, but it also suggests some difficulties in generalizing this account to alternate situations. [my emphasis]

In other words, the lessons of the Milgram Experiment aren't nearly as obvious or as unchallenged as popular folklore might suggest.

Tags: milgram experiment