It’s surprising what thoughts may exercise a septuagenarian as a middle aged woman, met for the first and likely only time not twenty minutes earlier, is sliding an index finger up his rectum. While on the receiving end of precisely this yesterday, I was minded of an Ivy League professor of interpersonal psychology who sixty years ago shot to fame in academia and beyond with his ‘electric shock’ experiments.
Stanley Milgram, a Jew who’d fled Europe just in time, was seeking answers to the question: how could ordinary men and women – family folk who doted on their children, and in their spare time had friends over for coffee; community minded citizens who traded gossip, had affairs, bemoaned aphids in the garden and fretted over middle age spread – go back next morning to the day job: escorting living skeletons to the ‘showers’ at Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka?
(See my 2024 post on the ordinary men and women depicted in the film, Zone of Interest.)
In a series of experiments involving deception – details here – Milgram found high numbers of Ordinary Men And Women, most in fact, prepared to administer what they truly believed were electric shocks, stepping up with each transgression from mild through moderate and severe to danger of death, to fellow human beings whose offence was failure to accurately recall pairs of nonsense syllables learned by rote. The deception being that the putative subjects were actors hired to simulate pain, fear and heartrending pleas, while the real subjects were told they were taking part in a study of the effect of punishment on recall.
None of the latter enjoyed what they did. Some pleaded in tears to be allowed to stop, only to be told – by overseers with no power beyond that conferred by status – that “in the interest of science, the experiment must continue”. A tiny few walked out but most continued despite their visible distress. (Some of the trials were filmed and later aired in a BBC Horizon documentary, “You do as you are told” .)
The experiments were subsequently slated both for the deception, and lack of counselling for people left to deal as best they could with what they had learned about themselves. Nowadays Milgram would have no chance of any university ethics committee giving the go ahead. 1 All the same, controlled experiment has its advantages. Not least that variables can be isolated and tweaked, with others held constant, in this case to ascertain which might raise or lower levels of compliance. Men versus women? No significant difference. Old v young? White collar v blue? West v global south? Same answer. Moving the venue from prestigious Harvard to a back office in a run down part of town saw some fall off but obedience remained high. More significant was the presence or absence of The Scientist. Obedience rates fell when instructions were issued by speaker from a remote location.
Experimental findings, like empirical data in general, are one thing; their interpretation another. Milgram concluded that what best explained such depressing results – in his experiments and, by extension, the death camps 2 – was neither innate cruelty nor innate weakness. It was role.
Would you – I’m talking to the menfolk now – expose your bared throat to a stranger wielding a newly whetted razor? Happily, at a barber shop; even one you’ve not previously frequented. And would you, man or women, hand over large sums of cash to a stranger? Yes, if said stranger is a High Street bank teller, whether or not the branch in question is one you’ve ever set foot in before.
In any number of commonplace scenarios we do things, or allow them done to us, we would not for a moment entertain in any context except where the role of a complete stranger – an airline pilot, say – is such that without a second thought we place our lives in their hands …
… even though, as indicated, such seemingly hard wired willingness to relinquish responsibility has its dark side …
So would you – I’m talking to the guys again – allow a female stranger to slide a latex gloved and lubed digit, in a decidedly non sexual setting, up your bum? Of course you would, if it’s to gauge the size and texture of your expanding prostate – and she’s wearing that neatly pressed uniform of reassuring blue.
And that’s before we get to the fact her finger’s a lot slimmer than that of the big hairy bloke you had last time.
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- A few years after Milgram had shocked the world, another study that wouldn’t get past today’s research ethics committees played out. So disturbing and dangerous were the results of Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment that, though scheduled to last two weeks, it had to be called off after five days. Subjects drew lots to decide who’d play prisoner, who guard. The first group were then “arrested” by real police and taken to a place of incarceration, while the second donned uniforms and awaited their prisoners’ arrival. So fully did both groups immerse themselves in their roles that, when a monitor reported her graphic observations of serious brutality to Zimbardo, he called time. The relevance to Milgram’s findings, and to the death camps, needs no spelling out.
- One reason the “just obeying orders” plea was dismissed at Nuremberg was the lack of evidence that the few who refused to participate in atrocities, whether in the camps or on the Eastern front, risked serious consequences. They were simply transferred to other duties. So were the many who did comply sadists to a man and woman? Milgram and Zimbardo suggest not but by denying their humanity – Beast of Belsen (Josef Kramer); Hyena of Auschwitz (Irma Grese) – we affirm our own. And by the way, don’t Zimbardo’s findings suggest that Milgram’s distressed subjects, used just the once, would, had they been repeatedly exposed to reruns over an extended period, have ‘toughened up’?