Behind the Shock Machine, a new book by Gina Perry, revisits the famous experiment by Stanley Milgram claiming that “nearly two-thirds of subjects will, under certain conditions, administer dangerously powerful electrical shocks to a stranger when commanded to do so by an authority figure”:
Perry reveals that Milgram massaged the facts in order to deliver the outcome he sought. When Milgram presented his finding — namely, high levels of obedience — both in early papers and in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority, he stated that if the subject refused the lab coat’s commands more than four times, the subject would be classified as disobedient. But Perry finds that this isn’t what really happened.
The further Milgram got in his research, the more he pushed participants to obey. In early variations of the study, those “who resisted four times [were] classified as disobedient,” but in later iterations, especially the 20th one — notably the only variation to use female participants and thus crucial to Milgram’s claims to gender universality — “the same behavior was ignored.” In fact, Williams, the actor who played the lab coat, was only instructed to stick to the script in the first two variations, after which Milgram “tacitly allowed Williams license to improvise.” Williams forced the female participants to endure far more commands than the early male subjects, prodding one female subject 26 times before she finally gave in and was classified as obedient.
This new evidence suggests that Milgram’s female subjects may have been more likely to disobey than his male subjects. Perry also finds that in later variations, Milgram allowed Williams to ad-lib new commands. For example, at one point Williams learned from early trials that some participants had felt obligated to follow his directions in the interest of aiding Yale in its pursuit of knowledge. He then intimated to later subjects that, if they refused to follow his orders, the entire study would be invalidated. Milgram never mentioned these facts in any of his published writing.
Aside from the specific situational implications of these facts, Perry’s evidence raises larger questions regarding a study that is still firmly entrenched in American scientific and popular culture: if Milgram lied once about his compromised neutrality, to what extent can we trust anything he said? And how could a blatant breach in objectivity in one of the most analyzed experiments in history go undetected for so long?
The Dish 