I'm running today but needed to get this up in an optimistic spirit. On Sunday mornings, my NPR station airs Krista Tippett's great religion show, On Being. And this morning during a conversation with a social scientist about torture, Tippett aired audiotape from the Stanley Milgram experiment at Yale that blew me away. The Milgram experiment is famous of course for what it demonstrated about human beings' willingness to torture others at the direction of authority. Well, Tippett pointed out that half of Milgram's subjects refused to follow orders, and she played a section of the researchers' tapes that showed a true profile in independence. I wish we knew his name, but his anonymity serves the larger spiritual point. Here's a transcript, with Tippett's intoduction. "Man" in the transcript is the authority figure. The "subject" is the confederate who acts like he's being tortured. And "Man Two" is the actual subject of the experiment, who has been assigned the role of "teacher." Tippett:
"The famous 'obedience experiments' conducted by social psychologist Stanley Milgram beginning in the early 1960s tested whether average citizens would inflict harm on another person under instruction from an authority figure. Milgram and his staff asked participants to deliver a series of progressively intense electric shocks each time a man answered a word problem incorrectly. Before this experiment, leading psychiatrists predicted that fewer than 1 percent of participants would be willing to administer shocks at dangerous levels. As it turned out, half of the participants were ready to comply in this. Yet, as Darius Rejali notes, half did not. Like the man we'll hear resisting instructions in the following audio. Please note that the electric shock you are about to hear is fake and the subjects of punishment in the Milgram experiment were in fact actors, though participants believed they were administering real pain."
Man: The experiment requires that you go on. Teacher, please continue.
[Buzzer]
Man: Incorrect. A hundred-and-fifty volts.
[Shock]
[Man groans]
Man Two: Sad face.
Subject: That's all. Get me out of here. I told you I had heart trouble. My heart's starting to bother me now. Get me out of here, please.
Man: Continue. Go on.
Subject: You're starting to bother me. I refuse to go on. Let me out.
Man Two: I think we ought to find out what's wrong in there first.
Man: The experiment requires that you continue, teacher.
Man Two: Well, the experiment might require that we continue but I still think we should find out what the condition of the gentleman is.
Man: As I said before, although the shocks may be painful, they're not dangerous.
Man Two: Look, I don't know anything about electricity. I don't profess any knowledge, nor will I go any further until I found out if the guy's OK.
Man: It's absolutely essential that you continue.
Man Two: Well, essential or not, this program isn't quite that important to me that I should go along doing something that I know nothing about, particularly if it's going to injure someone. I don't know what this is all about.
Man: Well, whether the learner likes it or not, we must go on until he's learned all the word pairs correctly.
Man Two: Well, you can sure have your $4.50 back. I didn't want it anyhow. I intended to give it some charitable organization. But I wouldn't go on with it.
Man: The $4.50 is not the issue here. That check is yours …
Man Two: Yeah, I realize that.
Man: … simply for coming to the lab. It is essential that you continue the experiment.
Man Two: No, it isn't essential. Not one bit.
Man: You've got no other choice, teacher.
Man Two: Oh, I have a lot of choices. My number one choice is that I wouldn't go on if I thought he was being harmed.
I am a bit flabbergasted at learning that half of Milgram’s subjects refused to follow orders. Hallelujah, indeed! I read Milgram’s book in an undergrad in a course on crime and punishment focusing on genocide. Most course readings covered the holocaust: we read Hitler’s Willing Executioner by Goldhagen and Milgram. The lesson that I took away from the course was that all of us have a dark side and given right combination of circumstances we—much as Milgram’s subjects—are not much different from Germans who stood by and let their fellow human beings perish. As the course proceeded I stumbled upon Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn’s critique of Goldhagen in the New Left Review. As I furthered my studies I came to see the whole complex of holocaust industry and began to question the knowledge complex around Israel-Palestine. I know now that half of the subjects walked away; it gives me great hope and it completely dismisses the version of holocaust sociology that Goldhagen and other holocaust exceptionalists want us to learn: the inherent “evil” nature of Germans. Now that I know that the modern Jewish history is intimately tied with questions of modernity, capitalism (market minority) and power, I take a more distant view of what had come to pass in the last century. I see Jews as both actors and victims, not solely as transhistorical victims that some want to portray them as. However, I am afraid that there are still large numbers who learn holocaust exceptionalism in classrooms and transfer their angst against Germans to the Palestinians.
“given right combination of circumstances we—”
$4.50?
Mooser, I did not know (was this even in the book?) that the subjects were offered $4.50. My impression was that they were selected via a newspaper ad that portrayed the experiment as a contribution to the advancement of science. By “right combination of circumstances” I was referring to the use of authority figure (white coat, lab setting, etc.) in the experiment. I guess now I know it was all about $4.50, right?
“I did not know (was this even in the book?) that the subjects were offered $4.50. “
The excerpt posted mentions it, but of course, I don’t know if it’s in the book.
I’m not going to torture people just because I’m told to, but for $4.50 …
$4.50 was worth a lot more in 1960.
I know. I remember 1960.
For $9 you could get someone whacked, and still get change.
“transfer their angst against Germans to the Palestinians.”
That may be, but don’t our Jonah’s, Hophmi’s and Wonderings claim the “Palestinians” (Arabs) are guilty enough of their own antisemetic sins? Who needs Germans, when all those Arabs “ethincally cleasnsed” all those Jews from their countries?
Yes, but European history and holocaust remains a framework that most undergrads are exposed to as compared to the specific history of Jews and Arabs that some people go out of their way to misinterpret (including the one’s you named above).
Goldhagen’s thesis is ridculous; it’s been properly debunked. So why is it being taught?
Why is Dershowitz teaching at Harvard and called in as THE expert on any discussion of the I/P conflict?
I can’t imagine Goldhagen is widely taught as the gospel on the Holocaust anymore, if it ever was.
This was back in mid-90s. I see Goldhagen left his professorship and has now become an expert in “political Islam,” much like Paul Berman. What is with these (mostly Jewish) intellectuals who overnight become experts in Islam?
Goldhagen has really been debunked by the new book Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War, by Thomas Weber. Almost all the men even of Hitler’s regiment in World War One were not anti-Semitic.
Seems that in real life, when people refuse to stand up to sociopathic orders, they end up turning their burning shame inward upon themselves:
link to nytimes.com
So much for the crews. What about the commander-in-chief who authorizes them to slaughter unknown strangers by remote control — Peace Laureate O’Bomber?
Can you imagine the president saying,
The Milgram Experiment is used to tell us that all those people obeyed the order to administer electric shocks, and you should, too.
Notice even here the “teacher” has to portray his hesitancy interms of a weakness, heart disease.
No, its the “Subject” who is complaining about a heart problem. The “Subject” was the one getting the phony shocks and the real subject of the experiment was “Man Two” in the transcript.
With no relation to Edmund Burke, here’s Elvis on the subject:
link to youtube.com
The videos of Milgram’s experiments are still both moving and troubling. I saw a screening a long time ago. Even for those who refused, it clearly took a lot of moral courage to refuse, and they often went on for longer than they really wanted to or should have. The screams everytime they hit the button were awful.
Worse, of those who kept going, one of the men slumped lower and lower and looked more and more, I can only say, crushed, beaten. This was no sadist or apparatchik. Like most of us, he believed what he was told, believed it was important, and I think just couldn’t believe that the man in the white coat would make him do something wrong, and actually suffered horribly to carry out the task.
In retrospect, these experiments were unequivocally abuse — by Milgram. To me what they show is not that we are capable of great evil. We know that there are evil people. Stalin, Ben Gurion and the whole list of eager killers great and small. But that yes, we are social, that we work together, and will often do hard things if we are convinced by people who ‘should’ know that it was ‘right’.
The big moderator is for the acts of evil to be be exposed. This is why it was so wrong for Mr Obama not to prosecute those who allowed us to start torturing. Because of this, I see that the junior mr bush is actually boasting that he approved waterboarding, instead of hiding in shame, and . This was not what the west stands for. If it now is, then we are now no better than the worst.
it is not enough just to look forward. there will be new mr bushes, and they will take up the bloody instruments again, and they will find people willing to do it, without being shouted at or bullied or coerced. Worse, his victims are still suffering —- because they deserved it, sure. I am sure you have all seen this great piece by Tony Keller. I read it and wept. link to nationalpost.com
another brilliant point made by rejali is the ‘blowback’ suffered by the communities welcoming home the torturers in the military, with waterboarding a technique brought back to the states after being practiced in the phillipines, and the electroshock techniques learned in vietnam. as rejali asked, where do all there torturers go once the war is over? why back to serve in the domestic police forces, of course.
absolutely right. and maybe they don’t immediately start cutting out pieces of suspects bodies, but they shift the line more and more, exactly as happened in istratine, that the suspects are no longer seen as quite human.
There was a case in Canada, if I recall correctly, where the military deployed a serial killer, not knowing he was a serial killer, of course.
When he returned, it was found that he had killed several women in Canada in years prior.
I don’t recall the details, but it’s a sickening case of yet another criminal serving as an ‘ambassador’ in a foreign country. I bet he enjoyed killing ‘the enemy’, especially women.
A veteran was noted last week for waterboarding his girlfriend while questioning her fidelity, and we have already had one case of a father waterboarding a child.
The Canadian ex-Colonel’s Wikipedia page:
link to en.wikipedia.org
Frankly, I don’t see any essential incompatibility between ‘serial killer’ and ‘soldier’. And sex, rape and war have been a match made in hell since the Rape of the Sabine women (and no doubt longer than that)
>> Man Two: Well, essential or not, this program isn’t quite that important to me that I should go along doing something that I know nothing about, particularly if it’s going to injure someone.
This man will never make a good religious believer or fanatic. Somewhere in hevven, gawd weeps.
;-)