Yet another criticism occurred in Dannie Abse’s play, The Dogs of Pavlov, which appeared in London in 1971 and which uses the obedience experiment as its central dramatic theme. At the play’s climax, Kurt, a major character in the play, repudiates the experimenter for treating him as a guinea pig. In his introduction to the play, Abse especially condemns the illusions employed in the experiment, terming the setup “bullshit,” “fraudulent,” “cheat.” At the same time, he apparently admires the dramatic quality of the experiment. And he allowed my rejoinder to appear in the foreword to his book. I wrote to him:
I do feel you are excessively harsh in your language when condemning my use of illusion in the experiment. As a dramatist, you surely understand that illusion may serve a revelatory function, and indeed, the very possibility of theater is founded on the benign use of contrivance.
One could, viewing a theatrical performance, claim that the playwright has cheated, tricked, and defrauded the audience, for he presents as old men individuals who are, when the greasepaint is removed, quite young; men presented as physicians who in reality are merely actors knowing nothing about medicine, etc., etc. But this assertion of “bullshit,” “cheat,” “fraud” would be silly, would it not, for it does not take into account how those exposed to the theater’s illusions feel about them. The fact is that the audience accepts the necessity of illusion for the sake of entertainment, intellectual enrichment, and all of the other benefits of the theatrical experience. And it is their acceptance of these procedures that gives you warrant for the contrivances you rely upon.
So I will not say that you cheated, tricked, and defrauded your audience. But, I would hold the same claim for the experiment. Misinformation is employed in the experiment; illusion is used when necessary in order to set the stage for the revelation of certain difficult-to-get-at truths; and these procedures are justified for one reason only; they are, in the end, accepted and endorsed by those who are exposed to them. . . .
. . . When the experiment was explained to subjects they responded to it positively, and most felt it was an hour well spent. If it had been otherwise, if subjects ended the hour with bitter recriminatory feelings, the experiment could not have proceeded.
This judgment is based, first, on the numerous conversations I have had with subjects immediately after their participation in the experiment. Such conversations can reveal a good deal, but what they showed most was how readily the experience is assimilated to the normal frame of things. Moreover, subjects were friendly rather than hostile, curious rather than denunciatory, and in no sense demeaned by the experience. This was my general impression, and it was later supported by formal procedures undertaken to assess the subjects’ reaction to the experiment.
The central moral justification for allowing a procedure of the sort used in my experiment is that it is judged acceptable by those who have taken part in it. Moreover, it was the salience of this fact throughout that constituted the chief moral warrant for the continuation of the experiments.
This fact is crucial to any appraisal of the experiment from an ethical standpoint.
Imagine an experiment in which a person’s little finger was routinely snipped off in the course of a laboratory hour. Not only is such an experiment reprehensible, but within hours the study would be brought to a halt as outraged participants pressed their complaints on the university administration, and legal measures were invoked to restrain the experimenter. When a person has been abused, he knows it, and will quite properly react against the source of such mistreatment.
Criticism of the experiment that does not take account of the tolerant reaction of the participants is hollow. This applies particularly to criticism centering on the use of technical illusions (or “deception,” as the critics prefer to say) that fails to relate this detail to the central fact that subjects find the device acceptable. Again, the participant, rather than the external critic, must be the ultimate source of judgment.
While some persons construe the experimenter to be acting in terms of deceit, manipulation, and chicanery, it is, as you should certainly appreciate, also possible to see him as a dramatist who creates scenes of revelatory power, and who brings participants into them. So perhaps we are not so far apart in the kind of work we do. I do grant there is an important difference in that those exposed to your theatrical illusions expect to confront them, while my subjects are not forewarned. However, whether it is unethical to pursue truths through the use of my form of dramaturgical device cannot be answered in the abstract. It depends entirely on the response of those who have been exposed to such procedures.
One further point: the obedient subject does not blame himself for shocking the victim, because the act does not originate in the self. It originates in authority, and the worst the obedient subject says of himself is that he must learn to resist authority more effectively in the future.
That the experiment has stimulated this thought in some subjects is, to my mind, a satisfying . . . consequence of the inquiry. An illustrative case is provided by the experience of a young man who took part in a Princeton replication of the obedience experiment, conducted in 1964. He was fully obedient. On October 27, 1970, he wrote to me:
“Participation in the ‘shock experiment’ . . . has had a great impact on my life. . . .
“When I was a subject in 1964, though I believed that I was hurting someone, I was totally unaware of why I was doing so. Few people ever realize when they are acting according to their own beliefs and when they are meekly submitting to authority. . . . To permit myself to be drafted with the understanding that I am submitting to authority’s demand to do something very wrong would make me frightened of myself. . . . I am fully prepared to go to jail if I am not granted Conscientious Objector status. Indeed, it is the only course I could take to be faithful to what I believe. My only hope is that members of my board act equally according to their conscience. . . .”
He inquired whether any other participants had reacted similarly, and whether, in my opinion, participation in the study could have this effect.
I replied:
“The experiment does, of course, deal with the dilemma individuals face when they are confronted with conflicting demands of authority and conscience, and I am glad that your participation in the study has brought you to a deeper personal consideration of these issues. Several participants have informed me that their own sensitivity to the problem of submission to authority was increased as a result of their experience in the study. If the experiment has heightened your awareness of the problem of indiscriminate submission to authority, it will have performed an important function. If you believe strongly that it is wrong to kill others in the service of your country, then you ought certainly to press vigorously for CO status, and I am deeply hopeful that your sincerity in this matter will be recognized.”
A few months later he wrote again. He indicated, first, that the draft board was not very impressed with the effect of his participation in the experiment, but he was granted CO status nonetheless. He writes:
“The experience of the interview doesn’t lessen my strong belief of the great impact of the experiment on my life. . . .
“. . . You have discovered one of the most important causes of all the trouble in this world. . . . I am grateful to have been able to provide you with a part of the information necessary for that discovery. I am delighted to have acted, by refusing to serve in the Armed Forces, in a manner which people must act if these problems are to be solved.
“With sincere thanks for your contribution to my life. . . .”
In a world in which action is often clouded with ambiguity, I nonetheless feel constrained to give greater heed to this man, who actually participated in the study, than to a distant critic. For disembodied moralizing is not the issue, but only the human response of those who have participated in the experiment. And that response not only endorses the procedures employed, but overwhelmingly calls for deeper inquiry to illuminate the issues of obedience a
nd disobedience.
Over the years, numerous statements in support of the experiment have appeared in print.
Dr. Milton Erikson, a well-known clinical psychologist, wrote:
That [Milgram’s] pioneer work in this field is attacked as being unethical, unjustifiable, uninformative, or any other derogative dismissal is to be expected, simply because people like to shut their eyes to undesirable behavior, preferring to investigate memory, forgetting of nonsense syllables. . . .
Milgram is making a momentous and meaningful contribution to our knowledge of human behavior. . . . When Milgram’s initial study appeared, he was already well aware that an area of scientific investigation was being opened up which would lead to reproaches and condemnation. . . . To engage in such studies as Milgram has requires strong men with strong scientific faith and a willingness to discover that to man himself, not to “the devil” belongs the responsibility for and the control of his inhumane actions.
(International Journal of Psychiatry,
October 1968, pp. 278–79.)
Dr. Amitai Etzioni, Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, wrote:
. . . Milgram’s experiment seems to me one of the best carried out in this generation. It shows that the often stated opposition between meaningful, interesting humanistic study and accurate, empirical quantitative research is a false one: The two perspectives can be combined to the benefit of both. . . .
(International Journal of Psychiatry,
October 1968, pp. 278–79.)
Professor Herbert Kelman had written a thoughtful article on ethical problems of experimental research entitled: “Human Use on Human Subjects: The Problem of Deception in Social Psychological Experiments.” And Dr. Thomas Crawford, a social psychologist at Berkeley, wrote:
Kelman takes the position that experimental manipulations are legitimate provided that they serve to increase the individual’s freedom of choice. . . . I submit that Milgram’s research . . . is precisely aimed at achieving the admirable goal which Kelman sets before us. We can hardly read the study without becoming sensitized to analogous conflicts in our own lives.
(“In Defense of Obedience Research: An Extension
of the Kelman Ethic.” In The Social Psychology
of Psychological Research, edited by Arthur G.
Miller. New York: The Free Press, 1972.)
Dr. Alan Elms of the University of California, Davis, wrote:
Milgram, in exploring the conditions which produce such destructive obedience, and the psychological processes which lead to such attempted abdications of responsibility, seems to me to have done some of the most morally significant research in modern psychology.
(From: Social Psychology and Social Relevance,
Little, Brown and Company, 1972.)
APPENDIX II
Patterns Among Individuals
To broaden our understanding of why some people obey and others defy the experimenter, a number of individual tests were given to the subjects. To see whether obedient and disobedient subjects differ in their concept of responsibility, subjects in the first four experimental conditions were exposed to a “responsibility clock.” This consisted of a disk which the subject could divide into three segments by means of movable rods rotating from the center. The subject, after performing in the experiment, was asked to “cut slices of pie” proportional to the responsibility of the three participants in the experiment (experimenter, subject, and victim). We asked, “How much is each of us responsible for the fact that this person was given electric shocks against his will?” The experimenter read off the results directly on the back of the disk, which is graduated in the manner of a 360-degree protractor.
On the whole, subjects did not have very much difficulty performing the task. And the results for 118 subjects for whom the test was given are shown in Table 9.
The major finding is that the defiant subjects see themselves as principally responsible for the suffering of the learner, assigning 48 percent of the total responsibility to themselves and 39 percent to the experimenter. The balance tips slightly for the obedient subjects, who do not see themselves as any more responsible than the experimenter, and indeed, are willing to accept slightly less of the responsibility. A larger difference occurs in assigning responsibility to the learner. The obedient subjects assign him about twice as large a share of the responsibility for his own suffering as do the defiant subjects. When questioned on this matter, they point to the fact that he volunteered for the experiment and did not learn very efficiently.
Table 9.Assignment of Responsibility by Defiant and Obedient Subjects
Thus, the defiant subjects, more often than obedient subjects, attribute primary responsibility to themselves. And they attribute less responsibility to the learner. Of course, these measures were obtained after the subject’s performance, and we do not know if they constitute enduring predispositions of the obedient and defiant subjects, or whether they were post facto adjustments of thought.
Dr. Alan Elms administered a number of psychological tests to about twenty obedient and twenty defiant subjects who had performed in the proximity series. His major finding is that there was a relationship between obedience in the experiment and score on the F scale. This is a scale developed by Adorno and his associates to measure fascistic tendencies (1950), and Elms found that those subjects who had obeyed showed a greater degree of authoritarianism (a higher F score) than those who refused to obey. Offhand, this sounds somewhat tautological but Elms explains:
Fig. 20. Responsibility clock
. . . The relationship between obedience and some elements of authoritarianism seems fairly strong; and it should be remembered that the measure of obedience is a measure of actual submission to authority, not just what a person says he’s likely to do. Too much of the research on authoritarianism . . . has been on the level of paper-and-pencil responses, which don’t necessarily get translated into behavior. But here we have people either obeying or refusing the demands of authority, in a realistic and highly disturbing situation. . . . So it does look as if those researchers in the late 40’s had something, something which can be translated from abstract tendencies into actual authoritarian behavior: submitting to the man in command, punishing the weaker subordinate. (page 133) (A. C. Elms, Social Psychology and Social Relevance, 1972)
The relationship between the measure on the F scale and performance in the experiment, although suggestive, is not very strong, owing in part, I think, to the imperfection of paper-and-pencil measuring devices. It is hard to relate performance to personality because we really do not know very much about how to measure personality.
Still another effort to find correlates of obedience was undertaken by Dr. Lawrence Kohlberg, a colleague of mine at Yale University. Dr. Kohlberg had developed a scale of moral development, which is based on the theory that individuals pass through a number of stages of moral judgment as they mature. Using a group of 34 Yale undergraduates who had served in pilot studies, he found that those who broke off were at a higher level of moral development than those who remained obedient. Again, the findings are suggestive, though not very strong (Kohlberg, 1965).
I had also collected background information on subjects immediately after participation in the experiment. The findings, although generally weak, pointed in the following directions. Republicans and Democrats were not significantly different in obedience levels; Catholics were more obedient than Jews or Protestants. The better educated were more defiant than the less well educated. Those in the moral professions of law, medicine, and teaching showed greater defiance than those in the more technical professions, such as engineering and physical science. The longer one’s military service, the more obedience—except that former officers were less obedient than those who served only as enlisted men, regardless of length of service. These were the findings when subjects in the first four experimental conditions (the proximity series) were studied. Many of these findings “washed out” when further experimental c
onditions were added in, for reasons that were somewhat mysterious to me. (It is true, of course, that the meaning of obedience and disobedience changes from one condition to the next.) My over-all reaction was to wonder at how few correlates there were of obedience and disobedience and how weakly they are related to the observed behavior. I am certain that there is a complex personality basis to obedience and disobedience. But I know we have not found it.
In any event it would be a mistake to believe that any single temperamental quality is associated with disobedience, or to make the simple-minded statement that kindly and good persons disobey while those who are cruel do not. There are simply too many points in the processes at hand at which various components of the personality can play complicated roles to allow any oversimplified generalizations. Moreover, the disposition a person brings to the experiment is probably less important a cause of his behavior than most readers assume. For the social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often, it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.
References
Abse, D. The Dogs of Pavlov. London: Valentine, Mitchell & Co., Ltd., in press.
Adorno, T.; Frenkel-Brunswik, Else; Levinson, D. J., and Sanford, R. N. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper & Row, 1950.
Arendt, H. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press, 1963.
Obedience to Authority Page 20