Elephants on Acid

by Boese, Alex

  The phenomenon the experiment demonstrated is called “diffusion of responsibility.” When people in groups witness an emergency, they tend to look around and think, “Someone else will help.” No one feels directly responsible. And, consequently, no one does anything.

  When Darley and Latané published their results in 1968, the scientific community hailed the experiment as a classic study. In the decades since then, other researchers have 71extended their work in many ways, staging fake emergencies, including robberies, kidnappings, women being attacked, subway passengers collapsing and drooling blood from their mouths, and men gushing blood from arterial wounds. Any shocking emergency you can think of has probably been simulated somewhere by a social psychologist for the benefit of a horrified crowd.

  These studies have taught us a great deal about group psychology and the phenomenon of diffusion of responsibility. But they have had an unintended consequence, because in addition to unresponsive bystanders we now also have to worry about skeptical ones. This was revealed during a 1986 experiment conducted by Robert MacCoun and Norbert Kerr. The two researchers were staging a mock trial. Suddenly a psychology student playing the part of a jury member had a grand mal epileptic seizure—for real. But many of the people in the room, familiar with Latané and Darley’s study, thought it was just part of the experiment. Even when the paramedics arrived, many were still convinced the student was acting. Luckily the seizure victim did get help and everything turned out fine. But what this incident demonstrates is that if you ever do need help in a crowded place—perhaps you trip and break your leg on a busy street—there’s a real danger you may bleed to death before anyone realizes you’re not just playing a part in a weird psychology experiment.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The End

  We arrive at the end. Not the end of the book—not yet, at least. Rather, the end as the theme of this chapter.

  Traditionally, there has been some tension between religion and science regarding matters of jurisdiction when the end arrives, whether we’re talking about the end of life or the end of the world. In the early days of experimentation, this dispute often came to a head in cemeteries. A priest would put bodies into the ground, and the grave robbers, paid by men of science, would haul them back out and cart them off to the medical labs. During the nineteenth century this practice became such a problem that many families held vigils at graves to prevent the bodies of their loved ones from being exhumed.

  Nowadays it is not just the anatomy of the dead that scientists are curious about. Psychologists study how death motivates our actions in life, and pharmacologists explore how drugs can alter the process of dying. All of these studies are grouped together into the broad interdisciplinary field called thanatology—from the Greek word Thanatos, meaning death.

  In a way, these studies represent the exact opposite of the Frankenstein experiments with which this book began. Those studies, despite the many corpses they featured, sought to understand the force of life. Here it is death—and the shadow it casts across our lives—that comes under the microscope.

  Fear Factor

  A prop plane cruises through a clear blue sky. Onboard, passengers lean back in their seats. A few pull out books. Others stare out their windows, anticipating an uneventful flight. But suddenly the plane shudders violently and banks sharply to the left. One of the propellers stalls. The plane begins to spiral slowly downward as the pilot struggles to control it. The passengers hear him in the cockpit, shouting into the radio to the flight controllers on the ground, “We need to make an emergency landing! Repeat. An emergency landing!” People clutch the armrests of their seats so tightly their knuckles turn white. At the back of the plane, a woman starts screaming, “We’re going to die! We’re all going to die!”

  How would you react in such an emergency? Would you remain calm, rationally assessing your best options for survival, or would you be the person screaming hysterically? For the U.S. Army, this question was of more than academic interest. The army needed to make sure soldiers kept their wits about them when bullets started to fly. So, in the early 1960s, it commissioned a team of psychologists—Mitchell Berkun, Hilton Bialek, Richard Kern, and Kan Yagi—to study the phenomenon of “behavioral degradation under psychological stress.” The army wanted to know how badly the performance of the average soldier suffered when he thought he was about to die, and whether there were techniques soldiers could learn to help them function more effectively in fear-arousing circumstances.

  There’s really only one way to find out how people will behave in a life-and-death situation. You have to scare them into believing their lives are in danger—or, as the researchers put it in the dry language of science, you have to effect “the experimental arousal of fear of death.” Soldiers going through basic training at the Hunter Liggett Military Reservation in central California became the subjects. Naturally, none of the soldiers were briefed that the terrifying events they would soon experience were part of an experiment. That would have ruined the effect.

  The first fear-arousing situation the researchers dreamed up was a flying laboratory of terror. Groups of soldiers were taken aloft in a small propeller plane. When it reached cruising altitude, the plane suddenly lurched and the propeller stalled. Over their headsets the soldiers heard the pilot talking to the tower: “Something’s wrong. We have to make an emergency landing.” The plane circled to return to the airport, and the soldiers could see ambulances and fire trucks waiting down below. At this sight, a knot of fear must have formed in the men’s throats, but then the situation grew even worse. The pilot announced that the landing gear wouldn’t come down. He was going to have to attempt to ditch the plane in the ocean.

  Having established the fear-arousing situation, the researchers next introduced a task to measure the soldiers’ ability to perform under pressure. Somewhat incongruously, the task was to fill out insurance forms. A steward distributed the paperwork, explaining it was a bureaucratic necessity that everyone fill it out—if they were all going to die, the army wanted to make sure it was covered for the loss. The forms were to be placed in a canister and jettisoned before the crash landing. Obediently, the soldiers leaned forward in their seats, pencils in hand, and set to work deciphering the legalese. “These forms are pretty hard to understand,” they probably thought to themselves. Perhaps they attributed the difficulty they were experiencing to the distraction of imminent death, but it was more than that. The forms had been purposefully written in a confusing manner. They were, as the researchers put it, “an example of deliberately bad human engineering.”

  As soon as the men completed the forms, the pilot turned the plane around—“This is your captain speaking. Just kidding about that emergency.” Then he landed it safely.

  The soldiers in the plane made a significantly greater amount of mistakes on the insurance forms than did a control group in a classroom on the ground who filled out the same forms, indicating the men felt stressed by the experience. But, disappointingly for the researchers who were hoping to produce a real scare, most of the men reported feeling merely “unsteady” during the incident. Perhaps filling out the forms actually calmed the men down by distracting them. Or maybe the plane needed to go into a nosedive to trigger a more dramatic reaction. A quarter of the subjects even figured out that the emergency was fake. Those with some flying experience realized something was fishy, but one soldier found a more direct clue: a note a subject in an earlier group had written on the back of an airsickness bag.

  Unfazed, the researchers went back to the drawing board and devised three new situations. These all involved mishaps during a supposed “atomic-age warfare” exercise. Soldiers were driven out to remote rural outposts and dropped off alone. Their job, their commander told them, was to man a radio and notify headquarters should any planes fly overhead. Wearily, the soldiers prepared themselves for a long and boring day. But it didn’t stay boring for long.

  As the men sat sweating in the one-hundred-degree heat, an ann
ouncement suddenly crackled over the radio. Each man heard one of three warnings, depending on which experimental group he had been assigned to. He heard either that an accident with radioactive material had resulted in dangerous fallout over his area, that a forest fire was surrounding his position, or that misdirected artillery fire was incoming. “This is not a drill,” headquarters emphasized. “Repeat. This is not a drill. Maneuvers have been cancelled. Radio in your position for immediate helicopter evacuation.”

  When the men tried to comply with the order they discovered, to their dismay, that their transmitters had chosen that moment to stop working. As if aware of the problem, headquarters gave another order: “Soldier, fix your transmitter and radio in your position.” Fixing the radio was the task the experimenters had chosen to measure performance under pressure. On the outside of each radio was printed a wiring diagram that the men were supposed to consult to fix the instrument. However, the schematic was really “a visual pursuit subtest of the MacQuarrie Test of Mechanical Ability, revised to look like a wiring diagram.”

  Of the three situations, the radiation warning provoked, by far, the least reaction from the soldiers. Perhaps because the threat was invisible, the men acted as if there was little to fear. The researchers noted that “They tended to react as though the injury, if any, had already been suffered and that the only question remaining was that of establishing contact with the Command Post.” In addition, many of the men appeared remarkably uninformed about the dangers of radiation. Evidently these young men had not paid enough attention in science class.

  The forest fire elicited more interest. Upon hearing the warning, most of the men stood up to scan the horizon, at which point they saw billowing clouds of smoke about three hundred yards away—produced, unbeknownst to them, by smoke bombs. Two men panicked at the sight of the smoke and took off, but the majority remained calm and set to work on the radio. They later explained that they figured they could run away if the fire got any closer.

  The clear first place in the fear-arousal contest went to the misdirected artillery fire. Seconds after the men heard the first warning on the radio—“Incoming artillery shells! Shells are landing outside the designated target area!”—a shell burst nearby. The soldiers threw themselves down on the ground and pulled on their flak jackets. They screamed into the transmitter, only to realize it wasn’t working. A few continued to scream into it even after they knew it didn’t work. Almost half of them took off running when a few more shells exploded, flagrantly disregarding the voice on the radio ordering them to remain at their post and repair the transmitter.

  The lesson learned from these experiments was clear: If your goal is to arouse maximum fear, then subtlety is not a virtue. Loud, exploding bombs work best.

  However, the larger goal of the experiments was to observe what psychological features characterized those who performed well under stress, in the hope that others could be trained to behave the same way. Here the results were far more tentative. The authors noted that, generally speaking, the more field experience and education a soldier had, the cooler he stayed under stress. They also noted that every top performer displayed the ability to “lose himself” in whatever 72task he was doing. These men were able to tune out the threat by “reducing imagery content centering around fear of harm or of physical injury.”

  Of course, those not in the military have slightly different priorities. Their goal is not to remain in position and continue to obey orders, but simply to survive. For which purpose, running at the first sign of radiation, forest fire, or incoming artillery shells, or screaming as a plane plunges to earth, still seem like compelling options.

  Heartbeat At Death

  October 31, 1938. 6:30 a.m. As John Deering walks to the room where he will be executed by firing squad, his face betrays no emotion. The sheriff reads the death warrant and Deering listens, casually sucking on a cigarette. The cigarette finished, he sits down in a chair positioned in front of the rock wall of the prison. A prison guard places a black hood over Deering’s head and pins a target to his chest. Then prison physician Dr. Stephen H. Besley steps forward and attaches electronic sensors to Deering’s wrists. Across the room, an electrocardiograph machine silently begins to record the hammering of the prisoner’s heart.

  Deering was not a typical death-row prisoner. When police picked him up on August 1, 1938, and charged him with the murder of Utah businessman Oliver Meredith, Deering readily admitted to the crime. He explained that he shot Meredith in cold blood while stealing the man’s car. But Deering also expressed regret for what he had done and for the life he had led. He pleaded that the state kill him quickly “without all the red tape and rigamarole of courts.” He got his wish. Only three months elapsed between his arrest and execution.

  During the final weeks of his life, Deering attempted to be a model citizen. He spoke out on the need to provide children with more opportunities. “Build more athletic fields and gymnasiums,” he wrote. “Give children more play facilities to keep their minds on wholesome activities. Give them the chance to develop that I never had.”

  In a gesture of atonement, Deering also willed his body to the University of Utah medical school and arranged for his eyes, following his death, to be frozen and flown to San Francisco, where a surgeon would attempt to use them to restore sight to a blind person. Finally, at the request of Dr. Besley, he agreed to participate in an experiment—the first of its kind—to have his heartbeat recorded during his execution. Dr. Besley believed the experiment would, besides satisfying morbid curiosity, reveal valuable information about the effect of fear on the heart, and how soon death occurs after the heart is wounded.

  On the day of his execution, Deering walked stoically to the firing squad as his fellow prisoners banged on the bars of their cells and howled maniacally. He sat down in the chair and allowed Dr. Besley to attach the electrodes to his wrists.

  The electrocardiogram immediately disclosed that, though Deering’s face showed no emotion, his heart was beating like a jackhammer at 120 beats per minute, far higher than the resting average of 72 beats per minute.

  The sheriff asked Deering whether he had any final words. His heartbeat momentarily fluttered higher. “I’d like to thank 73the warden for being so kind to me. Good-bye and good luck!” he replied. Then he murmured, “Okay, let it go.”

  The sheriff gave the order to fire. Deering’s heartbeat raced up to 180 beats per minute. Then four bullets ripped into his chest, knocking him back into the chair. One bullet bore directly into the right side of his heart. For four seconds his heart spasmed. A moment later it spasmed again. Then the rhythm gradually declined until, 15.6 seconds after the first shot, Deering’s heart stopped.

  Although his heart no longer beat, his breathing continued for almost a minute as he twisted and squirmed in the chair. Finally, 134.4 seconds after his heart had stopped, he was pronounced dead. The time was 6:48 a.m.

  The next day the grim experiment made headlines around the nation, sharing space with the mass panic caused by Orson Welles’s Halloween-eve War of the Worlds radio broadcast. Dr. Besley offered the press a eulogy of sorts for Deering: “He put on a good front. The electrocardiograph film shows his bold demeanor hid the actual emotions pounding within him. He was scared to death.”

  Thanks to Dr. Besley’s pioneering experiment, scientists can now say with certainty that the prospect of facing a firing squad causes a rapid heartbeat.

  Dying on Acid

  By the early 1960s the effects of LSD had been tested extensively. Cats, dogs, fish, mice, rats, baboons, chimpanzees, spiders, pigeons, and even, as we have seen, elephants, had all received the drug. It had been given to college students, prisoners, doctors, artists, government agents, soldiers, and tens of thousands of psychiatric patients. There weren’t many groups left to try it on. Then Dr. Eric Kast of Chicago’s Mount Sinai Hospital thought of what was, in hindsight, an obvious group. Not only might these people benefit from the drug, but they also didn’t have
much left to lose. They were the terminally ill.

  Kast had observed that his terminally ill patients often became preoccupied with their imminent deaths. At a time when, ideally, they should have been striving to experience the remainder of their lives to the fullest and savoring time with friends and family, they instead grew depressed and withdrawn. “Interference,” Kast wrote cautiously, “seems justified.”

  So Kast designed an experiment to study the effects of LSD on dying patients. He had no illusion that LSD could offer a cure, and he made sure all the test subjects knew that. Instead, he was interested in how LSD would alter the experience of facing death. LSD was reported to produce in recipients a sense of harmony with the surrounding universe. Kast described this as a “happy, oceanic feeling.” Could LSD make the terminally ill more accepting of their fate and less fearful of approaching death?

  Eighty patients took part in Kast’s study. All had life expectancies measured in mere weeks or months. Kast gave them each one hundred micrograms of LSD delivered hypodermically. He then observed the drug’s effects. If the subjects showed any sign of fear or disturbance—symptoms of a bad trip—he immediately administered an antipsychotic, chlorpromazine, that made them fall asleep. Most of the patients received the antipsychotic within eight to ten hours after being given the LSD. For the next three weeks, Kast interviewed and evaluated each patient daily. He paid careful attention to their moods, their attitudes toward life and death, and complaints of pain.

  The results were encouraging. Of the eighty patients studied, seventy-two said they gained insight through the experience, fifty-eight found it pleasant, and sixty-eight (a full 85 percent) wanted to do it again.