Prometheus 6

It’s highly significant that the destructive force in question is (fake) electricity. Electricity is epistemologically and morally tricky — shocks can be painful, as a brush with a cow fence or a Taser hit is — but they are used and morally justified in many sectors as a form of discipline. Electric shocks for a 1963 working-class man — who rewired his own lamp, if not his own house — were not uncommon. (My grandfather climbed electrical poles for a living, sometimes in storms, and he had plenty of midcentury big-shock stories.)

So how is this New Haven guy the next Eichmann again?

The Milgram subjects are absolutely right to defer to authority on the question of whether the shocks are dangerous. They very well might not be. And in fact the authority figure says they’re not! Intuition may be a good guide to some kinds of suffering, but it’s not a good guide to electricity; experts are. The subject believes he’s causing the man pain, but not hurting him.

Milgram, the Torturers of New Haven and the Truth of that Obedience Experiment
By Virginia Heffernan

I keep thinking that online video will be a boon to social sciences like linguistics and sociology. People will get to see all those wacko subway studies or gender tests for themselves.

Or maybe, contrariwise, it will let us all analyze those non-double-blind social experiments and debunk the soft sciences once and for all.

After all, we can now see and circulate field data, the experiments and observations that lead authorities to assert incontrovertible maxims of human behavior. Take this maxim: People Will Always Torture Each Other When Instructed To. That’s the lesson of the Milgram Obedience Experiment.

That has been an article of faith with me until now. But I just watched parts of the Milgram Obedience Experiment on YouTube — and, well, it doesn’t prove what people say it proves. (And what a 2006 documentary said it proved, namely — as a talking head put it — was that “you could staff a death camp with the middle class in New Haven.”)

First off, I’m surprised at how old, male and “Honeymooners”-ish the Milgram participants are. (The ad, which offered to pay participants $4 an hour, said, “We will pay 500 New Haven men to help us complete a scientific study of memory.”)

The men — including the experimenters, the subjects and the paid assistants who pose as subjects — all look to be white and between 40 and 60. The year is 1963. I reflexively pictured them to be younger, mixed gender and better heeled, because I was thinking of people who volunteer for academic experiments now, and the ones I’ve known have been students. But to call these guys “the middle class of New Haven” seems myopic.

Second, I imagined the subjects — the ones ordered to administer electric shocks to actors they believe are average Joes like themselves — as sadistically gleeful or at least expressionless and coldblooded.