A recent British reprise of Stanley Milgram’s famous “six degrees of separation” experiment of the ’60’s suggests that contemporary Great Britain is a ‘smaller world’ than the U.S. at the time of the original experiment. Telegraph/UK. I’ve been a fan of the ‘small world’ phenomenon since I learned of Milgram’s work at the time. It is sociologically fascinating but not immediately obvious to me why small world theory has recently become so popular and, as this book review for example suggests, usurped other exlanatory schemes in network science. I suspect it has something to do with our efforts to assimilate the novel experience of connectedness in the internet era as well as the homogenization of the world we have all experienced with globalization… and, of course, because of Kevin Bacon’s advent on the scene in the intervening decades.
But Milgram, a psychologist at Yale, was responsible for another of the most disturbing social psychology experiments of that era as well, the so-called Obedience to Authority study. This has equal applicability to our times, although is far more disturbing to contemplate, than the ‘six degrees’ material. With a clever experimental design, he found that most people had relatively few compunctions about inflicting what they thought was significant pain on strangers when influenced to do so:
Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted a study focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. He examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on “obedience” – – that they were just following orders of their superiors.
In the experiment, so-called “teachers” (who were actually the unknowing subjects of the experiment) were recruited by Milgram. They were asked administer an electric shock of increasing intensity to a “learner” for each mistake he made during the experiment. The fictitious story given to these “teachers” was that the experiment was exploring effects of punishment (for incorrect responses) on learning behavior. The “teacher” was not aware that the “learner” in the study was actually an actor – – merely indicating discomfort as the “teacher” increased the electric shocks.
When the “teacher” asked whether increased shocks should be given he/she was verbally encouraged to continue. Sixty percent of the “teachers” obeyed orders to punish the learner to the very end of the 450-volt scale! No subject stopped before reaching 300 volts!
At times, the worried “teachers” questioned the experimenter, asking who was responsible for any harmful effects resulting from shocking the learner at such a high level. Upon receiving the answer that the experimenter assumed full responsibility, teachers seemed to accept the response and continue shocking, even though some were obviously extremely uncomfortable in doing so. The study raised many questions about how the subjects could bring themselves to administer such heavy shocks. More important to our interests are the ethical issues raised by such an experiment itself. What right does a researcher have to expose subjects to such stress? What activities should be and not be allowed in marketing research? Does the search for knowledge always justify such “costs” to subjects? Who should decide such issues?
I remember reading Milgram’s reflection on the study, The Perils of Obedience, in Harper’s magazine in 1974. They include some fascinating portrayals of the dilemmas of conflicted clinical subjects and Milgram’s dissection of the psychological process of such obedience. He points to forces of social alienation which allow one to evade taking responsibility for one’s (even morally heinous) actions.
Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps, but he had only to sit at a desk and shuffle papers. At the same time the man in the camp who actually dropped Cyclon-b into the gas chambers was able to justify his behavior on the ground that he was only following orders from above. Thus there is a fragmentation of the total human act; no one is confronted with the consequences of his decision to carry out the evil act. The person who assumes responsibility has evaporated. Perhaps this is the most common characteristic of socially organized evil in modern society.
Chillingly, these trends have progressed, if we can use that word, in the intervening decades to an extent that makes authoritarian influence and obedience to it even more robust. The techniques of social control are ever more powerful but, fist-in-glove, ever more subtle and opaque to social discourse. The relatively limited scale of conscientious objection to US military adventurism, which I have discussed here during the Iraqi invasion, and recent revelations of US military research into neurobiological interventions to forestall the formation of traumatic memories during combat to enhance our troops’ fighting efficiency, are just two random threads in a net that should be viewed in this light. And I cannot help thinking the phenomenon is linked to the question I keep raising here about why the American public has acquiesced to the justifications for the invasion with nary an outcry about having been lied to egregiously. The maxim is trite, but more important than ever: ‘Speak truth to power.’
