The late, great social psychologist Stanley Milgram is well-known for several famous psychological experiments, about which I have written here from time to time. In one, he investigated how obedient subjects would be when, misled to believe they were experimenters, they were asked to inflict escalating pain on a supposed subject who was really a confederate of the researchers. (This has been described as the “How good a Nazi are you?” experiment and is one of the ‘great psychological experiments of the twentieth century’ described by psychiatrist and NY Times writer Lauren Slater in her controversial book of last year, Opening Skinner’s Box.) Another of Milgram’s studies established the renowned ‘six degrees of separation’ principle of social connectivity.

Thanks to several FmH readers who pointed me to this article from The New York Times. Milgram also sent his graduate students out onto the New York City subways with a simple directive — that they ask seated passengers for their seats. It was readily established that the proportion of recipients of such a request who would agree to give up their seat to an able-bodied stranger was surprisingly high, but the focus of the study was turned on its head in a fascinating way when it became apparent how difficult and anxiety-provoking the task was for the student investigators, some of whom became physically ill from the stress of doing so. Surprised at this, Milgram did it himself and confirmed how awful it made him feel. He speculated that one cause of the malaise may have been an unconscious need to be infirm to justify the request for a seat. I suspect that it is nearer to the truth to say that some of his investigators were experiencing viscerally the stress of violating what was apparently such a powerful unspoken social norm. Two NY Times reporters recently replicated this scenario and found that there has been no change in New Yorkers’ willingness to yield their seats upon request.

The discomfort it causes to make such a request dramatizes how differently wired the self-centered sociopaths among us must be, experiencing no compunctions as they routinely violate others’ rights in far more profound ways than depriving them of a subway seat.