Theirs not to reason why

Stanley Milgram was an academic psychologist at Yale who achieved a brief moment of fame in the early 1960s as the creator of ‘obedience experiments’. The idea was to discover how far people will act against their own most basic instincts if they are following someone else’s orders. A large sample of ordinary and superficially decent ‘subjects’ were persuaded to participate in what they believed to be experiments designed to establish the educational value of punishment. They were sat in a glass cubicle next to a room in which an actor pretended to go through a sequence of simple word tests. In front of the ‘subject’ was an impressive looking piece of electric gadgetry, which apparently enabled him to administer progressively more powerful electric shocks every time the ‘learner’ made a mistake. The ‘learner’ pretended to react with mounting discomfort and pain, and finally, at several hundred volts, began to plead with the ‘subject’ to stop. About two thirds of ‘subjects’ went on administering the shocks on the experimenter’s instructions until the limit of credibility was reached, at 450 volts.

The experiments aroused much interest among academic students of such matters. They also struck the imagination of the public, many of whom felt that Milgram had discovered the roots of the concentration- camp guard mentality. But there was always, among both groups, a faint sense of disgust at the experimental method used and at the uncomfortable conclusions. Bruno Bettelheim thought Milgram’s work ‘so vile that nothing these experiments show has any value’. Others praised his contribution to knowledge and denounced his critics as people afraid of the truth. But in the committee rooms in which American academic careers are made, they quietly cold-shouldered him. Milgram went on to run a variety of eccentric experiments: on people who gave up their seats on the subway, or failed to steal from open boxes of dollar bills left in empty buildings, or binned letters found on the pavement addressed to the Elect Goldwater Committee.