He left the lab to “check” on the learner, returning to reassure the teacher that the learner was OK. Instead of sticking to the standard four verbal commands described in accounts of the experimental protocol, Williams often abandoned the script and commanded some subjects 25 times and more to keep going. Teachers were blocked in their efforts to swap places with the learner or to check on him themselves. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2013/10/02/the-shocking-truth-of-the-notorious-milgram-obedience-experiments/ I've always been troubled by Milgram. I've never really dug into it, though. Dunno. An n of 40 involving two actors probably wouldn't be considered serious research today. There's something there, but I'm not sure how much... it's like the Kitty Genovese thing: something horrible about human nature is in there somewhere, but it's never quite what they say it is.In listening to the original recordings of the experiments, it’s clear that Milgram’s experimenter John Williams deviated significantly from the script in his interactions with subjects. Williams – with Milgram’s approval – improvised in all manner of ways to exert pressure on subjects to keep administering shocks.
The slavish obedience to authority we have come to associate with Milgram’s experiments comes to sound much more like bullying and coercion when you listen to these recordings.
Thank you for this important corrective. In my haste to make my point, I did not stop to ask if Professor Milgram may have had a reason — perhaps immortality in Psych 101 textbooks — for telling a vivid story. I am sympathetic to your oft-expressed belief in the fundamental goodness of human nature. My arguments on this site in favor of freedom and market solutions depend on people generally wanting to work together and get along. The idea that some Teachers wanted to trade places with the Learner is especially comforting and gives me hope that I might have performed better than Fred Prozi is said to. Nevertheless, as you have acknowledged, people are not always good. Atrocities happen. It seems to me that whenever someone does shock their neighbor, choke out a suspect, waterboard a stranger, disappear students, or annihilate a genotype, and these things happen in an organized, methodical way, there is a common element in the scene: a bully in a uniform. This is a generality, of course, and there are exceptions. But I think we should recognize that the greatest harms have occurred under the auspices of people exercising legal authority.
I voted for your mention of Milgram. We ignore his findings at our peril. There's no doubt that humans are much worse to each other when they can displace their responsibility for atrocities. I wonder what it's cost us to have this truly important aspect of human behavior canonized by someone whose methods were as sensationalist as Milgram's. I'm not entirely sure we've learned.