The Manipulated Mind

The Manipulated Mind - Translation by R.F.C. Hull

ISBN: 0-805-8041-4

Published by The Octogan Press

Pages 101-103

[Stanley] Milgram’s experiment involved 300,000 people in an attempt to find out whether punishment had advantageous effects on learning. Or that was what the subjects were told. In fact the real goal of the experiment was to find out about the behavious of the subjects themselves in a particularly stressful situation.

Forty people took part in each experiment and each time volunteers were divided so that there would be 40 percent working class, 40 percent white collar and 20 percent from professional classes, the age range from mid-twenties to mid-forties. The first series of experiments was carried out at Yale University where Milgram worked and the volunteers were solicited through local papers in New Haven, an incentive being that they would receive a fee for taking part.

Each volunteer was paired with another person, supposedly another volunteer but in reality a confederate of the experimenter. The real volunteer was to act as ‘teacher’ and the confederate as ‘learner.’ The teacher had to help the learner learn a long list of word pairs and then test his memory. If the learner got one wrong, he was to receive an electric shock which the teacher would deliver by pressing a switch on the shock generator in front of him (to which the learner was wired in another room). The intensity of the shocks ranged from fifteen to 450 volts and there were thirty switches in all. Every ensuing time the learner made a mistake, the shocks were to increase progressively in intensity. (The teachers were all given a sample 45 volt shock before beginning, so that their belief that the generator was actually switched on would be assured.) In fact, of course, the learner never received any shocks at all but he always responded in the following way: at 75 volts, he would grunt in discomfort; at 120 volts, he would complain; at 150, if anyone got that far, he would demand to be released from the experiment. At 285 he was to emit an agonized scream whereafter nothing would be heard from him again.

It was arranged among the experimenters that if a ‘teacher’ turned to an experimenter for guidance as to whether it was right to go on administering shocks or not, the experimenter could give four ‘prods,’ only progressing from one prod to the next if the first was unsuccessful. The prods were: 1. ‘Please go on.’ 2. ‘The experiment requires you to continue.’ 3. ‘It is absolutely essential that you continue.’ 4. ‘You have no other choice. You must go on.’ If the subject was still resisting and objecting after the fourt prod, the experiment was to be terminated.

If the teacher was still carrying on with the experiment after the point where the learner had lapsed into ominous silence, he was to be instructed, should he seek guidance, to wait five seconds for a response from the learner and, if none was forthcoming, to carry on giving shocks in the same way as if the learner had answered wrongly. The teachers were all told that the shocks would be painful to the learner but couldn’t inflict permanent damage.

Before the experiments started, psychiatrists were asked to predict how the teachers would react to the giving of painful electric shocks to a person to whom they could wish no harm, albeit in the ‘interests’ of science. The psychiatrists confidently predicted that none but the lunatic fringe would go beyond 150 volts, their assumption being that people for the most part are decent and don’t willingly inflict hurt where patently undeserved and that a person makes his own decisions about what he sees as right and wrong and acts on them, regardless of what he is told to do.

The predictions, of course, were disastrously inaccurate. They focused on the individual as an autonomous unit, rather than the individual as someone affected by the nature of the situation he finds himself in. Over all the experiments, it was average for 25 out of 40 people to carry on to the end, administering 450 shocks to their innocent partner.

During the experiments, the teachers who obeyed instructions and carried on with the shocks quite clearly suffered distress, according to Milgram. Tension, sweating and trembling were pronounced. Quite obviously they were in conflict, yet they didn’t do anything to bring themselves relief and so end the tension (i.e., halt the experiment)…

Page 104
Milgram found that politeness, a wish to keep their promise to help the experimenter and embarrassment at backing out all helped to prevent obedient subjects from taking any action to stop the experiment. He also made the following points to further explain their behaviour.

1. Adjustments started to take place in a subject’s thinking which served to undermine his resolve to break from authority, reduce the strain he was under and help keep up his relationship with the experimenter. For instance, he would get immersed in the procedures of the experiment in order to lose sight of the ethical issues. And he would decide that he was not responsible for what was happening, he was, after all, just the agent of an external authority.

2. The subject didn’t lose his moral sense. It was just that the morality that was uppermost was the need to live up to the expectations of authority, to carry out what he had freely undertaken, or, in short, to keep his word.

3. The subject might start to attribute an impersonal quality to what was going on. ‘The Experiment’ became an entity of itself, with an impersonal momentum of its own. The Experiment had got to go on. At that point, the subject had lost sight of the fact that an experiment is the creation of a man.

4. The subject would see his behavior as part of the honourable pursuit for scientific truth. This helped to justify it.

5. It was common for a subject to alter his perceptions of the learner in order to justify the pain he had inflicted on him. The learner became unworthy, someone who was so stupid he ‘deserved’ to be shocked.

6. Some subjects said that they believed all along the experiment was wrong and this belief somehow served to satisfy them that, ultimately they were right-minded about the whole thing. They didn’t see that thought not translated into action was useless as a moral safeguard.

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