Today, I was looking for writing topics in my history of excessive YouTube comments I've made over the years for no one to ever see, and I came across this one thing that always drives me crazy. It occurs to me now that this subject is something I care about, and it's thematically adjacent to some of my other unhinged writings on cohost, sometimes about youtube videos or complexly bad popular-information; I mean, apparently this is where I write things now, and this is what I write about, so here it is.
Has anyone ever told you that gross factoid that goes like, "Bro this one time in the '60s they did an experiment which shows people can be told what to do pretty easily, even it means torturing innocent people" ...? That's kind of a dramatic claim, huh? They're referring to the Milgram experiment of 1961, also known as the Milgram obedience experiments. This was the thing where volunteer participants were led to believe that they were administering electric shocks to other volunteer participants.
You may not be surprised to hear that the experiment is pretty widely misunderstood and, I think, often wielded in misleading and intentionless ways.
A writer by the name of Gina Perry did some work reframing the legacy of this experiment in her 2012 book Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments. There was a bunch of coverage of it in places like NPR and the Atlantic between 2012–2015 (a very specific time frame, to me). I have not read it, just the coverage, and I'm not actually familiar with her work in general, so I can't totally vouch for her or the book. Nor will I attempt to summarize her findings here. But the book's most popularly-salient message, or the part I have received, is pretty self-evident on the basis of a couple key points.
First of all, as Perry and countless others continue to point out in vain, it is not exactly true that the oft-cited number of 65% of the participants went "all the way" (meaning they kept pushing the button they thought was electrocuting someone to maximum voltage, sometimes until the recorded person stopped pleading and went silent).
In fact, 65% of participants in ONE of several iterations of the experiment went all the way. Many of the other iterations had much lower rates. Regardless, that is a scary number, so it's the one people have talked about the most, and eventually it became "The" experiment. You'll now hear that this means that most people would participate in torturing or killing you if it was their job, or if there was social pressure to do so.
The experiments as a whole, however, were conducted in different ways, with differing variables, and, necessarily, with different participants each time. People are psychologically different, we must acknowledge—people aren't drosophila flies—so there is a possibility, first of all, that some versions of the experiment went notably differently simply because of the unique and unpredictable, unregulatable nature of each group of participants. I would also point out that these people thought they were in some kind of artificial situation, and that's not nothing; it was set up to seem like they were merely hired to assist in the study, not themselves the ones being studied, in order to control for this perception. I would argue that it's still kind of inescapable. They knew they were being hired by a professor in the psychology department at Yale. I can't really make any claims about how this would go under different, more "natural" circumstances, and indeed I don't expect it would go all that differently (Milgram repeated the study around the world in various contexts with similar results), but that's not the point.
The point (if this is really what we do with science, idk) is not "people can tell people what to do, and that's just human nature," as it is often ambiguously and spookily implied, but rather something more like "People from the society and social context you currently live in can apparently tell some others in their society what to do under certain conditions that seem to have an effect, more effective or less effective, depending on undetermined factors varying in this social context, on said people's capacity to think and act for themselves in a manner aligning with the moral values they believe themselves to hold."
Not "People can just tell people what to do," but, less excitingly, "The degree to which people can tell others what to do apparently depends on a bunch of different things, and, in fact, you can resist being told what to do depending on those same things."
Here's the other half of what drives me crazy about this: ...We already knew the worst part of all that, because we've seen it happen in huge and terrible ways, historically. Part of the big media splash of the Milgram experiment in the news of 1961 was its chronological proximity to the Nuremberg trials, and the televised portion wherein Holocaust-orchestrator Adolf Eichmann famously used the superior orders defense to explain that he was "just following orders," as the saying now goes. So, the Milgram experiment had some very intentional timing. I believe the researchers had good, inquisitive intentions, but if you take today's colloquial version of it at face value as some kind of spooky truth about human nature, then all it does is absolve most Nazis while telling you nothing about why it happened. But the REALLY crazy-making part is that, ultimately, I'm left frankly confused by what the point of this study was in the first place, and I'm confused when it's recounted to me because often the teller is saying (especially in the context of parables about fascism and authoritarianism) something along the lines of "People can just tell you what to do... so don't let people tell you what to do!"
Is this actionable advice? Do we get to choose that, individually, according to what you're saying? Isn't that kind of a self-defeating fear? Or is the idea that knowing this supposed dark truth will inoculate you against the powers of suggestion? I dunno, it seems bogus.
I feel like the more straightforward lessons to take from these experiments are:
- We should be mindful of cultivating systems of social organization that might help work against these sort of forces, whatever they are.
- Question arbitrary authority held over you and others at every opportunity.
- Try to live in a way that reminds you, constantly and in an embodied way, what you truly stand for, and what you will not stand for.
- Strive to form meaningful, unalienated bonds with associates with whom you can rely on to stand up for each other, to hold each other accountable, to keep each other on the path, and to live a life you want to live, instead of a life where we're all pushing the punishment button.
And I don't think that believing most people are primed to become inherently violent automatons gets me personally any closer to that life.
