When Reality TV Was Science

On social psychology's quest for authenticity in novel situations

Milgram and his shock machine

I.

Some time ago, I wrote a five part series on “The Third Wave” pseudo-experiment, examining the manner in which its legacy spread throughout the media, bringing the attention to a few forgotten sources that exposed it for the obvious fraud that it was. At that time, I noted that the science historian Gina Perry had also written about Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments in her book Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments (2013). I’m a guy who tends to feel guilty if I promote a book that I haven’t actually read, so I went ahead and read it. Although it’s a bit too talky and takes the form of a sometimes tediously extensive first-person narrative about the author and her quest to uncover the truth about what really happened (a common problem with these kinds of books), it nonetheless isn’t bad. It didn’t quite “debunk” Milgram’s work the way I expected, but it leaves one with the impression that there was never really much to debunk in the first place.

For the uninitiated, Milgram sought to study the obedience of common people to authority figures, and he wanted to prove that people can do unspeakably cruel things simply because an authority told them to do so. He did this by recruiting unsuspecting experiment volunteers whom he had deceived into believing that they’re participating in a study on memory and learning. He ran the experiment many times and with many variables, but the basics of the procedure remained the same. The “procedure” section from Wikipedia is quite good and thorough, so you can read that instead of the following paragraph, but here’s a simplified version.

The administrator of the experiment (employed by Milgram) would tell each volunteer subject that he was working with another “volunteer” who had shown up at the same time (this person was in reality an actor working closely with Milgram), and the experimenter would pretend to arbitrarily give the roles of “learner” and “teacher” to each person. The true subject of the experiment would always be given the role of “teacher,” and he was told to zap the “learner” with an electric shock whenever the latter was asked a question to test his memory and got it wrong. The “learner” would go into another room where he would be supposedly hooked up to an electric shock machine. The experimenter would assure the “teacher” that the “learner” will suffer pain but not be truly damaged or injured from the experiment. The “learner” would then comment about how he has a heart condition before going off into the other room. Once the experiment began, he’d get a few questions right but then get them wrong more and more, and the “teacher” was then told to zap him with increasingly high voltage, prompting the “learner” to scream and wail in agony, begging the “teacher” to stop (in reality these screams were pre-recorded, though apparently quite convincing). After a certain voltage level, the screams and answers would stop altogether, giving off the impression that he was dead, though the subject would be told to continue zapping him even when he says nothing, since silence counts as a wrong answer. Milgram found that over 60% of the subjects reached the final voltage level before the experiment concluded and the “learner” would re-emerge from the other room, perfectly fine.

Many commenters, both academic and otherwise, have made criticisms of Milgram’s work, and Perry makes sure to include the big ones, gradually layering them in as her narrative goes on. They include the following:

• Milgram refined the experiment until he got the results he wanted. Initially, he didn’t have such high compliance rates. In order to reach them, he painstakingly created the most pressuring environment he could think of.

• In his book Obedience to Authority (1974), Milgram downplayed the hesitance his subjects showed in zapping the victim, as well as the persistent arguments they’d make to the experimenter against doing it. He also downplayed the somewhat improvised manner in which the experimenter would urge his subjects to continue on. At times, it sounds like the experimenter is coercing the subjects rather than merely prodding them forward.

• In questionnaires, quite a few subjects who went to the maximum voltage said that they didn’t believe they were actually hurting the “learner,” or at least had their doubts. Those who said they fully believed they were hurting the guy were less likely to give him the full voltage on average. Milgram dismissed this data altogether, claiming that of course they’d want to rationalize away their own culpability. But there’s no way to tell if their claims are lies or not. The issue, of course, is that no one actually did get hurt, so it’s entirely plausible that at least some recognized the experiment as some sort of trick and chose to cooperate with it, even though it disturbed them.

And beyond those three procedural/methodological complaints, there were further problems with Milgram’s interpretation of what his experiment meant. Milgram was interested in the subject of obedience to authority because he was Jewish and wanted to explain what went on in the Nazi concentration camps, so he conceived his experiment entirely to address that question. Initially, he sought out to discover if German-Americans were more obedient and/or sadistic than other ethnicities, but there were no compelling connections regarding ethnicity to be found — in fact, quite a few subjects who went all the way to the highest voltage level were Jews. So Milgram essentially wound up with an experiment showing that a bunch of people were willing to shock a guy, perhaps even to death, when repeatedly asked to do so by an authority figure. But there wasn’t much to say about that beyond the truism, “Some people blindly obey authority figures,” with the caveat, “especially if they believe the authority figure seems sufficiently competent or perhaps knows important things that they don’t.”

This did not stop Milgram from making explicit links between his work and the holocaust, however. In fact, that is how he promoted the value of his findings in both his academic and popular writing. Nevertheless, he didn’t have an explanation to account for the clear disparities between each situation. In one, trained military officers who strongly sympathized with Hitler’s ideological views were being given orders during wartime, and in another, a scientist was repeatedly reassuring some confused and agitated working-class dupes that they weren’t actually injuring a guy who was screaming out in agony, and moreover saying that they had “no choice” but to continue.

Additionally, Milgram couldn’t really find a compelling reason to show why some people would go all the way, while others would refuse. He couldn’t find anything terribly salient that his obedient subjects shared in common, so it was impossible to create a profile of a distinct personality type. On the whole, his experiment was surprising in the sense that its premise would seem far-fetched on its face despite being true, but what it actually taught us, no one quite knows. It was a curious finding in search of a useful explanatory theory, and none has ever been found. Moreover, attempts to recreate the experiment while tweaking certain variables have been quite inconsistent, even within Milgram’s own research, and so any potentially useful theory would require thorough discussion of each precise variable that Milgram fixed to get his results.

But perhaps the most significant shortcoming of Milgram’s attempt at theorizing is something Gina Perry doesn’t address until nearly the end of her book. It’s that there’s no guarantee that one person would have gone to the final level on the shock machine every single time, on every single day. In Milgram’s thinking, what the experiment revealed about each subject was true as a permanent condition. If you’re the type of person who went to the final shock during that experiment, then that’s who you are forever. Thus, his description of each person reads as though their behavior is frozen in time, and every observable trait they possess can therefore provide us with clues as to which kind of person would “shock someone to death.”

In reality, however, people are inconsistent, quite fickle, and much of what they choose to do, particularly in stressful situations, depends upon their mood at the time. Uncontrollable factors, such as e.g. how much sleep you’ve gotten, what kinds of drugs you’ve been using, what your diet is like, how you’ve been feeling about life in general, whether or not you’ve gotten into an argument recently with your spouse, whether or not you’ve been exercising lately — all of these play a role in how combative you’re going to be with some scientist telling you to shock someone in another room whom you can’t see, or how likely you are to think to yourself, “Ah, that guy is probably fine, the scientist keeps telling me it’s OK, there’s some sort of trick going on here” (which, again, was the correct assumption). Behavior in an unusual situation like that might involve one’s inner human nature to an extent, but it will also depend upon a complex web of known and unknown contingencies.

II.

The reason I consider that last point so important is that so much of social psychology was invested in using deception and trickery to uncover the authentic person and authentic instincts hiding behind the facade of everyday life, subtending all commonplace interactions. The entire post-war culture of America was deeply invested in unlocking this sort of authenticity, in fact, and this investment could be observed through parallel developments in both psychology and the arts, of which social psychology represented but one. For instance, Freudian psychoanalysis exploded during the 1940s and especially the 1950s, becoming a household name, with psychoanalytic therapists being featured in films like Spellbound (1945) and The Seven Year Itch (1955). Over in the world of sociology, Irving Goffman released The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life in 1956, a book which explored routine face-to-face encounters between individuals and relied heavily on the language of the theater to explain the nuances of social interaction.

Meanwhile in the world of theater itself, “method” acting was being introduced to American audiences through Lee Strasberg’s interpretation of Konstantin Stanislavski’s acting system. Lee Strasberg placed a much more personal and psychologistic emphasis on acting than Stanislavski, encouraging his actors to pretend as though they themselves were in their character’s situation by drawing upon real personal experiences and memories to simulate the emotions by proxy. Another interpretation of Stanislavski’s acting system taught by Stella Adler encouraged characters not to draw upon personal memories but instead do their best to emotionally recreate the circumstances of their character as thoroughly as possible, as though it were all fully real. Many of the actors taught by both Strasberg and Adler became major picture stars beginning in the 1950s, Marlon Brando being among the earliest.

And over in the world of performance art, there was a short-lived trend called “happenings” devised by Allan Kaprow, in which performers would do various things in public (often strange things), and then passersby would become curious and eventually interact with the performers in an impromptu fashion, often not knowing that they were partaking in some kind of performance art. Again, there was a vested interest in capturing the authenticity of a moment via the spontaneity of people who would normally have been mere spectators.

Pertaining to social psychology in particular, the eyes and ears of the camera lens and audio recorder were often understood as a powerful means through which to achieve the task of capturing authenticity. The radio show Candid Microphone debuted in 1947, and it would later become Candid Camera in 1960, creating the prototype for reality television as we know it. And as Gina Perry points out in her book, Allen Funt, the creator and host of Candid Microphone/Camera was briefly a research assistant of Kurt Lewin when he attended Cornell, one of social psychology’s most influential figures… although in fairness, we have no idea how much of a direct impact this had on him. What we do know, however, is that in the same year of 1947, a student of Lewin named Leon Festinger started to use deception liberally in social psychological research. Perry explains it thus:

It was Festinger who perfected the art of social psychological research as a kind of theatrical stage production. It required, according to him, making props, playwriting, casting, acting, and rehearsing. […] Festinger, [the prominent psychologist Elliott] Aronson said, was renowned for his ability to construct experiments in which “the participant gets caught up in a powerful scenario that is compelling, believable, and fully involving. Every details [sic] of the construction and performance is terribly important.” Aronson recalled the “hours and hours” of rehearsal and preparation that Festinger put him through: “Leon was a regular Lee Strasberg, and we graduate students felt that we were a part of Actors Studio. Art and craftsmanship in the service of science: it was an exciting process. It was very hard work, but we considered it a vital part of doing research.” The goal of such research was, according to Aronson, delivering surprising findings that were likely to attract attention and follow-up research.

The principle, then, was about executing a novel idea with perfect verisimilitude, and then coming up with some interpretation of it afterwards. Action first, thinking later. It was in that environment that Stanley Milgram came up with his obedience experiment and ran them a bunch of times. Perry continues:

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, full-scale theatrical laboratory experiments involving elaborate deception techniques were common. Social psychology handbooks promoted experiments with a high degree of “experimental realism,” scenarios that were “so striking and believable that subjects forget they are in an experiment.” The psychological discomfort that participants experienced—such as feelings of embarrassment, annoyance, or anger—were seen as regrettable but necessary. To study anxiety, subjects had to panic; to study insecurity, subjects had to feel vulnerable; to study humiliation, subjects had to be shamed. For example, in order to study anger and aggression, individuals were insulted by another “subject,” whom they could later choose to punish; to study low self-esteem, students completed a series of personality tests and were told that they had homosexual tendencies, regardless of the test results; and, in order to study how group bonds form between strangers who have shared the same painful initiation practices, young women were forced to read sexually explicit material aloud to male experimenters.

These are pretty zany examples when you think about it. And throughout the 60s and into the 1970s, these kinds of experiments didn’t stop. In James Korn’s Illusions of Reality, which Perry cites, even more examples are given. Here are a few additional experiments that took place:

• A subject is hooked up to a fake lie detector machine that is presented as real, and then he or she is asked to give an opinion about someone else in the room posing as another subject — sometimes with signs of an apparent physical disability, like leg braces.

• Some human guinea pigs who had signed up for a drug test were told they were being injected with a vitamin-boosting serum with no side effects, but instead it was epinephrine AKA adrenaline. They would legitimately be given an adrenaline shot without knowing it, and they were placed among a stooge who would then pretend to have various side effects associated with some emotion, like anger or silliness. The subjects were observed to see if they would be influenced into having the same side effects, and if they would consider the effects as coming from other factors pertaining to the experiment rather than the injection itself.

• In various scenarios, someone would undergo a staged emergency situation, and researchers would observe if others would help under various conditions. These emergency-based scenarios were inspired by the news story of Kitty Genovese, who was murdered as thirty-eight witnesses who saw or heard the crime taking place allegedly did nothing to report or stop the attack (this story turned out to be a complete fraud).

• Most curiously, while Milgram was doing his obedience experiments in 1961, another guy called Arnold Buss was doing quite similar experiments using a fake shock machine, a fake testing situation, and increasingly intense shocks meant to be administered as the experiment continued. Later on, a guy called Timothy Brock did tests with a “Pleasure Machine” that was meant to do the opposite of a shock machine. Surprisingly, we don’t hear much about the Pleasure Machine nowadays.

Gina Perry makes comparisons to Candid Camera throughout her book, sometimes through the quotations of her own interview subjects, and it’s not hard to understand why. These were ideas that came straight from theater and the arts. They involved method acting. They were “happenings.” Many of these studies formed the inspiration for later reality TV productions (Milgram’s experiments were in fact recreated for a Discovery Channel show called How Evil Are You? hosted by Eli Roth). But on epistemological grounds alone, reality TV prank shows are far more defensible, since the genre more or less accepts its own trashiness, and there’s never any pretense that what’s going on in them belongs to a higher category of human understanding.

III.

In 1972, Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt discussed

the institution of a new kind of global theater, in which all men become actors and there are few spectators. The population of the world is both the cast and content of this new theater. The repertory of the theater consists of a perpetual happening, which can include the retrieval or replay of any previous happenings that men choose to experience.

The global theater was the product of electronic technology, with its heightened capabilities for man to observe himself, along with satellite photographs of the Earth, which turned the domain in which all of humanity lives into not merely an object of voyeurism but rather the collective eye of mankind turning upon itself, captured in a visual representation.

It goes without saying that the citizens of developed and industrialized countries are all participating in the global theater today.

But in this new global theater, the social psychologists were placed in a curious position, which they seem remain in still. They needed to find moments of interpersonal authenticity from which they could extrapolate permanent and unchanging principles that define man, and thus they had to separate themselves from the action, devising and orchestrating situations that needed to generate more insights than what’s observable from everyday life. If the situations were too typical, then the results would give insights that everyone already knows and recognizes as obvious. But if the situations were too unusual and precisely constructed, as with Milgram, then there would be little universal import found in the results. And yet, the studies in the latter category are exactly what people craved and which have become the basis of so much metapolitical folklore during our time. Milgram created an ingenious theater production, and he was a master of self-promotion, connecting his work’s significance to the highly publicized trial of Adolf Eichmann, assuring both his colleagues and the public that what he discovered helps explain everything we need to know about what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.” But in truth, it explained very little outside of its own precise circumstances.

I’ve discussed how the most notorious social psychology stories (including the ones not done as legitimate science experiments) live on in the public imagination as post-liberal myths about the inherent dangers of unreconstructed man — dangers that the managerial therapeutic state must root out. Yet the sheer extent to which social psychology overlaps with theater was something I had not expected. It’s a particularly curious discovery because our collective understanding of authenticity has been changing from one rooted in individual uniqueness into a more typological conception in which authenticity is understood as a convincing adherence to a more or less defined set of conventions.

The theatrical expression of authenticity as seen in “method” acting and “happenings” corresponds to the individualized understanding of authenticity. “Happenings” are, it must be said, among the dumbest art trends to come out of New York, but in Allan Kaprow’s defense, he conceived of the “happening” as a mere moment in time — something that can’t be adequately captured, can’t be explained, and can only be appreciated as a fleeting bit of ephemera. He understood what was at stake in them, in other words. The human sciences, however, are strongly invested in the typological understanding of authenticity, and that kind of authenticity has ultimately triumphed in the digital era, as I’ve discussed here. The kinds of “happenings” that these social psychologists were devising were meant to do the opposite of what Kaprow wanted. They had to be repeatable, and they had to be broken down and interpreted along categorical lines. Researchers were looking for inflexible rules of human behavior, maybe distinct personality types to draw from their experiments, and they tried to find them by numerically quantifying various aspects and outcomes that stemmed from the situation. But as Gina Perry’s book shows through its extensive interviews with Milgram’s former research subjects, the numbers and general scientific observations often conceal far more than they elucidate.

From my perspective, there’s really no mystery as to why the most well-known experiments to emerge from social psychology don’t lend themselves to useful predictions about human behavior or tell us much of anything about types of people who aren’t already found in literature or the arts. Instead, the most well-known social psychology experiments function mainly as moralistic parables that reinforce modern western ideology. “Boy, people are so obedient! You should disobey The Man when he’s telling you to do bad things!” “Hey, people never think for themselves! You should be an individual and think your own thoughts!” and so on. There’s a great deal of hypocrisy in all of this, of course. Nothing is more obnoxious than the “anti-authority” authority figure. But I’ll discuss that hypocrisy another time.