Questioning Authority: A Rethinking of the Infamous Milgram Experiments

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted February 12, 2009.

"You can't put people through what Milgram did," says Burger. Revisiting descriptions of his subjects, he says, "you see that people were suffering tremendously." They believed they were torturing people, that people were "presumably even dying on the other side of the wall."

Thus, based on Milgram's original data, which showed that the majority of the participants who administered 150-volt shocks to their subjects were willing to go all the way to the highest levels, Burger decided that he would stop participants at the 150-volt mark, "the point of no return."

When the ABC special aired in January 2007, it took a predictably sensationalist approach. "A Touch of Evil" was the title, and foreboding music provided a dark backdrop.

The segment showed men and women of various ages, ethnicities and professions doing the same thing -- administering what they believed were electric shocks to a person in another room.

Often the participants would be startled by the shouts behind the wall, turning to look to the man in the lab coat with nervous expressions. But at his behest, they continued, even amid protests from the actor. ("Get me out of here, I told you I had heart trouble. My heart's starting to bother me now.")

In the end, 70 percent of the subjects reached the 150-volt mark -- a statistic basically identical to Milgram's. Unlike in Milgram's experiment, however, Burger told his subjects immediately after their time was up that the whole thing had been staged.

"I can't tell you why I listened to him and kept going," one participant told his ABC interviewer. "I should have just said no."

In the media and the blogosphere, the response to Burger's study has played into the notion that Milgram's findings, as true now as they were a generation ago, point to some intrinsic capacity for evil in human beings. It was more or less summed up by one blog's headline, which Burger noted, chuckling: "This Just In: We Still Suck."

'Under the Right Circumstances, People Will Act In Surprising and Unsettling Ways'

Although Milgram's research is understood mainly through the lens of "obedience," Burger believes that authority is actually not the definitive factor in the situation.

Just as important, if not more so, are the combination of factors that make up the scenario and which make subjects so dependent on authority. For example, despite being shown the "learner" strapped in before the experiment begins, participants are operating on relatively little information.

"They want to be a good participator, they don't know, 'should I stop, should I not,' " says Burger, "… Except there's a person in the room that's an expert, who knows all about the study, the equipment, etc … and he's acting like, well, this is nothing unusual … If the only information you have is telling you that this is the right thing to do -- of course you do it."

Participants are also absolved of any real sense of personal responsibility. "I was doing my job," is a common refrain. Burger notes, "when people don't feel responsible, that can lead to some very unsettling behaviors." And then, there's the high pressure created by the limited window of time participants have to choose whether to shock their "learner."

"Imagine if Milgram had allowed those people to take 30 minutes and think about it," says Burger. "They don't have time, and the experimenter doesn't allow them time. In fact, if the person pauses, the experimenter steps in and says, 'Please continue.' "

But perhaps the most important enabling factor is the fact that the volts go up in little by little.

"Milgram set this up so that people responded in small increments," says Burger. "They didn't start with 150 volts, they started with 15 and worked their way up … That is a very powerful way to change attitudes and behaviors." Most people, after all, don't start with extreme behaviors right off the bat.

"People didn't start by drinking Jim Jones' poison Kool-Aid," Burger says. "They probably started by donating money, or going to a meeting … you probably see that in most examples where you're scratching you head and saying, 'How can they do that?' "

In Burger's opinion, the significance of Milgram's findings are widely misunderstood. "The point is not 'look how bad people are.' … What we fail to recognize is the power of the situation and [that] under the right circumstances, people will act in surprising and sometimes unsettling ways."

Indeed, what these factors demonstrate is not how easily people will harm another person, but how quickly people will cede their own authority to another person when they feel isolated, pressured and powerless. The more controlled an environment, the more vulnerable a person is.

What Does It Take to Resist Authority?

Long before his most famous experiment, Stanley Milgram was interested in phenomena showing that people placed in the right situation will often do the wrong thing.

See more stories tagged with: abu ghraib, jim jones, abc news, stanley milgram, dr. jerry burger, the nation magazine

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