Read The Story of Psychology Online
Authors: Morton Hunt
Astonishingly—Milgram himself was amazed—63 percent of the teachers did go on, all the way. But not because they were sadists who enjoyed the agony they thought they were inflicting (standard personality tests showed no difference between the fully obedient subjects and those who at some point refused to continue); on the contrary, many of them suffered acutely while obeying the researcher’s orders. As Milgram reported:
In a large number of cases the degree of tension reached extremes that are rarely seen in sociopsychological laboratory studies. Subjects were observed to sweat, tremble, stutter, bite their lips, groan, and dig their fingernails into their flesh…A mature and initially poised businessman enter[ed] the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse… yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter, and obeyed to the end.
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Milgram did not, alas, report any symptoms he himself may have had while watching his teachers suffer. A spirited, feisty little man, he gave no indication in his otherwise vivid account that he was ever distressed by his subjects’ misery.
His interpretation of the results was that the situation, playing on cultural expectations, produced the phenomenon of obedience to authority. The volunteers entered the experiment in the role of cooperative and willing subjects, and the researcher played the part of the authority. In our society and many others, children are taught to obey authority and not to judge what the person in authority tells them to do. In the experiment, the teachers felt obliged to carry out orders; they could inflict pain and harm on an innocent human being because they felt that the researcher, not they themselves, was responsible for their actions.
In Milgram’s opinion, his series of experiments went far to explain how so many otherwise normal Germans, Austrians, and Poles could have operated death camps or, at least, accepted the mass murder of the Jews, Gypsies, and other despised groups. (Adolf Eichmann said, when he was on trial in Israel, that he found his role in liquidating millions of Jews distasteful but that he had to carry out the orders of authority.)
Milgram validated his interpretation of the results by varying the script in a number of ways. In one variation, a phone call would summon the researcher away before he said anything to the teacher about the importance of continuing to ever higher shock levels; his place would be taken by a volunteer (another confederate) who seemed to hit on the idea of increasing the shocks as far as needed and kept telling the teacher to continue. But he was a substitute, not the real authority; in this version of the experiment only 20 percent of the teachers went all the way. Milgram also varied the composition of the team. Instead of an affable, pudgy, middle-aged learner and a trim, stern, young researcher, he reversed the personality types. In that condition, the proportion of teachers going all the way decreased but only to 50 percent. Apparently, the roles of authority and victim, not the personalities of the persons who played the parts, were the crucial factor.
A disturbing adjunct to Milgram’s results was his investigation of how people
thought
they would behave in the situation. He described the experimental set-up in detail to groups of college students, behavioral scientists, psychiatrists, and laymen, and asked them at what level of shock people like themselves would refuse to go on. Despite the differences in their backgrounds, all groups said people like themselves
would defy the experimenter and break off at about 150 volts when the victim asked to be released. Milgram also asked a group of undergraduates at what level one
should
disobey; again the average answer was at about 150 volts. Thus, neither people’s expectations of how they would behave nor their moral views of how they should behave had anything to do with how they actually behaved in an authority-dominated situation.
Milgram’s obedience study attracted immense attention and won the 1964 award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for sociopsychological research. (In 1984, when Milgram died of a heart attack at fifty-one, Roger Brown called him “perhaps the most gifted experimentalist in the social psychology of our time.”) Within a decade or so, 130 similar studies had been undertaken, including a number in other countries. Most of them confirmed and enlarged Milgram’s findings, and for some years his procedure, or variations of it, was the principal one used in studies of obedience.
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But for more than two decades no researcher has used such methods, or would dare to, as a result of historical developments we’ll look at shortly.
In March 1964, a murder in Kew Gardens, in New York City’s borough of Queens, made the front page of the
New York Times
and shocked the nation, although there was nothing memorable about the victim, murderer, or method. Kitty Genovese, a young bar manager on her way home at 3
A.M.
, was stabbed to death by Winston Moseley, a business-machine operator who did not know her, and who had previously killed two other women. What made the crime big news was that the attack lasted half an hour (Moseley stabbed Genovese, left, came back a few minutes later and stabbed her again, left again, and returned to attack her once more), during which time she repeatedly screamed and called for help, and was heard and seen by thirty-eight people looking out the windows of their apartments. Not one tried to defend her, came to help when she lay bleeding, or even telephoned the police. (One finally did call—after she was dead.)
News commentators and other pundits interpreted the inaction of the thirty-eight witnesses as evidence of the alienation and inhumanity of modern city dwellers, especially New Yorkers. But two young social psychologists living in the city, neither one a native New Yorker, were troubled by these glib condemnations.
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John Darley, an assistant professor
at New York University, and Bibb Latané, an instructor at Columbia University who had been a student of Stanley Schachter’s, met at a party soon after the murder and found that they had something in common. Though unlike in many ways—Darley was a dark-haired, urbane, Ivy League type; Latané a lanky, thatch-haired fellow with a Southern country-boy accent and manner—they both felt, as social psychologists, that there had to be a better explanation of the witnesses’ inactivity.
They talked about it for hours that night and had a joint flash of inspiration. As Latané recalls:
The newspapers, TV, everybody, was carrying on about the fact that thirty-eight people witnessed the crime and nobody did anything, as if that were far harder to understand than if one or two had witnessed it and done nothing. And we suddenly had an insight: maybe it was the very fact that there
were
thirty-eight that accounted for their inactivity. It’s an old trick in social psychology to turn a phenomenon around and see if what you thought was the effect was actually the cause. Maybe each of the thirty-eight knew that a lot of other people were watching—and
that
was why they did nothing.
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Late though it was, the two immediately began designing an experiment to test their hypothesis. Many weeks later, after much planning and preparation, they launched an extended investigation of the responses of bystanders, under varied circumstances, to an emergency.
In the study, seventy-two NYU students in introductory psychology courses took part in an unspecified experiment in order to fulfill a class requirement. Each arriving participant was told by Darley, Latané, or a research assistant that the experiment involved a discussion of the personal problems of urban university students. The session was to be conducted in two-person, three-person, or six-person groups. To minimize embarrassment when revealing personal matters, they would be in separate cubicles and would communicate over an intercom system, taking turns and talking in an arranged sequence.
Whether the naïve participant was supposedly talking to only one other person or to two or five others—supposedly, because in fact everything he heard others say was a tape-recorded script—the first voice was always that of a male student who told of difficulty adjusting to life in New York and to his studies, and confided that under stress he was prone to epileptic seizures. The voice was that of Richard Nisbett, then a graduate student at Columbia University and today a professor at the University
of Michigan, who in tryouts had proved the best actor. The second time it was his turn to talk, he started to sound disordered and incoherent; he stammered and panted, said that he had “one of these things coming on,” started choking and pleading for help, gasped, “I’m gonna die—er-er—help—er-er—seizure-er,” and, after more choking sounds, fell silent.
Of the participants who thought that they and the epileptic were the only ones talking to each other, 85 percent popped out of their cubicles to report the attack even before the victim fell silent; of those who thought four other people were also hearing the attack, only 31 percent did so. Later, when the students were asked whether the presence of others had influenced their response, they said no; they had been genuinely unaware of its powerful effect on them.
Darley and Latané now had a convincing sociopsychological explanation of the Kew Gardens phenomenon, which they called “the social inhibition of bystander intervention in emergencies,” or, more simply, “the bystander effect.” As they had hypothesized, it was the presence of other witnesses to an emergency that made for passivity in a bystander. The explanation of the bystander effect, they said, “may lie more in the bystander’s response to other observers than in presumed personality deficiencies of ‘apathetic’ individuals.”
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They suggested later that three processes underlie the bystander effect: hesitancy to act in front of others until one knows whether helping or other action is appropriate; the feeling that the inactive others understand the situation and that nothing need be done; and, most important, “diffusion of responsibility”—the feeling that, since others know of the emergency, one’s own obligation to act is lessened.
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A number of later experiments by Latané and Darley, and by other researchers, confirmed that, depending on whether bystanders can see other bystanders, are seen by them, or merely know that there are others, one or another of these three processes is at work.
The Darley and Latané experiment aroused widespread interest and generated a crop of offspring. Over the next dozen years, fifty-six studies conducted in thirty laboratories presented apparent emergencies to a total of nearly six thousand naïve subjects who were alone or in the presence of one, several, or many others. (Conclusion: The more bystanders, the greater the bystander effect.) The staged emergencies were of many kinds: a crash in the next room followed by the sound of a female moaning; a decently dressed young man with a cane (or, alternatively, a dirty young man smelling of whiskey) collapsing in a subway car
and struggling unsuccessfully to rise; a staged theft of books; the experimenter himself fainting; and many others. In forty-eight of the fifty-six studies, the bystander effect was clearly demonstrated; overall, about half the people who were alone when an emergency occurred offered help, as opposed to 22 percent of those who saw or heard emergencies in the presence of others.
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Since there is less than one chance in fifty-one million that this aggregate result is accidental, the bystander effect is one of the best-established hypotheses of social psychology. And having been so thoroughly established and the effects of so many conditions having been separately measured, it has ceased in recent years to be the subject of much research and become, in effect, another closed case.
However, research on helping behavior in general—the social and psychological factors that either favor or inhibit nonemergency altruistic acts—continued to grow in volume until the 1980s and has only lately leveled off. Helping behavior is part of prosocial behavior, which, during the idealistic 1960s, began to replace social psychology’s postwar obsession with aggressive behavior, and it remains an important area of research in the discipline.
A Note on Deceptive Research:
One factor common to most of the closed cases dealt with above—and to a great many other research projects in social psychology—is the use of elaborately contrived deceptive scenarios. There is almost nothing of the sort in experimental research on personality, development, or most other fields of present-day psychology, but for many years deceptive experimentation was the essence of social psychological research.
In the years following the Nuremberg Trials, criticism of experimentation with human subjects without their knowledge and consent was on the rise, and deceptive experimentation by biomedical researchers and social psychologists came under heavy attack. The Milgram obedience experiment drew particularly intense fire, not only because it inflicted suffering on people without forewarning them and obtaining their consent, but because it might have done them lasting psychological harm by showing them a detestable side of themselves. Milgram, professing to be “totally astonished” by the criticism, asked a sample of his former subjects how they felt about the experience, and reported that 84 percent said they were glad they had taken part in the experiment, 15 percent were neutral, and only 1 percent regretted having participated.
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But in the era of expanding civil rights, the objections on ethical
grounds to research of this sort triumphed. In 1971 the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare adopted regulations governing eligibility for research grants that sharply curtailed the freedom of social psychologists and biomedical researchers to conduct experiments with naïve subjects. In 1974 it tightened the rules still further; the right of persons to have nothing done to them without their informed consent was so strictly construed as to put an end not only to Milgram-type procedures but to many relatively painless and benign experiments relying on deception, and social psychologists abandoned a number of interesting topics that seemed no longer researchable.