Would you pull the lever?
In a famous 1963 psychology experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram, a professor of psychology at Yale, a man posing in a white lab coat asked a group of subjects to administer painful and sometimes dangerous electric shocks to innocent people. The shocks were feigned, but the subjects thought they were real, and the “victims” pretended to feel pain.
Almost all the subjects in the experiment readily complied with the instructions given by the man in the lab coat to administer stronger and stronger “shocks” to their victims, even when the victims cried out in pain. These were ordinary Americans, not notoriously evil people, willingly inflicting more and more pain on innocent people because someone in authority told them it was the right thing to do. The subjects in the experiment were Americans, but it’s noteworthy that the experiment was conducted in the same year that saw the publication of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Both putatively helped explain how it was that under the Nazis, ordinary Germans had done such terrible, evil things.
Cut to today, 40 years after the original Milgram experiment. Professor Jerry Burger of Santa Clara University has repeated the experiment, yielding more or less the same results. As an Onion headline might put it — or as The New York Times headline actually did put it — “Four Decades After Milgram, We’re Still Willing to Inflict Pain.”
According to the Times article, Professor Burger said he was not surprised by the results of this second experiment. When figures of authority take responsibility for a decision to hurt other people, people willingly (at times even eagerly) follow them.
Arthur Cohen, the author of the Times article on Burger’s experiment, writes that the results of the two experiments “pose a challenge.” He asks, “If this is how most people behave, how do we prevent more Holocausts, Abu Ghraibs, and other examples of wanton cruelty?” Cohen adds that Burger believes that by teaching people about the Milgram experiment, they can be on guard against the human tendency to be blindly obedient to authority.
Pose a challenge? Teach people to be on their guard? Prevent more Holocausts and Abu Ghraibs? These questions would be risible if they weren’t such bitter reminders of the futility of human attempts to turn knowledge into a philosopher’s stone for morality. Reading about the Milgram experiment fascinates and sickens us — in the same way as watching a train wreck — but it only confirms what we already know from both history and human nature. Most of the time, in most places, most people will behave in a reasonably decent way. Given the right (that is, wrong) circumstances, however, almost everyone is capable of committing terrifyingly evil acts.
As more than one observer has noticed, the best hope for us mortals to behave in the morally right way comes from being surrounded by a combination of just laws, healthy public opinion, and good habits. Knowledge makes barely a dent.
(Photo by Flickr user Omar Omar)
