Milgram Goes Modern: The Milgram Experiments Revisited

Slightly more than fifty years ago, in August 1961 to be precise, a social

psychologist named Stanley Milgram carried out an experiment that was to change

our understanding of the human propensity for evil for ever. Now I am a non

religious person and I do not use words like “evil” casually. What I am talking about

is the kind of evil inflicted by the likes of Adolf Hitler, “Uncle” Joe Stalin, Mao Tse

Tung, Pol Pot, Idi Amin and so many other leaders of nations on their own people and

by so many leaders of religious cults from the notorious kool aid man to the con

artists who prey on the vulnerable in society. None of these were trying to repeat the

Milgram experiment, they were all very different and were applying their warped

solutions to diverse situations none thought of themselves as evil but all had one

thing in common: to do what they did they needed willing followers.

One of the things that annoys me about modern society and the noisy and illiberal

“liberals” who wield far more influence than the number of people they represent

entitles them too is the way that when a government scam, a scientific fraud of a rip

off by bankers and financiers is being talked about, these people, these lovers of

Ve Haff Vays Of Making You Buy Our Products

democracy and free speech as they like to style themselves, will try to suppress

intelligent debate by yelling “Conspiracy Theory” in the way that ignorant,

superstitious medieval peasants would yell “witch” at anybody whose behaviour

made them fearful. These gullible people believe that the government is their friend,

scientists are so clever we dare not question them. Such sheep like behaviour, such

emotional neediness that can only be assuaged by the secure, warm feeling of being

one of the great anonymous mass has been misrepresented as “The wisdom of the

crowd.”

Why do you think the west has made the enormous error of making our

businesses and government functions dependent on one software package (Don’t call

Windows an operating system, it isn’t) that has always been, in commercial terms

“Not fit for purpose”? And why have we used that package as a platform to build a

communications network that is likewise “not fit for purpose”, that provides no

security for our personal and financial data. “What about ‘https’ sockets? you might

well ask. Hogwash, the data was never insecure at that point. Enough however, this is

not a technology article. The reason we have made these mistakes is The Wisdom Of

Crowds or the Sheeple Factor as freethinkers know it.

When I was making my reputation as a consultant who could provide solutions

that worked, on time and under budget a management maxim often encountered in

the Information Technology was “Nobody was ever sacked for buying from IBM.” I

and most of my colleagues in our small but very successful consultancy firm would

reply, “No but a lot of people should have been.” The IBM solution was seldom the

best in terms of value for money or technical efficiency but it was safe. And far more

people than you imagine will always choose the illusion of safety over the thrill of the

adventurous course. The wisdom of crowds? The comfort of the flock or herd?

Modern manifestations of the behaviour patters Milgram's experiments identified

make his work seem scarier now than it must have to people reading of it 50 years

ago.

Selected participants were invited were invited to a laboratory at Yale University

supposedly to be part of a study looking at the effects of punishment on memory.

Those who were required to assume the role of the “teacher” were then told they

would have to administer an electric shock to a “learner” every time that person made

a mistake. The shocks started at 15 volts but increased in 15-volt increments every

time an error was made, going right up to 450 volts – enough to kill someone

according to the documentation. Actually it’s amps that kill not volts but Milgram

was a social scientist so we should excuse him for not knowing.

In reality the experiment was a hoax, the learner was an actor, and the electric

shocks weren’t real. What Milgram had really intended to investigate was how

willing ordinary people were to follow instructions. Would they stop at 150 volts, the

point at which the learner started to show signs of distress and demanded to be let out

because his heart was starting to bother him. Would they go to 300 volts the point

they had been told serious injury would occur and at which where the learner let out

an agonised scream and then stopped answering? Would they go all the way to the

Max and administer a shock they believed was strong enough to kill. How far would

they go?

Members of Milgram’s team suggested people would go no further than about

100 volts – certainly not far enough to cause real harm, the (fake) distress their victim

showed would cause instincts like compassion to kick in. The collective opinion was

that only a 1% would go push it all the way up to 450 volts. Surely they reasoned,

only a sadist or psychopath, somebody who gained as visceral pleasure from hurting

others or one totally detached from the feelings of fellow creatures would go far

A laboratory at Yale University

enough to kill. Every student who has studied psychology to A-level or

Baccalaureate standard knows, two-thirds of Milgram’s participants continued

administering shocks up to the potentially fatal level.

And you thought it was only Nazi concentration camp guards who would rely on

“I vass only followink orders” as an excuse? How charmingly naive.

Milgram’s experiment proved that even normal, “decent” people can put aside

moral values to engage in acts of extreme cruelty when instructed to do so by others

who they believe to be in authority. This idea is entirely consistent with Hannah

Arendt’s theory of the “banality of evil”, developed from her observations of the trial

of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann which concluded in the same month as

Milgram’s experiment. Arendt perceived Eichmann as a bland office worker, a

bureaucrat rather than a monster, someone more concerned with the importance of

following bureaucratic procedures than questioning the end end result of following a

process to the letter.

The empirical contribution of the Milgram experiment is as relevant today as it

was so much closer in time to the horrors of Nazi Germany. The conclusion that

ordinary, decent people will willingly participate in evil acts has recently been

challenged by historians and psychologists. Their attempts to unravel the thread of

reasoning leading to the conclusion that evil is banal lead us to even more disturbing

insights into the dark abyss hidden in the depths of the human psyche. Research

shows these proverbial decent people, in reality just ordinary people like you and me,

will participate in horrific acts not because they are passive, mindless functionaries

who never question what they are doing or consider the possible consequences, but

rather because they come to believe – typically under the influence of those in

authority – that what they are doing is right.

David Cesarani’s 2004 biography of Adolf Eichmann, for example, reveals he

was not just a pen-pusher, but an enthusiastic National Socialist keen to play his part

in delivering “the final solution” to “the Jewish problem”. There were however many

small, anonymous cogs in the wheel of Hitler’s authoritarian central government

machine, from the concentration camp guards who stood up at their Nuremberg and

actually did say, “I was following orders” to those referred to in Pastor Martin

Niemoller’s poem who simply “did not speak out.” The true horror is not that they

were blind to the evil they were perpetrating, but they knew full well what they were

doing, and believed it to be right.

In these terms the results of Milgram’s

experiments are still relevant, not because they

provide a perspective on to the “banality of

evil”, but because they provide insights into

the conditions under which not just evil but

control freakery and manipulative management

of information can appear banal. Consider the

power wielded by the mighty advertising

industry today. Consider how, in spite of the fact that we are all aware of the security

problems of the internet, so many are persuaded to move their business and much of

their social activities to an online environment.

The biggest question they throw up however is why participants in Milgram’s

original exercise and in more recent studies are willing to throw in their lot with

authority when surely nobody can be unaware that the track record of government,

corporate management, the security services and the mainstream churches in dealing

with the general population is so very bad. Why are people so eager to believe the

government is their friend or Apple Corp really have their best interests at heart when

selling very ordinary but vastly hyped gadgets for far more than equivalent devices

from competitors. I mention Apple not because they are any worse than others but

because of the cultish nature of their following, a situation it must be said that is not

of Apple’s making. Why are people willing to follow a Hitler or a David Koresh

down the destructive path he points the way along.

And what happened in the USA during the 2008 Presidential election campaign

when one candidate, Barack Obama, a professional community organiser with a very

They were only following orders.

dubious record in lower levels of politics, a vacuous portfolio of policies and a

secretive attitude about his family and educational backgrounds that would have

disqualified him from a job as a graduate entrant to civil service job was, thanks to a

massively expensive and grossly manipulative media campaign accorded quasi-

divine status and swept to power on a wave of hysteria. To those who viewd him

objectively the failure of Obama’s Presidency is no surprise, the people who

supported him so fanatically they were even in the habit of accusing anybody who

questioned Obama’s ability of being motivated by racism are now trying to blame

those who did question and oppose him for his failure..

The same questions as we ask about outbreaks of genocidal war in Africa, the

wilder parts of South East Asia and the middle east are germane to outbreaks of mass

hysteria we see around us in the developed nations. The rioting witnessed in London

during August 2011, the abuse of detainees in Abu Ghraib, genocide in Darfur or

Rwanda the persecution of Christians in the quasi – autonomous Indonesian island of

Timor, or even the mob like behaviour of climate science supporters when challenged

by people sceptical of their transparently fraudulent statistics are cases in point. In all

these episodes, people have chosen a cause to support and proved willing to put aside

normal restraints and courtesy in pursuit of efforts to impose their view on people

who do not share it, not because they were blindly obeying orders but because they

were working creatively towards the goals of a leadership with which they identified.

They were sheeple, they feared being seen as standing out from the crowd. Such

people would willingly believe in The Emperor’s New Clothes of the fairytale than

trust their own judgement and common sense, so great is their desperation to

conform.

In all these cases there is a failure to recognise the nature of the thought processes

and instincts at work. They involve not just the passive obedience of the person who

is “only following orders” but also a dynamic will to unquestioningly follow a leader,

to be part of a movement, to belong and to say, “Look at me, I’m one of you, I accept

that the mindless stupidity of the mob a.k.a. the wisdom of crowds is always superior

to the intelligence of the individual.

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