The Man Who Shocked the World

On 17 December 2005,  the BMJ published the following retraction:

"The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram

We are retracting this article by Raj Persaud (BMJ 2005;331:356) owing to unattributed use of text from other published sources."

 

The following week, the Guardian published an article mentioning the retraction, to which the BMJ's editor, Dr Fiona Godlee, responded.

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Professor Persaud's book review

 
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Professor Persaud's unedited book review, emailed  to Trevor Jackson, BMJ reviews editor, 31/07/2005   20.51

 
 THE MAN WHO SHOCKED THE WORLD: THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF STANLEY MILGRAM

THOMAS BLASS BASIC BOOKS

RATING ****

PROFESSOR RAJ PERSAUD


Thomas Blass, a Professor of Psychology in the USA has written a gripping

biography of a psychologist who the current generation of medical students

may well have forgotten but who fairly lays claim to be one of the greatest

behavioral scientists of the 20th Century.

 

The late Stanley Milgram derives his renown from of a series of experiments

on obedience to authority which he conducted at Yale University 1961-1962.

 

He found, surprisingly, that 65% of his subjects, ordinary residents of New

Haven, were willing to give apparently harmful electric shocks-up to 450

volts-to a pitifully protesting victim, simply because a scientific,

lab-coated authority commanded them to, and in spite of the fact that the

victim did not do anything to deserve such punishment.

 

The victim was, in reality, a good actor who did not actually receive

shocks, and this fact was revealed to the subjects at the end of the

experiment. Milgram's interest in the study of obedience partly emerged out

of a deep concern with the suffering of fellow Jews at the hands of the

Nazis and an attempt to fathom how the Holocaust could have happened. His

researches, like Freud's, lead to profound revisions in some of the

fundamental assumptions about human nature.

 

It suggested that 'evil' as a concept was not necessary to invoke why so

many ordinary people do terrible things. Instead Milgram's work, and that of

other social psychologists, suggests that much of what we do, we do

automatically. Evil often occurs simply because we don't question our acts

enough; instead our rationale arises from our trust in authority figures who

are in 'charge'.

 

The subjects in Milgram's original series of tests believed they were part

of an experiment supposedly dealing with the relationship between punishment

and learning. An experimenter--who used no coercive powers beyond a stern

aura of mechanical and vacant-eyed efficiency--instructed participants to

shock a learner by pressing a lever on a machine each time the learner made

a mistake on a word-matching task. Each subsequent error led to an increase

in the intensity of the shock in 15-volt increments, from 15 to 450 volts.

 

In actuality, the shock box was a well-crafted prop and the learner an actor

who did not actually get shocked. The result: A majority of the subjects

continued to obey to the end--believing they were life threatening

delivering 450 volt shocks--simply because the experimenter commanded them

to. Although subjects were told about the deception afterward, the

experience was a very real and powerful one for them during the laboratory

hour itself.

 

These groundbreaking and controversial experiments have had--and continue to

have--long-lasting significance and the media has been obsessed with them

since, repeatedly 're-discovering' them and re-reporting them as if they

were amazing news.

 

Milgram's study demonstrated with brutal clarity that ordinary individuals

could be induced to act destructively even in the absence of physical

coercion, and humans need not be innately evil or aberrant to act in ways

that are reprehensible and inhumane. While we would like to believe that

when confronted with a moral dilemma we will act as our conscience dictates,

Milgram's obedience experiments teach us that in a concrete situation with

powerful social constraints, our moral sense can all too easily be

overwhelmed.

 

The experiment was also conducted with amazing verve and subtlety, for

example, Milgram ensured the 'experimenter' wear a grey lab coat rather than

a white one precisely because he didn't want subjects to think that the

'experimenter' was a medical doctor and thereby limit the implications of

his findings to the power of physician authority.

 

The nuance of Milgram's conclusions often also eludes the superficial

reporting of his work, which Blass goes to some lengths in this important

book to rectify. Milgram believed the true explanation of evil like the

Holocaust was linked to his experiments by their demonstration of 'a

propensity for people to accept definitions of action provided by legitimate

authority. That is, although the subject performs the action, he allows

authority to define its meaning'.

 

We didn't need Milgram to tell us we have a tendency to obey orders. What we

didn't know before Milgram's experiments is just how powerful this tendency

is. And having been enlightened about our extreme readiness to obey

authorities, we can try to take steps to guard ourselves against unwelcome

or reprehensible commands.

 

While many professions have taken heed of Milgrams work, indeed the US army

now incorporates Milgram's findings into its education of officers in order

to illuminate the issue of following unethical orders, it is not clear that

medicine has truly understood the implications of Milgram's work. How often

are doctors or medical students placed in the position of having to obey

'orders' or implicit expectations in hospitals or clinics over which they

are uneasy about the ethics?

 

However, what is perhaps most intriguing about Blass' account of Milgram's

work and life is not actually so much the dramatic implications of Milgram's

work. But instead the insight Blass gives us into the kind of unconventional

mind it takes to devise groundshaking experiments that will continue to echo

through the corridors of history long after much more mundane work which

currently dominates journals is forgotten.

 

Raj Persaud is Gresham Professor for Public Understanding of Psychiatry and

Consultant Psychiatrist The Maudsley Hospital, London

 

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