Sexy, sexy Stanley Milgram

The Milgram Machine

The following is a scrap I’m considering adding to chapter one. It deals with Stanley Milgram, a name the general public may not know, but whose experiments are certainly familiar.

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The monkeys are just the tip of a much larger iceberg. Although the name may not be immediately recognizable, the late social psychologist Stanley Milgram exposed some of the most familiar and profound dynamics at play within organizations. While his concept of “six degrees of separation” is his most familiar work, it is the controversial “Milgram Experiments” that reveal a chilling yet pivotal aspect of organizational life. If the monkeys didn’t convince you that organizational forces change our behavior, perhaps watching someone administer deadly electrical shocks to another person will.

” Just doing my job” is one of the most telling indicators of the power of organizations over individual will. Sometimes seen as merely an excuse for bad behavior, the phrase took on a horrific aspect during the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Far from denying his complicity in coordinating the mass extermination of Jews, Eichmann admitted his role but added “I never did anything, great or small, without obtaining in advance express instructions from Adolf Hitler or any of my superiors.” Eichmann’s defense was that he was just doing his job. Unmoved, the court convicted him, and Eichmann was hanged on June 1, 1962.

Eichmann’s “superior orders” defense caught the imagination of Stanley Milgram, who wondered whether the power of obedience to authority figures could overcome an individual’s personal ethics and morality. To test this hypothesis, Milgram designed a series of experiments in which a subject would be directed to administer an electrical shock to another person. This was accomplished using a sinister-looking machine with dials and indicators of the level of shock. Unbeknownst to the subject, the person supposedly receiving the shock was in fact a research assistant only pretending to feel its effects. In most variations of the experiment, the researcher would assert that the subject must carry on the experiment, even as the voltage of the machine was increased incrementally to its maximum 450-volt level. No participant adamantly refused to administer the shocks before the 300-volt level, and in one set a stunning 37 out of 40 subjects delivered the 450-volt jolt three times in succession.

Milgram’s experiments produced some (ahem) shocking revelations about human behavior in the presence of authority, a key dimension of organizational life. One participant wrote to Milgram that he had known he was harming another person, but that he was not clear on why he was doing it. A Stanford researcher named Philip Zimbardo, a high school friend of Milgram, learned that even among the small number of subjects who refused to administer the final shocks, none of them requested that the experiment be terminated or even left the room to check on the health of the person being shocked without first asking permission to leave. Milgram concluded that

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

Zimbardo would eventually find himself uniquely placed to observe just how powerless people in such a system could become.

In 1971, Zimbardo led a group of researchers in what has become known as the Stanford Prison Experiments. A group of 24 mostly white, middle-class males was selected as the most psychologically healthy and stable subjects available. These subjects were divided into “inmates” and “guards”, with one of the researchers as the warden and Zimbardo as the superintendent. Accoutrements fitting to these roles–mirrored sunglasses and batons for the guards, ill-fitting smocks and rubber thongs for the inmates–were provided, and the guards were instructed that other than using physical violence, they were free to run the prison however they saw fit. On the day the experiment began, the actual Palo Alto police department arrested the prisoners at their homes and transported them to the prison for fingerprinting, mug shots, delousing, and assignment of an inmate number.

The results were disastrous. By the second day of the experiment, a riot had broken out, and the guards were volunteering for extra hours to crack down on the prisoners. By the sixth day the scene in the Stanford mock prison would look familiar to anyone who has seen pictures from Abu Ghraib: there were physical punishments, hunger strikes, sadistic and arbitrary rules and deprivations, and nudity and sexual humiliation. The two-week experiment was aborted before the end of the first week.

Although both Milgram and Zimbardo were criticized for the ethical implications of these experiments, they clearly demonstrate the often overwhelming power of the organization. Its effects are often both unnoticed and profound. Yet, these effects do not necessarily always trend toward the sinister and shocking. The overriding culture and norms of an organization can be creative as well as destructive. Organizations contain within themselves the broadest and deepest sweep of human life, including every emotion from joy to grief. The point is not that organizations oppress the individual; it is that organizations influence the individual far beyond what we may perceive. The organization and the individual are in a dance, and the most salient question is: who leads?

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Thoughts?