A Slightly Less Horrible Humanity

A new paper suggests that Stanley Milgram’s 1963 “obedience” experiments – which, infamously, involved volunteers delivering what they believed to be painful electric shocks to strangers on the instructions of an authority figure – might not be as damning as previously thought. Josie Glausiusz runs down what was found when the paper’s authors revisited the Milgram archive at Yale, noting that the participants were not “passive conformists blindly following malevolent orders, but rather ‘engaged followers’ who identified with the noble goals of Milgram’s research”:

Forty-four percent of respondents were “very glad” to have participated in the study. Sixty-four percent indicated that, once the experiment was over, it had not bothered them at all. One volunteer wrote, “I am very delighted to be apart of this project. … I sure hope my efforts, and cooperation have been somewhat useful.” Another replied, “I did not like the idea of giving the shocks, but had complete confidence in the instructor and the nature of the experiment.” While the experiment had prompted depressing thoughts and nightmares in some, others expressed satisfaction that they had been “of some small help,” and a firm belief in “experiments that will help to understand people.”

[Alex] Haslam and colleagues’ statistical analysis of the responses revealed that participants were “highly engaged” in the science, seeing it as a social good to which they were pleased to contribute. Milgram himself had convinced them of this when he wrote to them, at the conclusion of his study, that “the experiments you took part in represent the first efforts to understand [obedience] in an objective, scientific manner.” Their investigation, the researchers say, “supports the view that people are able to inflict harm on others not because they are unaware that they are doing wrong, but rather because—as engaged followers—they know full well what they are doing and believe it to be right.”