Page 41 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

see whether the threat of punishment affected someone’s ability to perform memory tasks. As the
shocks escalated, Wallace would cry out in pain, and ultimately he started hammering on the walls.
But if the “teacher” wavered, the imposing instructor would urge them on:
“Please continue.”
“The experiment requires that you continue.”
“It is absolutely essential that you continue.”

“You have no other choice, you must go on.”
The reason the experiment is so famous is that virtually all of the volunteers complied. Sixty-five
percent ended up administering the maximum dose to the hapless learner. In the wake of the Second
World War—and the revelations about what German guards had been ordered to do in Nazi
concentration camps—Milgram’s findings caused a sensation.
But to Levine, there’s a second lesson to the experiment. The volunteer shows up and meets the
imposing young John Williams. He was actually a local high-school biology teacher, chosen, in
Milgram’s words, because he was “technical-looking and dry, the type you would later see on
television in connection with the space program.” Everything Williams said during the experiment
had been memorized from a script written by Milgram himself.

“Mr. Wallace” was in fact a man named Jim McDonough. He worked for the railroad. Milgram
liked him for the part of victim because he was “mild and submissive.” His cries of agony were
taped and played over a loudspeaker. The experiment was a little amateur theatrical production. And
the word amateur here is crucial. The Milgram experiment was not produced for a Broadway stage.
Mr. Wallace, by Milgram’s own description, was a terrible actor. And everything about the
experiment was, to put it mildly, more than a little far-fetched. The electric-shock machine didn’t
actually give shocks. More than one participant saw the loudspeaker in the corner and wondered
why Wallace’s cries were coming from there, not from behind the door to the room where Wallace
was strapped in. And if the purpose of the experiment was to measure learning, why on earth did
Williams spend the entire time with the teacher and not behind the door with the learner? Didn’t that
make it obvious that what he really wanted to do was observe the person inflicting the pain, not the
person receiving the pain? As hoaxes go, the Milgram experiment was pretty transparent. And just
as with Levine’s trivia test, people fell for it. They defaulted to truth.
“I actually checked the death notices in the New Haven Register for at least two weeks after the
experiment to see if I had been involved and a contributing factor in the death of the so-called
learner—I was very relieved that his name did not appear,” one subject wrote to Milgram in a
follow-up questionnaire. Another wrote, “Believe me, when no response came from Mr. Wallace
with the stronger voltage I really believed the man was probably dead.” These are adults—not
callow undergraduates—who were apparently convinced that a prestigious institution of higher
learning would run a possibly lethal torture operation in one of its basements. “The experiment left
such an effect on me,” another wrote, “that I spent the night in a cold sweat and nightmares because
of the fear that I might have killed that man in the chair.”
But here’s the crucial detail. Milgram’s subjects weren’t hopelessly gullible. They had doubts—
lots of doubts! In her fascinating history of the obedience experiments, Behind the Shock Machine,
Gina Perry interviews a retired toolmaker named Joe Dimow, who was one of Milgram’s original
subjects. “I thought, ‘This is bizarre,’” Dimow told Perry. Dimow became convinced that Wallace
was faking it.
I said I didn’t know exactly what was going on, but I had my suspicions about it. I thought, “If
I’m right in my suspicions, then he [the learner] is in collusion with them; he must be. And I’m
not delivering shocks at all. He’s just hollering out every once in a while.”
But then Mr. Wallace came out of the locked room at the end of the experiment and put on a little
act. He looked, Dimow remembers, “haggard” and emotional. “He came in with a handkerchief in
his hand, wiping his face. He came up to me and he offered his hand to shake hands with me and he
said, ‘I want to thank you for stopping it’.…When he came in, I thought, ‘Wow. Maybe it really was
true.’” Dimow was pretty sure that he was being lied to. But all it took was for one of the liars to
extend the pretense a little longer—look a little upset and mop his brow with a handkerchief—and
Dimow folded his cards.