Movies That Settle: Obedience - The Milgram Experiment

For nearly 20 years of my adult life, I worked at a small liberal arts college which was part of a larger, prestigious university. One of my tasks was to facilitate film showings, and every year for probably eighteen of those 20 years, I presided over multiple showings of a documentary called Obedience, chronicling an experiment by Stanley Milgram from the early 60’s. The experiment was meant to discern the willingness of people to obey an authority figure, even if they were being asked to do something that was against their principles. If you took a college social science class, you may have even seen this film or studied this experiment.

To summarize, forty men representing various levels of education and a range of occupations are brought in to participate in a learning experiment. The men are brought in two at a time, with one man being designated the teacher and the other the learner, supposedly at random. The idea is that the teacher reads several word pairs, and then the learner is supposed to remember them from a list of words. Every time he does not remember the correct matching word, he receives an electric shock. Each successive time he gets a word pair wrong, the voltage goes up, all the way to 450 volts, which will definitely make your hair stick up funny.

As we see in the documentary, the learner is told of this, and lets the teacher and administrator know that he has a mild heart condition, and these shocks may have an adverse affect on him, and he is told that “although the shocks are painful, they are not dangerous.” As the experiment progresses, the learner keeps getting the answers wrong and the teacher ascends to higher and higher voltages, and the learner shouts in pain when he receives a shock. The teacher lets out a brief chuckle in response, but proceeds with the test at the administrator’s urging. Eventually, with the voltage climbing, the learner yells out that his heart is bothering him, and (rather amusingly) screams, “Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!”

The teacher finally refuses to go any further until someone goes to check on the poor learner. The administrator continues to push, saying, “You must go on with the experiment.” The gentleman refuses, saying that the experiment really means nothing to him, so why should he continue? And they can keep the money they promised him for partaking in the experiment.

The teacher is then asked a few questions, such as why he chuckled and how he felt about being asked to harm another person. It is finally revealed that the whole experiment has nothing to do with learning word pairs, but instead is about how people can be pushed and manipulated into obeying. The learner is actually in on the whole thing, and his responses, including the hilarious, “Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!” was pre-recorded. The teacher and the learner then are re-introduced, and exchange pleasantries to ensure that there are no hard feelings, and the teacher is excused, perhaps only slightly embarrassed.

The documentary shows several more instances with similar outcomes, except that the teachers went farther up on the voltage scale. Apparently, 65% of the teachers went all the way to 450, even after the learner stopped answering the questions entirely, which we are told constitutes a wrong answer.  And most of the ones that we saw gave the requisite nervous chuckle when the learner yelped in pain.

In fact, since I was showing this documentary in a large auditorium filled with college freshmen, it should be noted that they also laughed at that, and I would be remiss if I did not admit to laughing at that same moment (at least the first 10 or so times I showed it). The thing that made this particular film stand out amongst the hundreds that I showed while working there, was that the first several years I showed Obedience, it was on 16mm film. If you are too young to have had home movies or whatever on film, let me tell you that it was a giant pain in the ass to show them. Fortunately, Obedience was only 45 minutes long so it didn’t require any reel-changes. Longer films required two projectors to be set up side-by-side and the second one had to be ready to go so that there was no break in the film. Some of you may know about the little “cigarette burn” that used to appear in the top right corner of the screen in pre-digital movies, which would signal the reel-change. I used to show movies that were four or five reels long, and I know that as a film major I should enjoy the tactile feeling of threading film through a projector and onto reels for the enjoyment of hundreds of young minds, but really, it was a pain in the ass. In fact, one of my first acts on the job was buying the college a DVD player.

Anyway, the point of that long-winded explanation of film history was that 16mm film showings required me to be there to make sure that nothing went wrong (and seeing as how most of that equipment was about 30 years old at that point, the likelihood of that was high), so I was present to hear the laughter in the large audience when that poor, fake man bellowed after receiving electric shocks. I’m not sure if that was something that the professors discussed in class afterwards but it seems like something that would be worth mentioning. Also, 65% (as reported by wikipedia) of teachers going all the way to 450 volts just because some guy who is dressed in a white coat says they must does seem ridiculously high, but considering the current political climate, maybe it isn’t. And, not for nothing, but what happens when they get to 450? Does the administrator finally say, “Ok, enough. By the way, this was all bullshit, and you sir, may have some serious issues.”

As I was researching this post, I found out that Dr. Milgram conceived of this experiment after the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann began, and his goal was to study the “psychology of genocide.” Basically, like a lot of similar experiments (And A Few Good Men), they were trying to answer the question, “Were the Nazis just following orders?” 

There were also a lot of ethical concerns raised based on the stress it put on the teachers who had to administer electric shocks to a fellow human being, The results of their stress ranged from sweating and biting their lips to actual seizures. I wonder how high on the voltage scale the seizure guys went? In spite of the ethical issues, however, when surveyed after,  apparently 84% of the participants said that they were “glad” to have been involved. I guess it’s a good way to judge your moral compass. A quiet chuckle? That’s just human nature. You’re fine. Going all the way to 450 when the guy has stopped answering? You’re a real asshole.

I guess the funny thing is that, having never sat in the follow-up classes to see what the students thought, I never made the Nazi connection. But a trusted colleague of mine who taught Social Science did get back to me and give a little insight into the experiement: “This film is a part of a whole major trend in postwar social science, which became somewhat obsessed with the Holocaust.  Milgram’s famous experiments, Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, Solomon Asch’s line experiments, and others were all trying to figure out how ordinary people could participate in genocide.  It’s a good fucking question.  Long story short, social scientists started positing that we humans have less independent agency that we think, and we tend more toward obedience and conformity than we’d like. The Asch conformity experiments are really interesting.  If this sort of things holds any interest for you, you could look them up.”

It’s hard to fathom, but we probably do have a lot less independent agency than we’d lie. I suppose I never made the Nazi connection because, in a way, I was also just following orders. My job was to show that film (again and again!), and I did it to the best of my ability each time, unless I was hungover. Isn’t that kind of what we all do at our jobs? The man in the white coat telling us to proceed may be metaphorical in most cases - at least, I hope so - but isn’t the idea the same? I’m not actually being asked to harm people… yet. But I do often get asked to do things that I don’t really want to do. Were the Nazis just doing their jobs? Were the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, 2021 just following along, or did they all really believe in what they were doing? Did they chuckle when the security guards were getting pushed around by an angry mob? I don’t know, but it’s a safe bet none of them went to my college and watched a screening of Obedience presided over by me. 

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