Knowing & Behaving

In the August 2nd New Republic Adam Kirsch writes about several new books that discuss the experience of “ordinary Germans” during the Holocaust. The problem of the “ordinary German” as Kirsch puts it is to try to explain how “citizens from an advanced society, famous for its culture and education—could be led in the space of a few years to commit a genocide of the Jews.”

Of course, we know that this problem is not confined to citizens of Germany; it is the problem of any human being when asked by an authority under extreme pressure to attack their neighbors. And who among us believes that they would do that?

Can we learn anything from historical events like this? Is knowing about them sufficient to immunize us against strong pressures to commit violence against another human being? This is the age-old question of the effect of knowledge on behavior.

The research on this question is far from cheering. In study after study it has been demonstrated that prior knowledge or anticipating an event has very little effect on how we will behave when put in similar one. Perhaps the most relevant example of the situation Kirsch is talking about is the well-known experiments of Stanley Milgram in which individuals where asked to deliver shock to another human being in the guise of a study on the effects of punishment.

To study the effects of knowing about these studies, another experimenter gave subjects a good deal of written and verbally presented information about Milgram’s experiments. Then the subjects were asked to serve as experimenters themselves in a similar study. Of the 24 informed subjects only 1 resisted the demands of the authority to continue the experiment in spite of the clearly visible distress of the confederates who were ostensibly given shock for errors they made on a learning task. The author writes:

“For these participants, knowing that people are willing to coerce others and cause distress to obtain and scientific understanding and feeling the original Milgram study to be personally distasteful, did not preclude behaving in a manner similar to that obtained in the original Milgram study.”

The increasing public awareness of Milgram's research provides an additional test of this effect. His research has been widely written about in the media, portrayed in television plays and films, and was the subject of at least one popular song. The studies have been discussed in countless public forums and many academic disciplines. Milgram's work is as well known as any program of research in psychology.

If, as a result of this dissemination process, individuals have become more "enlightened" about unreasonable demands of authority, one might expect a diminution in the overall level of obedience in ensuing replications of his work. However, a recent analysis of these replications, which covered a 22-year period, from 1963 to 1983, found no systematic decline in obedience during this time. The overall level of obedience in the most recent studies was just as high (65% of the subjects) as it was in the earlier ones.

What can be done in the face of such evidence? It is difficult to discount it, given the various situations in both the laboratory and under natural conditions in which it has been observed. Frankly, I am not sure there’s much that can be done. In a situation of strong social pressure, even the strongest succumb.

Kirsch concludes: “A society than can only be saved by heroes is not going to be saved: there will always be far more selfish and corrupt people, than good but ineffectual ones...Someone such as Sophie School, the twenty-one year old who distributed anti-Hitler pamphlets in Munich knowing it would lead to her death, deserves everlasting praise … but she knew full well that she was not going to stop Hitler. It took the Allied armies and many millions of death to do that.”


References
Shelton, G. A. (1982). The generalization of understanding to behavior: The role of perspective in enlightenment. Doctoral dissertation, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

Blass, T (2000). The Milgram paradigm after 35 years: Some things we now know about obedience to authority. In Thomas Blass (Ed) Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Obedience to Authority

It is not often that a psychological experiment is discussed in work of fiction. Stanley Milgram’s well-known experiment on obedience and disobedience is an exception. You may recall that in the guise of a study on the effect of punishment on learning, subjects were “ordered” by the experimenter to give increasingly more severe shocks for errors made by the learner in another room who cried out in pain as the shocks became more painful. (Of course, the learner never received shocks and the cries of pain were bogus, although the teacher believed shock was being delivered to the learner.) Milgram reported that sixty-five percent of the subjects in this basic procedure obeyed the experimenter and went to the very end of the thirty-point shock level generator.

Milgram's classic experiments stunned me, as they have virtually everyone who reads or hears about them. They revealed the enormous power of the social situation in controlling behavior and the extent to which an individual can be induced to harm another person. In his recent discussion of two recent novels that describe these studies, Edward Champion says, “Ordinary people have relatively few resources to resist being sucked into an activity which normal circumstances would see them shrinking from in disgust.” Moreover, they did this in a compelling laboratory situation of deep personal consequence to the participants. Finally, as they have for so many others, their relevance to the Holocaust moved me deeply. The force of these experiments has similarly affected countless students and scholars in a variety of disciplines to this day.

Champion describes two recent novels, Chip Kidd’s The Learners, and Will Lavender’s Obedience, that have concerned themselves with Milgram’s experiments. I have just started reading a third, Rebecca Goldstein’s tour-de-force, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. Early in the novel, the brilliant game theorist, The Goddess of Game Theory, Lucinda Mandelbaum attends a seminar in which the long-winded speaker claims the subjects (teachers) in Milgram’s experiments fail to display the slightest degree of moral reasoning. Madelbaum takes issue with this interpretation arguing that the experiment is an instance of what is called an escalation game in game theory.

“Once a participant takes the first step, he’s already paid a certain price—he’s inflicted discomfort, and he’s feeling bad about it—but if he stops he’ll get nothing for his pain…So once he’s made his first bid, and the experimenter escalates by telling him he has to give an even stronger shock at the next mistake or he will not have completed the experiment like a good subject, he’s more than likely to escalate by complying.”

Lucinda claims that once you view the study this way, the results are completely predictable. She then proposes a test: run the experiment without requiring the subject to incrementally increase the intensity of the shock. She predicts not a single subject will deliver the highest level on the shock generator.

In fact, her interpretation does not predict the experimental results observed by Milgram and others who have replicated the study. In particular, it does not account for the fact that thirty-five percent of the subjects do not follow the experimenter’s order, who say they cannot go on any longer, and withdraw from the experiment. They are known as the disobedient subjects, the resistors, if you will.

In addition, Lucinda’s prediction is incorrect. Milgram did conduct the experiment she proposes and found that when subjects were allowed to choose the shock intensity level, there was one subject who continued to the highest level (30th shock level) and another went to the 25th level, well beyond the point at which the learner had stopped responding altogether, which should have led any normal person to wonder if he was even alive.

Milgram concludes his discussion of the study this way: “Insofar as the experiments tell us something about human nature, the revelation on how men act toward others when they are on their own is here. Whatever leads to shocking the victim at the highest level cannot be explained by autonomously generated aggression but needs to be explained by the transformation of behavior that comes about through obedience to orders.”

I suspect Rebecca Goldstein was not aware of this study—Number 11 in a series of variations Milgram carried out on his basic design. Is a factual refutation of an explanation presented in a work of fiction relevant? In order to answer this question you might want to look at the context in which it is introduced. Everything Goldstein had earlier presented about game theory, the nature of a zero-sum game, and escalation games is factually correct. To maintain consistency with this framework then, it seems reasonable to me to continue in that vein and either propose another untested empirical explanation or let the story go forward in light of the falsification of Lucinda’s proposal