about one person in a thousand would be willing to continue to the
end. No one, then, was prepared for the behavior patterns that the ex-
periment actually produced.
How can we explain those alarming patterns? Perhaps, as some have
argued, it has to do with the fact that the subjects were all males who
are known as a group for their aggressive tendencies, or that the subjects
didn’t recognize the potential harm that such high shock voltages could
cause, or that the subjects were a freakish collection of moral cretins
who enjoyed the chance to inflict misery. But there is good evidence
against each of these possibilities. First, the subjects’ sex was shown by
a later experiment to be irrelevant to their willingness to give all the
shocks to the victim; female Teachers were just as likely to do so as the
males in Milgram’s initial study.
The explanation that subjects weren’t aware of the potential physical
danger to the victim was also examined in a subsequent experiment
and found to be wanting. In that version, when the victim was instructed
to announce that he had a heart condition and to declare that his heart
was being affected by the shock—“That’s all. Get me out of here. I told
you I had heart trouble. My heart’s starting to bother me. I refuse to go
on. Let me out”—the results were the same as before; 65 percent of the
subjects carried out their duties faithfully through the maximum shock.
Finally, the explanation that Milgram’s subjects were a twisted, sad-
istic bunch not at all representative of the average citizen has proven
unsatisfactory as well. The people who answered Milgram’s newspaper
ad to participate in his “memory” experiment represented a standard
cross section of ages, occupations, and educational levels within our
society. What’s more, later on, a battery of personality scales showed
these people to be quite normal psychologically, with not a hint of
psychosis as a group. They were, in fact, just like you and me; or, as
Milgram likes to term it, they are you and me. If he is right that his
studies implicate us in their grisly findings, the unanswered question
becomes an uncomfortably personal one: What could make us do such
things?
Milgram is sure he knows the answer. It has to do, he says, with a
deep-seated sense of duty to authority within us all. According to Mil-
gram, the real culprit in the experiments was his subject’s inability to
defy the wishes of the boss of the study—the lab-coated researcher who
urged and, if need be, directed the subjects to perform their duties,
despite the emotional and physical mayhem they were causing.
The evidence supporting Milgram’s obedience to authority explana-
tion is strong. First, it is clear that, without the researcher’s directives
to continue, the subjects would have ended the experiment quickly.
They hated what they were doing and agonized over their victim’s
160 / Influence