The Order That Never Worked

00:00Four sentences

Hi, it's Qing. [pause] Most people know the story in one breath. In 1961, at Yale, a psychologist got ordinary men to give what they thought were deadly electric shocks to a stranger, just because a man in a grey lab coat told them to. Two out of three went all the way. And the moral everyone took home is that people will do terrible things if someone in authority gives the order. [pause] But the man in the lab coat wasn't free to say whatever he wanted. He had a script. When a volunteer hesitated, he was allowed four sentences, in a fixed order. First: "Please continue," or "Please go on." Second: "The experiment requires that you continue." Third: "It is absolutely essential that you continue." And fourth, the last resort: "You have no other choice. You must go on." [pause] Only one of those four is actually an order. It's the last one. And when researchers went back, decades later, and looked at what that sentence did, they found something that doesn't fit the story at all. So today I want to reread the obedience experiments. Not the legend. The paper, the book, the archive, and what happened when people tried it again.

01:35What everyone remembers

Here's the setup, as Stanley Milgram described it in 1963. He put an ad in the local paper in New Haven: men wanted for a study of memory and learning, four dollars for an hour, plus fifty cents for the bus. Forty men came in for the first version: a postal clerk, teachers, salesmen, factory workers. Each one met a friendly, middle-aged man who was introduced as another volunteer. They drew slips of paper to decide roles, and the draw was rigged, so the real volunteer always became the "teacher" and the friendly man always became the "learner." The learner was strapped into a chair in the next room, with an electrode on his wrist. The teacher sat in front of a machine with thirty switches, from 15 volts up to 450, labelled from "Slight Shock" through "Danger: Severe Shock" to two last switches marked only "X X X." Every wrong answer meant one switch higher. [pause] Nobody was being shocked. The learner was an actor, an accountant named James McDonough, and the experimenter in the grey coat was a biology teacher named John Williams. But the teachers didn't know that. In that first version, the learner pounded on the wall at 300 volts, and after that he went silent. Silence counted as a wrong answer. Twenty-six of the forty men kept going to the very last switch. [pause] The timing made it famous. That same year, Adolf Eichmann was on trial in Jerusalem, and Hannah Arendt was writing about "the banality of evil," the idea that great crimes can be carried out by people who are not monsters, just functionaries. Milgram's lab seemed to show it with numbers. His own explanation, worked out later, was that people slip into what he called an "agentic state." They stop seeing themselves as the authors of their actions and start seeing themselves as instruments of someone else's will. The responsibility moves up the chain. That's the version in the textbooks, and it's a clean, frightening idea.

03:58The parts that didn't make the headline

The first thing you notice when you go past the 1963 paper is that there wasn't one experiment. There were more than twenty. Milgram spent the next couple of years changing one thing at a time, and he put them all in his 1974 book, *Obedience to Authority*. [pause] Move the learner into the same room, and fewer people go to the end. Make the teacher press the learner's hand onto a metal plate, and fewer still. Take the experimenter out of the room and have him give instructions by phone, and full obedience drops to about one in five. And Milgram noticed something odd in that version: several teachers quietly gave lower shocks than they were told to, and said nothing. They didn't refuse. They just stopped doing what they were told once nobody was watching. [pause] Then there's the version I find most telling. Two experimenters in the room, and at a certain point they start to disagree. One says continue. The other says stop. If people were simply obeying authority, you might expect them to follow whichever voice was more forceful. They didn't. Almost everyone stopped at the moment the two men disagreed. [pause] In 2014, the psychologists Alex Haslam, Steve Loughnan and Gina Perry went back to all of the conditions where people could go to 450 volts, twenty-one of them, seven hundred and forty people in total. Across all of them, the share who went all the way was not two out of three. It was 43.6 percent. Less than half. So the famous number is real, but it's one setting of a dial that Milgram himself spent years turning. And the question his own data keeps asking is not "do people obey?" but "under what conditions do people keep going, and under what conditions do they stop?"

06:00You have no other choice

Now back to the four sentences. [pause] In 2009 a psychologist named Jerry Burger ran the experiment again in California. Ethics boards don't allow the full thing anymore, so he stopped at 150 volts, the point where the learner first demands to be let out. That's a reasonable place to stop, because in Milgram's data, most people who got past 150 went on to the end. Seventy percent of Burger's volunteers were willing to keep going past it. That's a bit lower than Milgram's number for the same point, but not by much. So people in 2009 were roughly as willing as people in 1961. [pause] But Burger's team also used Milgram's four prods, word for word, and they looked at what happened after each one. The further down the list the experimenter had to go, the less likely people were to continue. And of the volunteers who heard the last one, "You have no other choice, you must go on," none of them continued. Not a few. None. The numbers were small, so I wouldn't put too much weight on "none" by itself. But it matches what other researchers found when they went back to Milgram's own recordings: the sentence that most resembles a real order is the one that worked worst. [pause] [slowly, thoughtfully] Think about what that sentence does. Up to that point, the volunteer is inside a story where he is helping with an important piece of research. "The experiment requires that you continue." That's an appeal to the project. Then a man says, "You have no other choice," and the story breaks. It becomes obvious that he does have a choice, because someone is telling him he doesn't. Burger's team listened to what people said out loud during the session, and the ones who talked about being responsible for what was happening, the ones who said, in effect, "this is on me," were the least likely to go past 150. [pause] In 2014, Haslam, Steve Reicher and Megan Birney tested this directly. They built a milder version of the task, something unpleasant but harmless, and changed only what the experimenter said when people wanted to stop. Prods that talked about the science kept people going. Prods that sounded like orders made people stop. So the pure order doesn't just fail to help. It backfires.

08:42The letters in Box 44

If orders didn't keep people at the machine, what did? Part of the answer is sitting in a box at Yale. Milgram's papers are archived there, and in Box 44 there are the replies to a questionnaire he mailed to his volunteers after they'd been told the truth. Eighty-four percent said they were glad or very glad to have taken part. Only about one percent said they were sorry. [pause] In 2015 Haslam and Reicher, with two colleagues, went through those replies and the letters people wrote alongside them, and they called their paper "Happy to have been of service." What comes through, again and again, is that people believed in what they had been doing. They thought they'd helped science find out something important about human beings. These are not the words of men who switched their judgement off. They used their judgement, and their judgement said: this is Yale, this is research, this man knows why it matters, and I'm part of it. [pause] There's another layer in the archive, and it complicates the clean version from the other side. Gina Perry spent years with the original tapes and records for her book *Behind the Shock Machine*. She found that John Williams, the man in the grey coat, often went well beyond the four scripted lines. With some volunteers he pushed more than twenty times. He improvised. So the experiment that is supposed to measure how far people go when someone gives an order was, in practice, often measuring how far they go when someone keeps persuading them. That's a different thing, and in some ways a more realistic one.

10:31Followers, not machines

Haslam and Reicher have a name for what they think was going on: engaged followership. People don't go along with harm because they've become instruments. They go along because they've come to identify with a cause and the person leading it, and they work, sometimes creatively, to help it succeed. Not everyone in the field accepts this reading, and Milgram's "agentic state" still has defenders. But it explains things the old reading struggles with: why the telephone version collapsed, why two arguing experimenters stopped everybody, why the order backfired, and why so many people wrote back to say they were glad. [pause] It also lines up with something historians found about the trial that made Milgram famous. Arendt saw Eichmann in a glass booth in Jerusalem, a dull man repeating clichés, and called it banality. But in 2011 the historian Bettina Stangneth published *Eichmann Before Jerusalem*, built on hundreds of pages of interviews he had given among Nazi exiles in Argentina in the 1950s, before he was caught. In those, he isn't a clerk following orders. He's proud and committed. The dull functionary in the booth was, at least partly, a defence. [pause] So the two founding stories of "ordinary people just following orders," the lab in New Haven and the courtroom in Jerusalem, both look different when you go back to the sources. In both cases, what keeps people going is less the order than the belief.

12:15The sentence to watch

Why does this matter outside a psychology class? Because the two readings tell you to watch for different things. [pause] If the danger is obedience, then you listen for commands. "You have no choice." "Do it because I said so." And the research suggests those are the easy ones. People hear them, and something in them stands up. [pause] If the danger is engaged followership, then the sentences to watch are the reasonable ones. "This is important." "The project needs this." "You're helping." Those are the lines that kept people at the machine in New Haven, the ones that came from a respected place and gave a good reason. They're also the lines that make most good work possible, which is exactly what makes them hard to notice. The question they invite isn't "am I obeying?" It's "what exactly am I being asked to do, and would I still do it if I took the cause out of the sentence?" [pause] One more detail from the 1963 paper. Milgram wrote that many of his volunteers sweated, trembled, stuttered, dug their fingernails into their own skin, broke into nervous laughter. Once, he noted, the laughter turned into a seizure so violent that the session had to be stopped. They were not calm instruments. They were people in conflict, and what tipped them was not the loudest voice in the room but the most convincing one. [pause] [casually] Okay, that's enough for one day. Talk tomorrow.