CAN HOLOCAST HAPPEN AGAIN?

 

OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY EXPERIMENT

         Stanley Milgram, professor of psychology at Yale University, got interested in the topic ‘obedience’ during the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann who was one of the architects of the Nazis “Final Solution” which oversaw the systematic execution of 6 million innocent jews. Like other high -profile war criminals, he too defended his actions as, ‘merely following orders of superiors.’  Milgram also, was intrigued by the acquiesce of normal German population to these mass killings. The agenda could have been set at top but the actual killings were carried out by officials down below and local population would have been aware and acceptable of such mass killings. Were they all demons or psychopaths? What conditions led people to become partner in such mass scale killings? These were the questions which Milgram wanted to test.

The experiment had three participants. The ‘experimenter’ overseeing the research and two volunteers who were told that the experiment focused on the effect of punishment on the ability to memorize and that they will be randomly assigned the role of either a teacher or learner through draw of lots. This was a lie as the experiment was a test of obedience and one of the two volunteers was a confederate of the experimenter. The draw was fixed so that the confederate was always the learner and the true participant always landed up as ‘teacher.’  The learner was strapped on an electric chair with an electrode attached to his wrist which was further connected to a shock generator placed with the teacher in the other room. The generator, specially designed for the experiment, had 30 level of shocks from 15 volts and increasing in 15-volt increments to 450 volts. In addition to numerical voltage all switches were labeled with terms describing the intensity of shock like ‘slight shock’, ‘moderate shock’, ‘danger: severe shock’. The final three switches were labeled with an ominous ‘XXX.’ The learner was given a list of word pairs to memorize. The test would consist of the teacher calling out the first word which was to be matched by the learner. If the answer was incorrect the teacher would administer a shock to the learner via shock generator which would increase incrementally to maximum 450 volts. Any silence was to be taken as wrong reply resulting in increment of the shock. The generator, though, was fake. It caused no shocks but the teacher had no means of discovering this and performed the experiment believing that the shocks were for real. The generator was integrated to a tape recorder, kept next to the learner, with prerecorded sounds.  With increasing shock level, the recorder had audible protests ranging from mild cry to severe sounds of agony with loud banging of doors and cries for stopping the experiment. At 300 volts the response turned into cries of extreme agony and distress. From 330 volts onwards there were no sounds indicating that the learner had become unconscious.

All the participants gave the initial mild level shocks. Few refused after around 150 volts, but many continued. Every participant paused the experiment at least once worrying and expressing concern about the learner but most continued after being prompted by the experimenter to continue. They continued despite being visibly uncomfortable about their actions. They were seen sweating, trembling, stuttering, biting their lips, groaning, digging their finger nails into their skin and some were displaying nervous laughing fits or seizures. In the end almost two third of the participants (26 out of 40) had shocked another person to the max 450 volts (marked clearly as XXX: DANGER: SEVERE SHOCK), even when they felt that it was wrong and wanted to stop. They all felt pressured to continue by the perceived authority of the person leading the experiment despite getting no response from the student indicating that he is either dead or severely incapacitated by the shocks. The point to note here is that there was no penalty for refusing. The participants were told that they could withdraw from the experiment anytime. Also, it was a benign lab setting and the authority was a lab coat draped scientist. The results shook the world. Normal, well intentioned and educated people with no hostility could be compelled to unimaginable hostilities merely on command of a perceived authority. The results also showed that holocaust could happen anywhere.