Free Behind the Shock Machine by Gina Perry Page A

contributing factor in the death of the so-called learner—I was very relieved that his name did not appear in such a column.”
    Subject 1817 wrote:
I’ve been waiting very anxiously for this report to really put my mind at ease and [have my] curiosity satisfied. Many times I wanted to look up a Mr. Wallace, who was my student. I was just that curious to know what had happened. Believe me, when no response came from Mr. Wallace with the stronger voltage I really believed the man was probably dead.
    Subject 711 confessed, “The experiment left such an effect on me that I spent the night in a cold sweat and nightmares because of the fear that I might have killed that man in the chair . . .”
    Herb was right to worry about screening people before they took part in the experiment. And he wasn’t the only one who made the point to Milgram. Subject 216, who described the experiment as “the most unpleasant night of my life,” wrote on his questionnaire, “I would here inject a word of caution—since taking part in the experiment I have suffered a mild heart attack—the one thing my doctor tells me is that I must avoid any form of tension. For this reason I feel that it is imperative that you make certain that any prospective participants have a clean bill of health.”
    Other subjects criticized Milgram for sending them home without telling them the truth. Subject 829 stated, “I was pretty well shook up for a few days after the experiment. It would have helped if I had been told the facts shortly after.”
    Subject 623 stated, “I seriously question the wisdom and ethics of not dehoaxing each subject immediately after the session. . . . Allowing subjects to remain deceived is not justified, in my opinion, even if such continued deception was thought necessary ‘to avoid contamination.’” 13
    But if they had been told at the end of the experiment that the learner was fine and the voltage wasn’t as strong as they had thought, why were so many subjects still worried that they had hurt or injured him?
    In February 1963, nine months after the experiments had ended, Milgram arranged (at Yale’s insistence) a series of follow-up group interviews to be conducted by psychiatrist Dr. Paul Errera. One hundred and thirty of Milgram’s subjects were invited back to Yale to take part in the sessions in order to establish whether any had been harmed by their participation in the experiments. From the transcripts of Errera’s interviews, it’s clear that some subjects didn’t get even the standard, rather flawed “dehoax” that Milgram had scripted. For some subjects, there had been no reassurance at all and no explanation that the learner was unharmed before they left the lab. Milgram might have been surprised to learn this because, as far as he knew, the standard explanation had been offered to all subjects—if not by him, then by his staff. But in one of Errera’s interviews, Subject 501, who had been in one of the heart-attack variations and had brought his wife along to the interview for support, explained how distressed he was after the experiment. Milgram came out from behind the one-way mirror to quiz him, and during their conversation it dawned on Milgram that the minimal “learner is alright” dehoax had not happened. Subject 501 described how, after going to the maximum voltage, he was shaking so much he didn’t think he’d be able to drive home. His wife was waiting for him outside, in the passenger seat of their car. She told the group: “He was shivering. I was parked out in front—it wasn’t cold—and I thought, What in the world are they doing in there? And he came out and I said, ‘Well, what was it like?’ I said, ‘You want me to drive, was it that bad?’ So he proceeded to tell me. . . . Then we, we, we got through New Haven somehow and then we got out to the turnpike and he was [going over] it until midnight that night. On and on and on.”
Milgram: Now, there was supposed to be a dehoax