Free Behind the Shock Machine by Gina Perry Page B

after the experiment in which you met the guy [the learner] . Now Mr. [blank] , did you meet the man after the experiment?
Subject 501: Oh yes, I recall he stomped out saying something about that the teacher had the best part of it, or something like that.
Milgram: But it wasn’t supposed to work that way at all. Did the experimenter tell you that the shocks were not painful afterward?
Subject 501: No. I certainly expected him to, but—
    Later in the same interview, Subject 501 quizzed Milgram about the dehoax.
Subject 501: You say you’re supposed to dehoax the whole thing?
Milgram: Everyone was supposed to be told that the shocks weren’t painful and they were supposed to shake hands with the man who had been shocked. Did that happen in your case?
Subject 501: Well, no, he came out and he was—he meant business or something like that—
Subject 612: He still was indignant about it.
    Milgram must have been disturbed at Subject 501’s description. He seemed shocked to find that some subjects were not even given the basic dehoax. After Subject 612 and Dr. Errera left, Milgram stayed on in the room with Subject 501 and his wife, talking through how the man felt, with Milgram trying to persuade him that he shouldn’t feel guilty or upset about his obedience. 14 And on a number of occasions during the remaining Errera interviews, he questioned subjects about the debriefing they were given.
    How had this lack of debriefing occurred? At the time he wrote his first article, about the first condition, Milgram’s description of the debriefing process (although misleadingly labeled “dehoax”) was an accurate account of what occurred in conditions 1 to 4. I heard Milgram on the tapes of condition 3, telling subjects that the learner had been overreacting and the machine was only for administering shocks to small animals. 15 Alan had described Milgram’s “careful debriefing” as he had observed it in the early stage of the experiments. He and Milgram watched conditions 1 to 3, and Milgram had gone out from behind the mirror to handle the debriefing himself if he felt that a subject was particularly upset. 16
    But while the first four conditions ran through the summer break of 1961, subsequent variations coincided with the academic year. Milgram would have been less available to supervise the experiments, and Alan had left his job as research assistant. Milgram admitted to one subject in the group interviews that he was present at only about “a third” of the experiments. 17
    Alan agreed that Milgram didn’t go far enough in his debriefing. But, if anything, Alan felt that Milgram, in his desire to make his subjects feel better, let them off the hook. He felt that more of them should have been troubled by their behavior.
    It was Saturday and this was my second visit to Davis, and this time we’d gone to his university office to talk. The building was deserted except for the sound of a custodian rattling a bucket at the end of the corridor. The office was small and cramped—he shared it with two others—and it felt stuffy.
    Alan conducted interviews with forty of Milgram’s subjects in 1961 as part of a study of personality and obedience and was frustrated to find how few had learned anything useful from the experience. “I remember one man who had been fully obedient told me that he would never even harm a squirrel, that he always braked for wild animals. Okay, so he’s a good person in that sense, but he has gone through this whole shock board, administering what he thought were dangerous shocks to a human being, but he doesn’t seem to make the connection. I felt that maybe Stanley was giving these people too much justification for their own behavior.”
    Alan told me that he thought Milgram gave his subjects too easy an excuse when he reassured them—whatever voltage they had gone to—that their behavior was normal. It was understandable, Alan said, that Milgram wanted to make them feel better, to make sure