Science as Art: Revisiting Milgram's Shock Experiment

Fifty-two years ago, the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology published the unassumingly titled “Behavioral Study of Obedience” by Yale professor Stanley Milgram. The research that went into the article—and the maelstrom that changed its author's life in the years after—are the subject of Michael Almereyda's new film Experimenter, which screens at the Wex this Friday with the director in attendance.

One of psychology's most notorious experiments, Milgram paid volunteers to ask questions to an unseen "learner" in another room and deliver increasingly powerful shocks whenever the other man answered incorrectly. As the voltage increased, pre-recorded screams played and the learner—unshocked and in on the obedience experiment—shouted through the wall protests and pleadings, mentioned a heart condition, and in later stages of some sessions, fell silent. A scientist politely rebuffed concerns on the volunteer's part, leading in the experiment's most famous variation to 65% of participants taking the questions all the way through to the maximum 450 volts, the last switch in a series marked "Danger: Severe Shock."

Championed by Milgram as stark evidence of the power of authority and some kind of explanation for the horrors of the Holocaust and other massacres, the research has come under increasing scrutiny. Earlier this year, Atlantic writer Cari Romm detailed the various holes that have been punched into Milgram's work. Some recordings indicate that participants were coerced into continuing the experiment. Research and interviews supporting Gina Perry's 2012 book Behind the Shock Machine suggest that several subjects were fully aware that the whole setup was a hoax. And several commentators find a problem of drawing such sweeping conclusions as Milgram did from an hour-long laboratory experiment that had little consideration for the multi-faceted, long-simmering nuances of, say, Vietnam.

Yet the experiment is firmly established as a cultural landmark. Apart from being standard fare in any introductory psychology course, the Milgram experiments inspired pop songs, books, plays, storylines in Law & Order and Bones, a made-for-TV-movie starring William Shatner (played by Kellan Lutz in Almereyda's film), recreations for nightly news stories tied to Abu Ghraib and other atrocities, a French television broadcast in game show format, a jewelry collection, and some basis for rich parodies on psychological study.

In his conclusion to a 2014 essay for Aeon magazine, writer Malcolm Harris offers an explanation for the experiment's cultural longevity—and unknowingly provides an enticing tease for the new film. "To view the Milgram experiments as a work of art is to include the haunted young doctor as a character," he writes, "and to question his reliability as a narrator. As an artwork, the experiments can tell us about much more than obedience to authority; they speak to memory, trauma, repetition, the foundations of post-war social thought, and the role of science in modernity. There is no experiment that can prove who we are but, in its particulars, art can speak in universals." With Almereyda's Experimenter, we have the most direct approach yet.