Milgram’s secret experiments

Tom Bartlett over at the Chronicle of Higher Education has blogged about my discovery of obedience experiments that Stanley Milgram kept secret. In these experiments, family members were given the role of torturer and victim.

Milgram didn’t actually conduct one single experiment, but 24 different variations. Each variation was like a mini play, with a different scenario, script and sometimes, different actors.

The variation I came across during my research – and that Milgram never published – was condition 24. Milgram called it the ‘Relationship condition’.

In this variation Milgram recruited pairs of people who knew each other very well – work mates, best friends, brothers-in-law, even father and son. When they arrived at the lab, Milgram took the person who had been given the role of the learner into a separate room and in a whisper, quickly explained what he wanted them to do – scream and shout as if they were in pain – each time the teacher gave them a shock.

In Milgram’s eyes, this variation of the experiment was a dismal failure and he noted disconsolately that it ‘was as powerful a demonstration of disobedience than can be found.’ Perhaps that was why he never published it.  Or was it because of the ethical implications of this particular variation were so much more troubling than his others?  We can only guess because Milgram left no record of why he failed to make this variation public.

But by leaving details of this experiment out of his official account of his findings, Milgram withheld an important piece of the puzzle that is the Obedience to Authority experiments.

The results of Condition 24 contradict Milgram’s bleak conclusions about human nature and prompted me to question the findings of what has been called the most famous psychological research of the twentieth century.