Today was our "get-to-know-you" day at the 2011 FASPE Law Program. We were at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, a very impressive Holocaust museum at the southern tip of Manhattan. Our group consists of twelve Fellows -- law students from Yale, U. Va., NYU, Duke, Michigan, and Columbia -- and three faculty members (me, Bo Burt from Yale, and Amos Friedland, an attorney at Quinn, Emanuel, Urquhart & Sullivan in New York).
After self-introductions, we spent a big chunk of the day discussing obedience to authority, the subject of Stanley Milgram's famous (notorious?) experiments from the early 1960s in which he deceived subjects into thinking they were required to apply increasing voltages of electric current to a person as part of a supposed study of how punishment facilitates learning. In fact there was no study of punishment and learning; there was only a study of whether (and under what circumstances) ordinary men (the subjects were all men) would agree to shock the living hell out of an innocent person -- to the point of seeming unconsciousness or even death -- simply because a labcoat-wearing scientist in a Yale laboratory told them that the experiment required them to. A phalanx of psychiatrists had predicted that only a vanishingly small minority of subjects would inflict pain as instructed; Milgram showed that virtually everyone would administer at least some pain when instructed to do so, and that many would agree to inflict lethal doses.
The connection that the FASPE curriculum is drawing between the Milgram experiments and the Holocaust is no stretch. Milgram commenced the experiments in 1961 when the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel was ongoing and the Nazi technocrat was advancing a defense based in part in the need to comply with the orders of superiors. The upshot of Milgram's findings were deeply uncomfortable: they made it hard to write off the Nazis' horrors as some special circumstance unique to Germany at a particular historical moment and, in a sense, put the whole human race in the dock alongside Eichmann.
It was a rich discussion. I was surprised by some of my own reactions to watching footage of the Milgram experiments themselves. I had always thought that what the Milgram experiments revealed was basic bloodthirstiness in humans -- that the experiments revealed that men would more or less mindlessly march their way all the way up the voltage scale. I thought the message of the Milgram experiments was almost exclusively about obedience. And while it's true that many subjects did prove themselves ultimately willing to inflict horrible pain when instructed to do so, the story now seems to me richer and more complex -- a story with space in it to think about how humans' instincts are not just to obey authority but also subtly to resist or at least temper it.
Watch this video from about 6:31 to the end (if you can bear it).
It's easy to focus on the main story line: a scientist instructs a guy off the street to fry his fellow man, and he does so. But what stood out for me today, very powerfully, was the subject's distress. This is not the man I thought the Milgram experiments revealed to us -- the obedient, authority-controlled automaton. This is a man in great distress (so great that I end up more furious at Milgram than at the subject), a man who, while ultimately complying, is exploring the horrible space he finds himself in for little ways to temper what he's being ordered to do. As the required voltage mounts, he depresses the lever for shorter and shorter times, to the point that it's barely making electrical contact. And he breaks from the script he's required to follow, imploring the man he thinks is strapped to the electrodes to "please answer the question!" (He understands at that point that he is "required" to shock the man if the man doesn't answer, and that within the system of the experiment, the man can't avoid the shock unless he answers. The script doesn't call for him to encourage the man to answer, or to warn the man that he'll get shocked if he doesn't answer, but the subject, while not defying the authority figure outright, does innovate small ways to try to temper things.)
Don't get me wrong; I am duly horrified that so many men (like the one in this video clip) ultimately comply with the voice of authority. All I am saying is that I saw a flicker of something else in the video today, something I was not expecting: an instinct not just to follow authority, but to fudge it.
Will any of this bear fruit as we continue in the coming days to reflect on questions of lawyer's roles in systems of oppression? I don't know--it's just the first day!
Our day today also included a tour of the core exhibit of the Museum of Jewish Heritage. Our docent was an Auschwitz survivor who told us her harrowing, even shattering story of losing her parents and all but one sibling to disease and the gas chambers while herself managing to survive. I think we were quite numb by the end of her presentation, but after dinner, we watched a video of another surivivor's testimony, and the differences in the narrations of the two survivors led to some very interesting discussion about what survivor testimony is and whether its telling and its hearing ought or ought not be governed by our ordinary standards of evaluation.
All in all, a fascinating first day.
Tomorrow morning we focus the lens a bit more closely on lawyer ethics. Daniel Markovits will be with us in the morning to talk about his controversial claim that lawyers are basically liers and cheaters (and are encouraged to be such by our ethical rules). And in the afternoon, we're off to the airport to catch a plane to Berlin.
I want to share with one of my personal points of pride: I passed a Milgram-type "obey my authority" experiment.
I was in high school, taking a summer college class on psychology. The professor walked into the room on the first day of class and immediately started ordering people around. At first it was simple things -- you move to that empty seat there, then you two switch, and so on. But then the requests started getting weirder. He brought out a beach ball and started asking us to throw it around to particular people, then to stand up and do various things. I was the only person in the class of about two dozen to refuse to follow his instructions. I'd done a few things he asked, but when he asked me to stand up in front of the room and dance, I got up, and then suddenly said no. I sat back down, he moved on and asked another person, and didn't come back to me with any more orders. After he'd done enough to make his point, he had everyone sit down again and we discussed the Milgram experiment.
What was really interesting, though, was the feeling I had when I said no to that instruction. It was almost a spur-of-the-moment, reflexive decision. I didn't think consciously about whether I should follow his instructions or disobey, either before he called on me or after I started to get up. It was just a sudden, nearly uncontrollable urge to refuse. And as the word "no" came out of my mouth, I felt dizzy and lightheaded. I actually feared that I was going to fall over or pass out. Nonetheless, it was clear to me right then and there that I was *not* going to follow any more instructions from that professor. After I sat down, I felt much better, but the heady feeling of having survived a dangerous situation stuck with me for hours. Which is weird, because there was nothing even remotely dangerous about the situation. This was about 15 years ago, but I still remember the moment so vividly.
I don't know if there have been any studies of how people who refuse instructions from authority feel, but I would be interested to see if my experience was common.
Posted by: Hanah Volokh | May 26, 2011 at 06:52 AM
I've never heard of these experiments, but they sound terrifying. It adds a layer of complexity to particularly bad chapters of human history, doesn't it?
Posted by: Joe | May 26, 2011 at 03:07 PM