Electrified Sheep: Glass-eating Scientists, Nuking the Moon, and More Bizarre Experiments by Alex Boese

Author:Alex Boese [Boese, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2012-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

The Golden Age of Deception

Asch published an account of his study in Scientific American in November 1955. It immediately fuelled new concerns, especially among educators, about America’s drift towards conformity. Brown University President Barnaby Keeney told his students several weeks later, during a weekly chapel service, that he wanted to see less conformity among them. He jokingly suggested they should express their individuality by doing something radically different, such as tidying their dorm room. At Harvard, the theologian Paul Tillich managed to find a biblical admonition of conformity that he shared with his congregation: ‘And be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind’. (Romans 12:2.)

But it was among psychologists that Asch’s study had the most profound effect. By 1955, there had been numerous studies that used deception, but no one had ever used it on such a grand scale. No one had ever packed an entire room full of actors as Asch did. His colleagues were deeply impressed and rushed to design ingenious deceptions of their own. As a consequence, the next two decades became the Golden Age of Deception in psychological research. Deception became sexy and prestigious. If you didn’t do it, you weren’t part of the psychological ‘in crowd’. By the early 1970s, over half of all the articles published in psychology journals reported the use of deception, having risen from only 20 per cent in the early 1950s. Of course, there was a touch of irony in the fact that a study on conformity helped inspire this fad for duplicity.

Numerous studies, including some famous in their own right, were directly inspired by Asch’s experiment. For instance, Stanley Milgram, who had once worked as Asch’s teaching assistant and had conducted a modified form of the conformity study for his doctoral dissertation, wondered what would happen if something more consequential than comparing line lengths was at stake. What if a person was pressured to do something morally repugnant, such as delivering a fatal electric shock to an innocent victim? Would he or she then be as willing to comply?

To explore this question, Milgram, like Asch before him, recruited volunteers by running an ad in a newspaper offering a small payment in return for participation in an innocuous-sounding ‘study of memory and learning’. But he departed from Asch’s study by doing away with the roundtable panel of stooges and using in its place the authority of a researcher – really an actor in a white lab coat – who directed a subject to deliver increasingly strong electric shocks to a victim. The researcher was supposedly studying whether the threat of shocks would aid memorization.

The shocks were fake, but the unwitting volunteer, listening to the agonized cries of the victim, didn’t know that. Whenever the volunteer expressed hesitation, the pseudo researcher cryptically stated, ‘The experiment requires that you continue.’ To Milgram’s surprise, two-thirds of his subjects unquestioningly accepted this command and kept pressing the button to shock the victim, even past the point at which the victim appeared to die.

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