Thoughts on Experimenter

It was quite an enlightening experience to finally watch the story of the scientist of one of the most controversial studies, whom I often heard but never knew before, in the movie, Experimenter. Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment is frequently presented along side Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiement, in terms of social psychology and ethical issues. Interestingly, both of them were also classmates in James Monroe High School in 1950. I also never knew about the other various experiments that Milgram developed, such as his lost letters experiments, his looking up experiment and his six-degrees of separation theory. But of course, it was the obedience test that garnered much attention, and is still largely debated decades later to this day.

The experiment was infamous for its ethical issues and concerns. Chief among them, were the deception and distress that the participants felt. In order to obtain true and authentic responses, Milgram had to deceive them from true nature of the experiment, by informing them that the experiment was to reinforce memory and learning. Furthermore, most, if not all, of the participants were emotionally and mentally distressed throughout the experiment, as they struggled to obeyed. Many people would claim that such methods are unethical and unjustifiable, and had no grounds to be carried out in the first place. Others would suggest that it opened the eyes of many to the true nature of humanity, as most researchers wrongly predicted that most would NOT obey all the way during that time.

Milgram uncover something dark and essential about human nature. When we are being told to obey a command, under certain conditions, more than half of us are likely to obey, even if the command is evil. As we can see in the movie, although the participants struggled and complained, they eventually went all the way until the maximum voltage. Despite the screams and later silence of the "learner", they obeyed the instruction from the authority figure of the assistant. Although most of us would like to think that we are good people without the capacity to harm others, the truth lies somewhere a little further from that. And this very fact troubles many, on a deep and dark level within ourselves. To illustrate, in the movie, we can see how uncomfortable the participants were in the follow-up debriefing. They were not traumatized, but rather, were disturbed by their very own actions. As such, we can see how they try to attribute the blame away, claiming that they had tried their best to resist but the circumstances did not allow so. One lady even mentioned how Milgram could have conducted the experiment on anyone else besides her, suggesting that she didn't want others, nor herself to know or see her nature.

Milgram's interest in the nature of obedience stem largely from the fact of his Jewish origins. The events of the Holocaust left an lasting impression on him, as well as tickled his curiosity. The mind of a scientist is driven by curiosity and the need to satisfy that curiousity. This drive can also applied others, in many other areas as well. If there is no motivation, there is no will to move forward. At the same time, we are not necessarily who we think we are. More often than not, we probably overestimated ourselves, or in my case and personal nature, underestimated myself. There is more inside of us than we realized, and it would be presumptuous to hold fast to what we think we know. We need to look further and deeper, and understand ourselves as a whole, including the darkest part. Only then, we can truly accept ourselves and be a little more rooted from within, and not run away from the truth, like how the lady in the debriefing session tried to did so in the movie, Experimenter.