suspect that Dealin' Dan would not.
READER'S REPORT
From a Chicago Man
'Although I've never been to a Tupperware party, I recognized the same kind of friendship pressures recently when I got a call from a long-distance-phone-company saleswoman. She told me that one of my buddies had placed my name on something called the MCI Friends and Family Calling Circle.
'This friend of mine, Brad, is a guy I grew up with but who moved to New Jersey last year for a job. He still calls me pretty regularly to get the news on the guys we used to hang out with from the neighborhood. The saleswoman told me that he can save twenty percent on all the calls he makes to the people on his Calling Circle list, provided that they are MCI-phone-company subscribers. Then she asked me if I wanted to switch to MCI to get all the blah, blah, blah benefits of MCI service, and so that Brad could save twenty percent on his calls to me.
'Well, I couldn't have cared less about the benefits of MCI service; I was perfectly happy with the long- distance company I had. But the part about wanting to save Brad money on our calls really got to me. For me to say that I didn't want to be in his Calling Circle and didn't care about saving him money would have sounded like a real affront to our friendship when he learned of it. So, to avoid insulting him, I told her to switch me to MCI.
'I used to wonder why women would go to a Tupperware party just because a friend was holding it, and then buy stuff they didn't want once they were there. I don't wonder anymore.'
Directed Deference
—Virgil
SUPPOSE THAT WHILE LEAFING THROUGH THE NEWSPAPER, YOU notice an ad for volunteers to take part in a 'study of memory' being done in the psychology department of a nearby university. Let's suppose further that, finding the idea of such an experiment intriguing, you contact the director of the study, a Professor Stanley Milgram, and make arrangements to participate in an hour-long session. When you arrive at the laboratory suite, you meet two men. One is the researcher in charge of the experiment, as is clearly evidenced by the gray lab coat he wears and the clipboard he carries. The other is a volunteer like yourself who seems average in all respects.
After initial greetings and pleasantries are exchanged, the researcher begins to explain the procedures to be followed. He says that the experiment is a study of how punishment affects learning and memory. Therefore, one participant will have the task of learning pairs of words in a long list until each pair can be recalled perfectly; this person is to be called the Learner. The other partici-pant's job will be to test the Learner's memory and to deliver increasingly strong electric shocks for every mistake; this person will be designated the Teacher.
Naturally, you get a bit nervous at this news. And your apprehension increases when, after drawing lots with your partner, you find that you are assigned the Learner role. You hadn't expected the possibility of pain as part of the study, so you briefly consider leaving. But no, you think, there's plenty of time for that if need be and, besides, how strong a shock could it be?
After you have had a chance to study the list of word pairs, the researcher straps you into a chair and, with the Teacher looking on, attaches electrodes to your arm. More worried now about the effect of the shock, you inquire into its severity. The researcher's response is hardly comforting; he says that although the shocks can be extremely painful, they will cause you 'no permanent tissue damage.' With that, the researcher and the Teacher leave you alone and go to the next room, where the Teacher asks you the test questions through an intercom system and delivers electric punishment for every wrong response.
As the test proceeds, you quickly recognize the pattern that the Teacher follows: He asks the question and waits for your answer over the intercom. Whenever you err, he announces the voltage of the shock you are about to receive and pulls a level to deliver the punishment. The most troubling thing is that with each error you make, the shock increases by 15 volts.
The first part of the test progresses smoothly. The shocks are annoying but tolerable. Later on, though, as your mistakes accumulate and the shock voltages climb, the punishment begins to hurt enough to disrupt your concentration, which leads to more errors and ever more disruptive shocks. At the 75-, 90-, and 105-volt levels, the pain makes you grunt audibly. At 120 volts, you exclaim into the intercom that the shocks are
But instead of the assurance you expect from the Teacher that he and the researcher are coming to release you, the Teacher merely gives you the next test question to answer. Surprised and confused, you mumble the first answer to come into your head. It's wrong, of course, and the Teacher delivers a 165-volt shock. You scream at the Teacher to stop, to let you out. But he responds only with the next test question—and with the next slashing shock when your frenzied answer is incorrect. You can't hold down the panic any longer; the shocks are so strong now they make you writhe and shriek. You kick the wall, demand to be released, beg the Teacher to help you. But the test questions continue as before and so do the dreaded shocks—in searing jolts of 195, 210, 225, 240, 255, 270, 285, and 300 volts. You realize that you can't possibly answer the test correctly now, so you shout to the Teacher that you won't answer his questions any longer. Nothing changes; the Teacher interprets your failure to respond as an incorrect response and sends another bolt. The ordeal continues in this way until, finally, the power of the shocks stuns you into near paralysis. You can no longer cry out, no longer struggle. You can only feel each terrible electric bite. Perhaps, you think, this total inactivity will cause the Teacher to stop. There can be no reason to continue this experiment. But he proceeds relentlessly, calling out the test questions, announcing the horrid shock levels (about 400 volts now), and pulling the levers. What must this man be like? you wonder in confusion. Why doesn't he help me? Why won't he stop?
For most of us, the above scenario reads like a bad dream. To recognize how nightmarish it is, though, we should understand that in most respects it is real. There was such an experiment—actually, a whole series—run by a psychology professor named Milgram in which participants in the Teacher role were willing to deliver continued, intense, and dangerous levels of shock to a kicking, screeching, pleading other person. Only one major aspect of the experiment was not genuine. No real shock was delivered; the Learner, the victim who repeatedly cried out in agony for mercy and release, was not a true subject but an actor who only pretended to be shocked. The actual purpose of Milgram's study, then, had nothing to do with the effects of punishment on learning and memory. Rather, it involved an entirely different question: When it is their job, how much suffering will ordinary people be willing to inflict on an entirely innocent other person?
The answer is most unsettling. Under circumstances mirroring precisely the features of the 'bad dream,' the typical Teacher was willing to deliver as much pain as was available to give. Rather than yield to the pleas of the victim, about two thirds of the subjects in Milgram's experiment pulled every one of the thirty shock switches in front of them and continued to engage the last switch (450 volts) until the researcher ended the experiment. More alarming still, not one of the forty subjects in this study quit his job as Teacher when the victim first began to demand his release; nor later, when he began to beg for it; nor even later, when his reaction to each shock had become, in Milgram's words, 'definitely an agonized scream.' Not until the 300-volt shock had been sent and the victim had 'shouted in desperation that he would no longer provide answers to the memory test' did anyone stop —and even then, it was a distinct minority who did.
These results surprised everyone associated with the project, Milgram included. In fact, before the study began, he asked groups of colleagues, graduate students, and psychology majors at Yale University (where the
