In 1961, a chilling and notorious experiment exposed human beings’ universal capacity for evil –– and the ease with which we look away. Now, in the same basement of Linsly-Chittenden hall, professors and students go cheerfully about academic life.
My first descent to the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall was James Joyce’s fault. The spring of my sophomore year, I took a seminar where we read Ulysses. I was struggling to wrest meaning from sentences that seemed to have no internal logic and words that swam aimlessly across the page. I visited my professor, Craig Eklund, for guidance.
Eklund’s basement office had a narrow window looking out onto a charming collection of trash cans. A white pillar skewered the room through the middle. As we discussed protean form and the ways ancient epics haunted modern life, I tried to ignore a growing sense of unease.
During my first year at Yale, I’d learned about an infamous experiment that unfolded in the basement of the building we all call LC. Some sixty years before, in the rooms below the lecture halls, a series of tests had exposed an enormous capacity for violence latent in us all.
After hearing the story—from a source I can no longer remember—I’d quickly forgotten about it. I preferred to stay upstairs, amid the sunlight and the poetry.
***
In the summer of 1961, while the students were away, an unusual experiment was unfolding in LC. The test was simple: a series of word associations in which a “learner” was tasked with memorizing pairs of words: Soft Hair. Nice Day. Fat Neck. Hard Hit.
An advertisement seeking five hundred male participants had appeared in the New Haven Register that June. WE WILL PAY YOU $4.00 FOR ONE HOUR OF YOUR TIME, read the ad. (That’s equivalent to more than $43 today.) We want: factory workers, businessmen, construction workers, city employees, clerks, salespeople, laborers, professional people, white collar workers, barbers, telephone workers.
Prospective applicants were directed to a 27-year-old assistant professor of psychology who had arrived at Yale less than a year earlier––a man by the name of Stanley Milgram.
Milgram was born in the Bronx in 1933, the son of two working-class Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. (Milgram attended James Monroe High School in the Bronx, where he was classmates with Philip Zimbardo, who would later conduct the Stanford Prison Experiment). After studying Political Science at Queens College, he pursued a PhD at Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, despite never having taken a psychology class in college. He arrived at Yale in 1960, where he soon began organizing an ambitious psychological experiment. Disturbed by the horrors of the Holocaust, which had unfolded when he was a child, he sought to understand the nature of human evil.
The men who answered Milgram’s ad arrived through the High Street entrance of LC, where Milgram taught introductory psychology. They then descended the wide stone steps to the basement, where the university had opened the new elegant interaction laboratory.
Milgram had spent May through July furiously preparing. He’d sent letters and telegrams to companies that sold electrical and psychophysiological equipment, asking for instruments to be shipped “as soon as possible” on “urgent order.” He even prepared to film a documentary titled Obedience that he would release in 1965.
Down in the elegant interaction laboratory, the barber or telephone worker or businessman sat in front of a large shock generator. Switches were ordered by electrical impulse: Slight Shock, Moderate Shock, Strong Shock, Very Strong Shock, Intense Shock, Extremely Intense Shock, Danger: Severe Shock, and finally, XXX—450 volts of electricity.
In the experiment setup, a “learner” was tasked with memorizing pairs of words. The unknowing participants acted as “teachers,” feeding the learner word-association questions and administering shocks for incorrect answers.
The learner, however, was a hired actor: a New Havener named Jim McDonough. Before the experiment began, McDonough, a jolly, heavy-set man, would tell subjects he had a heart condition. Milgram’s documentary features video footage where subjects administer fake shocks to McDonough. He reacts with grunts, screams, and then a terrifying silence.
In the video, a dispassionate “experimenter,” cloaked in a lab coat, prompts the subject to administer increasingly dangerous shocks. Continue, the experimenter commands. The experiment requires that you continue teaching. It is absolutely essential that you continue. Sixty-five percent of the participants did, administering the maximum shock level.
Milgram observed it all from behind a one-way mirror, disturbed but enthralled.
“The tension created is extraordinary,” Milgram wrote that August in a letter to an assistant director at the National Science Foundation. “Subjects sweat, tremble, stutter and groan; but they obey.”
Milgram later described the results as “highly reminiscent” of philosopher Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil,” which she developed in her 1963 report on the trial of the Nazi Adolph Eichmann. Eichmann defended himself on the grounds that he acted as a mindless technocrat carrying out orders from above. To Arendt, Eichmann showed how mundane order-following could escalate to unfathomable violence. “The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them,” she wrote.
In September 1961, Milgram had finished a new iteration of the experiment, which asked the teacher to force the learner’s hand onto an electrical plate connected to the shock generator. Before Milgram had begun his research, he had doubted there were enough “moral imbeciles” in the United States to orchestrate the sort of atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. In a letter to the assistant director that September, Milgram wrote that his view of human nature had transformed. “I am now beginning to think that the full complement could be recruited in New Haven,” he wrote.
***
Milgram died of a heart attack at the age of 51. The experiments remain some of the most controversial psychological studies of the 20th century. Following the study, the American Psychological Association mandated that institutional review boards must approve experiments involving humans. In 2004, experts referred to Milgram’s experiments when explaining the abuse of prisoners by U.S. soldiers in Abu Ghraib. Critics have accused Milgram of traumatizing his unknowing subjects, lying about his experimental procedures, and manipulating his results to exaggerate obedience levels in his subjects.
But Milgram’s connection to Yale is often forgotten, both at Yale and in the public consciousness. Eklund, my sophomore year English professor, was unaware that the obedience experiment took place in the basement of LC until I contacted him for this piece. He was less than thrilled: Now, I guess I can have authoritarian nightmares when I drift off to sleep at my desk, he wrote in an email. Thanks for that. 🙁
“It’s like I’m in the dark basement of human cruelty,” he said, when I spoke to him the following day. He thinks it’s ironic that the experiment took place in what is now Yale’s English building—supposedly a temple to humanity’s literary heights. But then again, “literature is full of all sorts of dark shit too, it just happens in art, where it gets redeemed in some ways,” Eklund said.
Kate Bolick occupies the office next to Eklund’s. She calls her office “the dungeon.” To Bolick, Milgram’s renegade experimental tactics and his warning against the violence of conformity align with her teaching philosophy as a creative writing instructor. “What I try to impress upon my students is that we are all deeply original—it’s a matter of tapping into our originality and letting go of what other people are telling us to think and care about.”
After talking with Eklund and Bolick, I decided to take my own trip underground. Video footage of the Milgram experiment frames the subjects in front of a dark curtain, making it difficult to place the experiment within the building’s current layout. But wandering the basement, might I find something forgotten, some vestige of the elegant interaction laboratory?
After descending the stairs, I turned into an alcove opposite Ecklund’s office and came face-to-face with an unlabeled wooden door. It swung open at my touch. On the other side of the door, the tiled floor turned to concrete, and the air took on a gaseous, metallic tinge. Six wooden lecture chairs, all maimed in some way, lay splayed about the room, as if abandoned during a violent game of musical chairs. A handleless metal door across from me led to a larger room, with a low ceiling strung with water pipes and hundreds of white wires twisted into ropes. Air churned out of a vent, and I heard a low electric hum.. In the middle of the room, a metal cage trapped stacks of blue books, a broken desk, and other objects no one wanted.
Milgram’s word associations appeared in my mind, forming a strange poetry.
Blunt. Knife Stick Word Arrow.
Wet. Night Grass Duck Cloth.
Fat. Man Lady Tub Neck.
Suddenly, I saw a movement in the shadows. I remembered a conversation with Kim Shirkhani, senior lecturer in English, who has occupied an LC basement office for over a decade. Shirkhani doesn’t dwell on the basement’s history. Terrible things happen everywhere, she pointed out to me. Plus, she doesn’t believe in the poetic idea of history lingering in physical spaces. The real danger in LC, she said, is wildlife. Mice roam her office. Roaches half the size of her palm crawl out of water pipes.
Brave. Woman Soldier Dog Horse.
I turned and fled. ∎
Maggie Grether is a senior in Ezra Stiles College and former editor-in-chief of The New Journal.
