Picture it: It’s the end of the month, around the end of the year, and all your bills come due; rent, phone, holidays, heat… that embarrassing trip to the Emergency Room to have that thing dislodged. And to top it all off your stuffed animal decoupaging business has yet to take off. You’re strapped for cash… well, even more so than usual and, so yet again, to craigslist you go.
After spending too much time in the Casual Encounters section and another uncomfortable trip to the free clinic you finally find just the thing. An experiment, just an hour or two of your time and you’ll have some green-back for some green-buds around the holidays. Perfect!
You show up and meet the person running the experiment; we’ll call them, the ‘Experimenter.’ Then you and the other volunteer get randomly selected for the other two roles. Naturally, fate is on your side because you get the ‘Teacher’ and the other poor schlub gets to be the ‘Learner.’ At first you think the Learner looks a little too old to be in school but once you find out what that entails you just think, “Better you than me. Sucker!”
You, the Teacher go to one room, and they, the Learner to another. It’s your job to say a word over the intercom and the Learner’s job to give you a matching one back. If they get it wrong you give them a little electrical shock. It wasn’t so bad, you got a tiny jolt from the lowest setting yourself, just to see how it felt. The only thing is, every time they get a wrong answer you have to increase the level of their zap by 15-volts. But as long as the Learner isn’t an idiot everything should be fine, right?
Ok, so the Learner just can’t seem to get it. You’re up to 135 volts already and they’re yelling with every jolt. You ask the Experimenter if you can quit. “Please continue.” he implores.
You go on. Now the learner is banging on the wall and saying they want to stop. You ask if you can but the Experimenter says, “The experiment requires that you continue.”
The Learner is still getting things wrong and now they’re complaining about their fucking heart condition! You ask to be relieved of duty. You even say they don’t need to pay you if they just let you go early!
“It is absolutely essential that you continue.” says the Experimenter.
Eventually the banging and shouts stop. But so have the answers to the questions. Just dead air. And that counts as a wrong answer for the Learner. Another shock and turn up the juice. Another shock. ’Why does easy money so often turn into a nightmare?’ you wonder and remember that time with the Crisco.
“Can I just pleas stop this?” you ask.
“You have no other choice, you must go on.” is the Experimenters only response.
This, in a nuts-hell, is the Milgram Experiments on Obedience to Authority Figures. If you say, as most do, “Well, I’d never do that.” Great! Congratulations! You’ve just avoided looking deep within yourself and asking some difficult questions. Try not to break your arm patting yourself on the back.
Of all who took the study though, 65% went all the way to the highest setting and administered the 450-volts, three times. Beforehand, I’m sure almost all of them would’ve said, ‘I’d never.’ too.
The ‘Teachers’ weren’t violent people by nature, well, no more than the rest of is, and most of them stated disagreeing with the test – but carried on anyway. They continued even after they themselves began to sweat. After they began biting their lips, after they couldn’t control their nervous laughter and/or stuttering. They dug their fingernails into their skin. They kept shocking the Learner with trembling hands that hit the button in spite of nervous ticks. They continued in-spite of all that it was doing to themselves and the Learner. Following the Alpha’s instruction like good members of the tribe.
There were two ways the Experimenter, the alpha, would’ve let the you, the teachers, stop the test:
1) You could go all the way to 450-volts and shock the Learner three times.
2) All you had to do was say you wanted to stop four times in a row. First the Experimenter would say, “Please continue.” If you still wanted to stop they’d say, “The experiment requires that you continue.” If you persisted they’d whip out, “It is absolutely essential that you continue.” and finally they would hit you with, “You have no other choice, you must go on.” That was it. If you still wanted to quit they’d let you.
The prompts to continue worked amazingly right up until the last. If people made it that far, the phrase, “You have no other choice, you must go on.” would kick in their Reactance and finally bring out their heretic pride.