2023-08-01 05:00:08
It’s 8 a.m. in Brisbane, Australia, and Alex Haslam, who isn’t in the office yet, is sorry he can’t show us remotely his electroshock generator. At the University of Queensland, where he teaches, the researcher has a functional replica of the one that the American psychologist Stanley Milgram (1933-1984) had made for his famous study on obedience in the early 1960s. Under the pretext of evaluating the role of punishment in learning, the latter installed ordinary citizens at the controls of this device supposedly connected to a kind of electric chair. In an adjacent room, an accomplice of the research team was doing a memorization exercise. At each error, the guinea pig had to administer shocks of increasing intensity, first 15 volts, then 30, then 45, and so on, up to 450 volts. Of course, the “victim” was simulating suffering, but the operator of the device knew nothing about it, nor did he suspect that he was the real subject of the study. ” Please continue “said the experimenter in case of hesitation. « Bzzzz »did the machine.
Alex Haslam and his colleague Steve Reicher, of the University of St Andrews, Scotland, reproduced the Milgram experiment by any means compatible with 21st century ethical standards, for example in virtual reality. They also co-authored a dozen scientific publications related to the study and made two trips to the United States to browse through the 614 boxes of documents bequeathed to the Yale University library (Connecticut) by Sasha Milgram, the widow of the psychologist.
The archivist in charge of this collection, Moira Fitzgerald, estimates that these documents are among the most requested in the reading room and that around fifteen researchers travel to consult them each year. What else do they hope to find there? “The reasons why so many participants went all the way”, replies Alex Haslam. Sixty years after its publication, this study, which has inspired filmmakers, writers, playwrights, musicians and many television producers, still questions the world of social psychology.
Haunted by the Holocaust
To understand this, you have to go back to the spring of 1960. Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann has just been captured outside his Argentinian home when Stanley Milgram gets the idea for his experiment in a “moment of incandescence”, at the age of 26. Born in New York to Jewish parents from Hungary and Romania, this young man with an extraordinary IQ is haunted by the Holocaust. “My true spiritual homeland is Central Europe”he wrote, a student, to a Harvard classmate: “I should have been born into the German-speaking Jewish community in Prague in 1922 and died in a gas chamber some twenty years later. I will never understand how I was born in the hospital in the Bronx. » Like other young people of his generation, the psychologist wonders how ordinary men – “neither perverse nor sadistic”, wrote the philosopher Hannah Arendt – were able to implement the “final solution”. He is interested in authority, in obedience. He wants to understand.
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