“It’s not surprising that in these studies people conformed, because…they’re being pulled in two directions, it’s authority, they might get in trouble or they want to be what’s called socially desirable, there’s an effect of that, wanting to please this experimenter.”

[SM:] Mt. Sinai Hospital neuroscientist Heather Berlin. She’s talking about the famous Milgram experiment, in which subjects were told to give what they believed would be painful electric shocks to people who got answers wrong on a test. Berlin was part of a panel in New York City February 27^th after a performance of a play about the Milgram experiment. I moderated the panel. The majority of subjects in the experiment delivered the alleged shocks—the supposed victim was actually unhurt—when commanded to by the person overseeing the experiment.   

“And not everybody conformed, right, so 35 percent of people didn’t, and it would be interesting to see what was happening in their brain or mind, those who didn’t. But if we tell people about this, our underlying behavior, if you tell people about conformity and that we’re being influenced by all these factors around us, will that be enough to actually change our behavior, if we bring these sort of influences to consciousness.”

[SM:] “And the whole world now knows about the Milgram experiments, so can you even run an experiment that recapitulates it without having an entirely biased subject population?”

“Well, the one thing, this just came out a few days ago, a new study actually came out, done in London, where they kind of replicated it to a certain extent, it was different, they varied different factors, they had either the experimenter telling them to give this person, and they used real shocks, to give a person a shock. Or saying you can decide to either punish them by giving them a shock or taking away money from them. And so they either told them which one to do or they said it’s up to you to do it. And they actually looked at brain activation and found that when they were being told by the authority what to do they had a dampening of a certain brain activation when they looked at EEG, and they subjectively felt less agency for what they were doing. [Emilie A. Caspar et al, Coercion Changes the Sense of Agency in the Human Brain, in Current Biology]

“So you do feel less responsible, which can allow, Freud would say put down certain defenses, but it can allow you to just behave on command because you actually physically are becoming less in control of what you’re doing, to a certain extent.”

The play about the Milgram experiment is called Please Continue. It runs through March 6th at the Ensemble Studio Theater at 549 West 52nd Street. It’s really good, check it out if you have a chance.

—Steve Mirsky

[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]