she half-turned her body toward the bookshelves and shielded her eyes. I realized that she was still ashamed—and frightened. I felt like leaning across the table and taking hold ofher liver-spotted hands. I wanted to say that it was all right, but of course it wasn’t.
She looked away from me, down toward the front window. “I don’t know what it was for, but if it was for cancer research, then I am glad I did it,” she murmured. I opened my mouth to say that it wasn’t a medical experiment, but then I closed it. Once again, I felt caught off balance—clearly, she still didn’t know what it was all about. Later, I would hear it being explained to her on tape, and she most likely would have received the report from Milgram giving more detail, but somewhere or somehow people like Hannah Bergman and Bob Lee had either not taken it in or forgotten it. Or perhaps the debriefing had still felt like part of the experiment, and they left believing that even the explanations were part of the hoax.
Later, I kept going through our conversation in my head. I couldn’t understand, given how little she was prepared to talk about the experiment, why she’d met with me at all.
Milgram’s use of ordinary citizens in his experiment was unusual at the time. Most social psychology experiments used undergraduates, who were both plentiful and handy. Critics of the discipline had complained as early as the 1940s that the “science of human behavior” was primarily the science of the behavior of college undergraduates. By the mid- to late 1960s, surveys published in leading psychology journals found that 90 percent of subjects were college students, with 80 percent of those first-years “coerced” into participating, by either receiving extra points for taking part or being penalized for not taking part. 2 Milgram was conscious that others would argue that high rates of obedience among competitive Ivy Leaguers and indifference to the learner’s pain were hardly surprising. 3 But his primary reason for not using students was more mundane: his grant had come through at the start of the summer break, when most of them had left, or were about to leave, New Haven for the holidays.
Psychological researchers at the time generally used men as subjects, and it was common to generalize from their male subjects to society at large. 4 Milgram appeared to have been no different: there is no reference to using female subjects in his early plans forthe experiment, and he excluded females in his initial recruitment drive. Given that they were used only in condition 20, which came late in the program, it seems to have been more of an afterthought. Condition 20 was the second to last experiment conducted at Yale, held in the final two months. In his progress report to the NSF in January 1962, just two months before the condition ran, Milgram had made no mention of it, even though he described the other ten conditions he had planned for February, March, and April. 5 It’s likely that, just as he had been gathering information after each experiment about participants’ political beliefs, ethnic background, religion, and military service to see if those variables had any relationship to their level of obedience, he came to regard gender as another factor worth investigating.
I imagined what the campus would have felt like to Hannah and the thirty-nine other women who arrived here in March and April 1962. It would have been buzzing with tall, athletic-looking men in suits and ties hurrying from one building to another, some perhaps stopping to smoke a cigarette before the next lecture began.
My vision of attractive, all-American men wasn’t facetious: Yale had a tradition of looking for what it called boys of “character,” a term that encompassed personality, leadership skills, and appearance. Yale undergraduates were chosen for their looks and “manliness,” and sound bodies and physical prowess were viewed as indicators of strong character
She looked away from me, down toward the front window. “I don’t know what it was for, but if it was for cancer research, then I am glad I did it,” she murmured. I opened my mouth to say that it wasn’t a medical experiment, but then I closed it. Once again, I felt caught off balance—clearly, she still didn’t know what it was all about. Later, I would hear it being explained to her on tape, and she most likely would have received the report from Milgram giving more detail, but somewhere or somehow people like Hannah Bergman and Bob Lee had either not taken it in or forgotten it. Or perhaps the debriefing had still felt like part of the experiment, and they left believing that even the explanations were part of the hoax.
Later, I kept going through our conversation in my head. I couldn’t understand, given how little she was prepared to talk about the experiment, why she’d met with me at all.
Milgram’s use of ordinary citizens in his experiment was unusual at the time. Most social psychology experiments used undergraduates, who were both plentiful and handy. Critics of the discipline had complained as early as the 1940s that the “science of human behavior” was primarily the science of the behavior of college undergraduates. By the mid- to late 1960s, surveys published in leading psychology journals found that 90 percent of subjects were college students, with 80 percent of those first-years “coerced” into participating, by either receiving extra points for taking part or being penalized for not taking part. 2 Milgram was conscious that others would argue that high rates of obedience among competitive Ivy Leaguers and indifference to the learner’s pain were hardly surprising. 3 But his primary reason for not using students was more mundane: his grant had come through at the start of the summer break, when most of them had left, or were about to leave, New Haven for the holidays.
Psychological researchers at the time generally used men as subjects, and it was common to generalize from their male subjects to society at large. 4 Milgram appeared to have been no different: there is no reference to using female subjects in his early plans forthe experiment, and he excluded females in his initial recruitment drive. Given that they were used only in condition 20, which came late in the program, it seems to have been more of an afterthought. Condition 20 was the second to last experiment conducted at Yale, held in the final two months. In his progress report to the NSF in January 1962, just two months before the condition ran, Milgram had made no mention of it, even though he described the other ten conditions he had planned for February, March, and April. 5 It’s likely that, just as he had been gathering information after each experiment about participants’ political beliefs, ethnic background, religion, and military service to see if those variables had any relationship to their level of obedience, he came to regard gender as another factor worth investigating.
I imagined what the campus would have felt like to Hannah and the thirty-nine other women who arrived here in March and April 1962. It would have been buzzing with tall, athletic-looking men in suits and ties hurrying from one building to another, some perhaps stopping to smoke a cigarette before the next lecture began.
My vision of attractive, all-American men wasn’t facetious: Yale had a tradition of looking for what it called boys of “character,” a term that encompassed personality, leadership skills, and appearance. Yale undergraduates were chosen for their looks and “manliness,” and sound bodies and physical prowess were viewed as indicators of strong character
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