Red button

A plant metaphor for the disturbance of consciousness in situations of power.

When I looked at this series of photographs after I’d made it, this floral red button seen in multiple facets, in multiple states of gaze, strangely the other red button came to mind, this symbol of the easy power of destruction. And the intimacy and fragility of these photographs reminded me of the mental confusion of Milgram’s experiment. I share a reminder of it here, and quote from his book Submission to Authority (1974), where he recounts the issues in detail. The ease with which he got “normal” people to do their worst seems to me to be a great lesson for democracy. I find he brings a new awareness, invaluable for our power to act and our choices; a delicate red button.

Psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted this social experiment between 1961 and 1963 at Yale University in the USA. Subjects, recruited via a newspaper advertisement, were paid to take part in what was presented as a scientific experiment on memorization and learning. In a nutshell, they had to punish a student’s wrong answers by pressing a button that sent out increasingly strong electric shocks; these electric shocks were fictitious. The student victim and the experimenter were actors. The fake pupil showed signs of increasing suffering, and the fake experimenter gave the order to continue. Stanley Milgram found “unexpected and disturbing” results, which showed that for reasons of social conformity rather than cruelty, 65% of participants obeyed orders against their morals, seeking justifications for their actions.

This scientific experiment is part of a humanist philosophy. A number of psychologists have replicated it and come up with the same results as Milgram. But others have sought to prove that this experiment was false, biased, and that Hannah Harendt’s thesis on the banality of evil, which Milgram’s experiment corroborated, was unfounded. My position is that this experiment reveals a psychological reality, a flaw that it is our responsibility to take into account in order to build something better, which means not putting human beings in this kind of situation. In addition to learning from the experiment itself, I also find it enlightening to note that the disagreements it may give rise to, presented as a controversy between two opposing scientific “truths”, are in reality a conflict of a philosophical nature. And let’s not forget that science is often used to defend a point of view.

Many obey, no matter how vehemently the victim complains, how obviously she suffers, how much she begs to be set free. Such behavior has been seen over and over again during our investigation as well as at several universities where the experiment has been replicated. It is this extreme propensity of adults to submit almost unconditionally to the commands of authority that constitutes the major finding of our study. This is a phenomenon that requires explanation.

The most common one is to take those who have administered the full range of discharges as monsters constituting the sadistic fringe of society. However, if we consider that almost two thirds of the participants fell into the category of “obedient” subjects and that they represented ordinary people, workers, company managers and executives, the argument becomes quite fragile. In truth, it is reminiscent of the reactions triggered in 1963 by Hannah Arendt’s book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. The author argued that the prosecution’s efforts to portray the perpetrator as a sadistic monster were based on a totally false viewpoint, that Eichmann was much more of a self-initiated wastrel who simply sat behind his desk and went about his business. For expressing such views, Hannah Arendt attracted immense scorn, even to the point of slander. There was an obscure belief that Eichmann’s abominations could only be the work of a bestial, perverted and sadistic personality, the very embodiment of evil. Having witnessed in my own experiences the unconditional submission of hundreds of ordinary people, I have to conclude that Hannah Arendt’s conception of the “banality of evil” is closer to the truth than we would ever have dared to imagine. Those who administered electric shocks to the victim did so not to satisfy particularly aggressive tendencies, but because their idea of their obligations as subjects compelled them to do so morally.

This is perhaps the most important lesson of our study: ordinary people, devoid of any hostility, can, by simply doing their job, become the agents of an atrocious process of destruction. Moreover, even when they can no longer ignore the evil effects of their work, if authority demands that they act against basic moral standards, few have the inner resources to resist it. A whole range of inhibitions opposes a possible revolt and manages to keep everyone in their assigned position.

Submission to authority, Stanley Milgram (Paris, Calmann Lévy, 1974).