Psychology
Experiments in conformity show how the behaviour of others influences us.
Experiments in conformity show how the behaviour of others influences us.
Among my to-be-watched-again movies is The Experimenter, which portrays the adult life story of Stanley Milgram. A professor at Yale, he conducted one of the most controversial experiments in social psychology. The sessions began in 1961, during the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, at which Eichmann would say he was simply following orders. Participants in the so-called obedience experiments were instructed to administer what they believed were electric shocks to a “learner”, gradually increasing them to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.
The Experimenter is a little slow and arty, and I find it a bit hard to reconcile actor Peter Sarsgaard’s robotic Milgram with the “spirited, feisty little man” described in Morton Hunt’s The Story of Psychology. But the film doesn’t focus only on the obedience experiments that made Milgram notorious.
When a member of the public steps into a lift in which four actors stand facing the rear, the “real” person turns to face the back, too.
At one point, Milgram and wife Sasha (Winona Ryder) are shown watching Candid Camera, a TV show that resonated with Milgram’s interest in the stuff of everyday life. An unsuspecting member of the public steps into a lift in which four others, all actors, stand facing the rear. Sure enough, the “real” person turns to face the back, too. It was a madefor-TV conformity study, and Milgram would later adopt a similar approach in experiments. He would place confederates on street corners and instruct them to stare up at an apartment window. Sure enough, passers-by stopped to gawk upward, clueless as to why. The more actors there were, the more passers-by joined in.
Recent replications of this simple study draw on advances in technology. An American evolutionary psychologist and neuroscientist, Andrew Gallup, has used computer modelling of video of such a situation to check the conformity count, where people stand and where they’re looking. About a quarter of pedestrians will stop and peer upwards, but technology allows identification of the factors that enhance conformity. Slower-moving pedestrians who are moving towards the backs of the confederates are more likely to join in, because gaze direction is important: we tend to look where other people are looking, and that group may be more likely to pick up on this cue.
The Experimenter portrays Milgram’s disappointment with the 1976 madefor-TV dramatisation of his obedience studies, The 10th Level, starring William Shatner as the Milgram-like Stephen Turner. Later movies inspired by Milgram’s ideas have been more positively received, however.
John Guare’s 1990 play Six Degrees of Separation (which was adapted into a 1993 film) draws on the so-called “small-world” studies Milgram published in 1967. He posted letters and instructions to about 300 people chosen at random, asking them if they knew a particular other individual (living several states away). If they did, they were to mail the pack directly to that person; if not, they were to forward the material to someone they did know and who they thought may know the target person. And so on.
More than three-quarters of the packages never made it to the target (mostly because people didn’t comply). But 64 did, averaging just under six links in the chain that took them there. Perhaps Milgram deliberately sought to dilute his notoriety with these more innocuous works.