Wrong answers on obedience research, October 13, 2006

Alfred McCoy's A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, is a timely and informative book. The CIA's recent and ongoing use of torture, with George W. Bush's support and encouragement, is one of the most outrageous aspects of the so-called "War on Terror." I assume that much of the book's history of CIA torture techniques and practices is accurate. But I am personally familiar with at least two strands of that "history," and McCoy's discussion of those strands is wildly inaccurate.

The strand I'm most familiar with is Stanley Milgram's famous research on obedience to authority. I was Milgram's first graduate research assistant in those experiments, and more recently I've reviewed the Milgram Archives at Yale University to remind me of the details. Milgram died in 1984, so he cannot respond to McCoy's misstatements concerning the obedience experiments, but I'll give an indication here of their general drift. McCoy asserts (p. 47) that Milgram had"close ties" to the Office of Naval Research, which in turn was involved in a "close collaboration" with the CIA and with the field of experimental psychology (p. 31). I don't know how closely the ONR worked with the CIA (McCoy's evidence on that point is vague at best). Though I think the book exaggerates the CIA's collaboration with experimental psychologists throughout Chapter 2, it is true that some such collaborations have occurred and may still be occurring. But Stanley Milgram never had "close ties" with the ONR, or any ties at all with the CIA. Early in his academic career he wrote simultaneous inquiries to the ONR, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Mental Health, briefly describing his plans for research on obedience to destructive authority and asking whether one of those federal agencies might be interested in funding the research. At that time the ONR supported a wide variety of social-scientific research programs without insisting on any practical Navy components, so young social psychologists often saw it as a potentially soft touch. But the NSF was more encouraging to Milgram, so he didn't pursue ONR or NIMH funding further.When the NSF granted him most of the money he asked for, his obedience research was off and running. McCoy attempts to keep the ONR in the picture via a very shifty sentence: "...the NSF gave Milgram a substantial $24,700 grant - an exceptional mix of caution and largesse that hints at NSF reluctance and possible ONR or CIA pressure." Sorry, but such "reluctance" and"pressure" exist only in McCoy's mind. Milgram asked for $30,348 indirect and indirect costs to cover two years of research on obedience,whereupon the NSF gave him roughly 80% of what he requested - not at all an"exceptional" reduction in a beginning researcher's proposed budget.

McCoy goes ahead to characterize Milgram's research in consistently negative terms, even wondering "why the NSF would have funded an experiment of so little scientific value" (p. 49). He suggests, on the basis of admittedly"circumstantial" evidence, that "Milgram's experiment was a by-product of the larger CIA mind-control project." Though its scientific value was so trivial, according to McCoy, it answered "the key question the agency faced as it began global dissemination of its interrogation [i.e.,torture] method": Would "ordinary police officers in Asia and Latin America be willing to practice what they had been taught?" (p. 49). Here I'd like to make several quick points, for which much non-circumstantial evidence is available elsewhere: (1) Plenty of"ordinary police officers" and military personnel around the world have demonstrated over and over again their willingness to torture prisoners on command; the CIA didn't need Milgram's results to be certain of that. (2) Far from being "of so little scientific value," Milgram's research has been recognized from its initial publication as one of the most important social-psychological experiments ever done; it continues to be widely cited more than 40 years after its completion. (3) The most important conclusion to be drawn from Milgram's research is not that most police or military officers in the chain of command will torture prisoners if ordered to do so, but that many ordinary men and women without extensive training will likewise torture fellow humans, if somebody in an even vaguely authoritative position tells them to do so. Milgram did not have the CIA's needs in mind when he conceived and carried out his research. He was instead concerned with why so many ordinary Germans had become (as the title of another book put it) "Hitler's Willing Executioners," and with whether or not (in the title of still another book) "It Can't Happen Here." His grim conclusion was that it CAN happen here. When his research results became widely disseminated, in the mass media and in many psychology textbooks, large numbers of college students and other US citizens became more attentive to the message of a popular post-Milgram bumper sticker: "QUESTION AUTHORITY." Surely that message could not have been popular with the authoritarian CIA types whom McCoy fancies as having plotted to support Milgram's research and his advancement in the academic world.

I'm also very familiar with the research of social psychologist Irving L. Janis, whom McCoy sees as somehow "recommending the sort of experiment Milgram now proposed" (p. 47), and as also somehow furthering the CIA's torture program with his own research on Groupthink and other psychological phenomena. I won't take up further space here to discuss McCoy's exaggerations and misinterpretations of Janis's work. Instead I recommend that you read both Milgram's book Obedience to Authority and Janis's book Victims of Groupthink,to get a clearer sense of the anti-authoritarian agenda shared by these extraordinarily creative researchers. Meanwhile I'm left wondering how much I can trust the rest of McCoy's book - the parts that I don't have enough background knowledge to assess.

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