Behind the Shock Machine by Gina Perry

responded with “You must continue” or “The experiment requires that you continue” or “Youhave no choice.” “The pressure was unbelievably intense. The thing that bothered me the most was that I could feel my heart rate increasing, and I was under very severe stress, and I finally realized that my stress, however it might bother me, could hardly compare with the pain and stress I was inflicting on the learner. I finally screwed my courage to the sticking place and quit. I said, ‘That’s it, I can’t continue.’”
    Herb said that it might have been the learner’s cries to stop that finally forced him to dig in his heels and refuse to go on, but he doesn’t remember. In fact, he doesn’t remember at exactly what voltage he stopped. “I blocked that out of my memory. I’d like to think it wasn’t much over 120 or so.” He’s certain he stopped before the maximum voltage because “if I’d ever have gone all the way to 450 volts, we wouldn’t be talking now. I would keep this a secret. I wouldn’t want to talk about it.”
    It was a point that Herb would return to each time I met him: that he didn’t remember the voltage at which he stopped. It is something we won’t know until all the subject files, including his, are made public in 2039. He worried at it, like a stone in a shoe. I wondered if perhaps he didn’t want to remember.
    What he did remember vividly was how wound up he felt afterward. Any soothing words or explanations of the experiment were ineffectual; they did nothing to alleviate his mounting outrage. “I took the four dollars and fifty cents—I had no compunction about that—then I went back to my office in Sage Hall, about half a mile away, on Prospect Street, and I looked him up in the faculty phone directory. I was ready to call Yale’s president if Milgram hadn’t been in the phone directory. I then phoned assistant professor Stanley Milgram—I felt that I had no reason to grovel before him because I was an assistant professor and he had no rank above me—and I told him that I wanted to see him at his earliest convenience because I’d just been a participant in his so-called memory study and I was very angry and concerned about it.”
    Herb was still “boiling with anger” when he confronted Milgram in his office two days later. “I said, ‘Whatever your motives or incentives, you had absolutely no business subjecting a medically unscreened personto that sort of stress.’ I think he was hit. I asked him, ‘Haven’t some of your other subjects come in to complain?’ And he felt that my reaction was extreme, and I wasn’t put off or ashamed of that. I think I made my complaints known because it was easy—I was in a good position. Someone who had come in from a job at Winchester or A.C. Goldberg or some factory position may well have felt intimidated by this high-level Yale academic.
    “He was very receptive to my concerns and we had lunch together, and over the course of the next few months I sort of realized that from a purely research standpoint . . . he had made a landmark contribution.” Surprisingly, the two men ended up developing a friendship of sorts.
    By the time Milgram left New Haven for Harvard eighteen months later, Herb had become a fervent admirer, albeit one with mixed feelings. “The last thing I told him when he was leaving was that I still resented the way he had acquired the insider knowledge he did, but I was very grateful that we had it. I followed Stanley’s career with great interest.” Herb gestured at his books and papers. “He just had the imagination and inventiveness, to me, of a true genius. I came to appreciate Stanley’s principal conclusion that we behave as we do largely as a result of the situation we’re in. You don’t have to be a psychopath to follow orders.”
    Herb’s friendship with and admiration for Milgram would play a far greater role than he would ever know. He did not realize that Milgram, after being