The teacher-volunteer was instructed to give the learner a series of memory tasks, and each time the learner failed, the volunteer was to punish him with an ever-greater electrical shock, in order to see whether the threat of punishment affected someone’s ability to perform memory tasks. As the shocks escalated, Wallace would cry out in pain, and ultimately he started hammering on the walls. But if the “teacher” wavered, the imposing instructor would urge them on:
“Please continue.”
“The experiment requires that you continue.”
“It is absolutely essential that you continue.”
“You have no other choice, you must go on.”
The reason the experiment is so famous is that virtually all of the volunteers complied. Sixty-five percent ended up administering the maximum dose to the hapless learner. In the wake of the Second World War—and the revelations about what German guards had been ordered to do in Nazi concentration camps—Milgram’s findings caused a sensation.
But to Levine, there’s a second lesson to the experiment. The volunteer shows up and meets the imposing young John Williams. He was actually a local high-school biology teacher, chosen, in Milgram’s words, because he was “technical-looking and dry, the type you would later see on television in connection with the space program.” Everything Williams said during the experiment had been memorized from a script written by Milgram himself.
“Mr. Wallace” was in fact a man named Jim McDonough. He worked for the railroad. Milgram liked him for the part of victim because he was “mild and submissive.” His cries of agony were taped and played over a loudspeaker. The experiment was a little amateur theatrical production. And the word amateur here is crucial. The Milgram experiment was not produced for a Broadway stage. Mr. Wallace, by Milgram’s own description, was a terrible actor. And everything about the experiment was, to put it mildly, more than a little far-fetched. The electric-shock machine didn’t actually give shocks. More than one participant saw the loudspeaker in the corner and wondered why Wallace’s cries were coming from there, not from behind the door to the room where Wallace was strapped in. And if the purpose of the experiment was to measure learning, why on earth did Williams spend the entire time with the teacher and not behind the door with the learner? Didn’t that make it obvious that what he really wanted to do was observe the person inflicting the pain, not the person receiving the pain? As hoaxes go, the Milgram experiment was pretty transparent. And just as with Levine’s trivia test, people fell for it. They defaulted to truth.
“I actually checked the death notices in the New Haven Register for at least two weeks after the experiment to see if I had been involved and a contributing factor in the death of the so-called learner—I was very relieved that his name did not appear,” one subject wrote to Milgram in a follow-up questionnaire. Another wrote, “Believe me, when no response came from Mr. Wallace with the stronger voltage I really believed the man was probably dead.” These are adults—not callow undergraduates—who were apparently convinced that a prestigious institution of higher learning would run a possibly lethal torture operation in one of its basements. “The experiment left such an effect on me,” another wrote, “that I spent the night in a cold sweat and nightmares because of the fear that I might have killed that man in the chair.”
But here’s the crucial detail. Milgram’s subjects weren’t hopelessly gullible. They had doubts—lots of doubts! In her fascinating history of the obedience experiments, Behind the Shock Machine, Gina Perry interviews a retired toolmaker named Joe Dimow, who was one of Milgram’s original subjects. “I thought, ‘This is bizarre,’” Dimow told Perry. Dimow became convinced that Wallace was faking it.
I said I didn’t know exactly what was going on, but I had my suspicions about it. I thought, “If I’m right in my suspicions, then he [the learner] is in collusion with them; he must be. And I’m not delivering shocks at all. He’s just hollering out every once in a while.”
But then Mr. Wallace came out of the locked room at the end of the experiment and put on a little act. He looked, Dimow remembers, “haggard” and emotional. “He came in with a handkerchief in his hand, wiping his face. He came up to me and he offered his hand to shake hands with me and he said, ‘I want to thank you for stopping it’.…When he came in, I thought, ‘Wow. Maybe it really was true.’” Dimow was pretty sure that he was being lied to. But all it took was for one of the liars to extend the pretense a little longer—look a little upset and mop his brow with a handkerchief—and Dimow folded his cards.
Just look at the full statistics from the Milgram experiment:
I fully believed the learner was getting painful shocks.
56.1
percent
Although I had some doubts, I believed the learner was probably getting the shocks.
24
percent
I just wasn’t sure whether the learner was getting the shocks or not.
6.1 percent
Although I had some doubts, I thought the learner was probably not getting the shocks.
11.4 percent
I was certain the learner was not getting the shocks.
2.4 percent
Over 40 percent of the volunteers picked up on something odd—something that suggested the experiment was not what it seemed. But those doubts just weren’t enough to trigger them out of truth-default. That is Levine’s point. You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them.
I’m going to come back to the distinction between some doubts and enough doubts, because I think it’s crucial. Just think about how many times you have criticized someone else, in hindsight, for their failure to spot a liar. You should have known. There were all kinds of red flags. You had doubts. Levine would say that’s the wrong way to think about the problem. The right question is: were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief? If there weren’t, then by defaulting to truth you were only being human.
5.
Ana Belen Montes grew up in the affluent suburbs of Baltimore. Her father was a psychiatrist. She attended the University of Virginia, then received a master’s degree in foreign affairs from Johns Hopkins University. She was a passionate supporter of the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, which the U.S. government was then working to overthrow, and her activism attracted the attention of a recruiter for Cuban intelligence. In 1985 she made a secret visit to Havana. “Her handlers, with her unwitting assistance, assessed her vulnerabilities and exploited her psychological needs, ideology, and personal pathology to recruit her and keep her motivated to work for Havana,” the CIA concluded in a postmortem to her career. Her new compatriots encouraged her to apply for work in the U.S. intelligence community. That same year, she joined the DIA—and from there her ascent was swift.
Montes arrived at her office first thing in the morning, ate lunch at her desk, and kept to herself. She lived alone in a two-bedroom condo in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington. She never married. In the course of his investigation, Scott Carmichael—the DIA counterintelligence officer—collected every adjective used by Montes’s coworkers to describe her. It is an impressive list: shy, quiet, aloof, cool, independent, self-reliant, standoffish, intelligent, serious, dedicated, focused, hardworking, sharp, quick, manipulative, venomous, unsociable, ambitious, charming, confident, businesslike, no-nonsense, assertive, deliberate, calm, mature, unflappable, capable, and competent.