De Vos, J. (2009) ‘Now That You Know, How Do You Feel? The Milgram Experiment and Psychologization’, Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 7, pp. 223-246 http://www.discourseunit.com/arcp/7.htm 223 NOW THAT YOU KNOW, HOW DO YOU FEEL? THE MILGRAM EXPERIMENT AND PSYCHOLOGIZATION Jan De Vos Introduction The Milgram experiment is probably one of the most well known experiments of the psy-sciences. Rightly so as the novelist Doris Lessing would have it, for according to her the human race has all this “hard information about ourselves” remaining unused to improve our institutions and therefore our life (Lessing, 1986: 50). The idea that it is to the benefit of everybody to spread the psy-theories is held by many psychologists themselves. George Miller, the cognitive psychologist, pleaded in his presidential address to the American Psychological Association in 1969 to “give psychology away”, claiming this is the royal road towards a “psychology as a means of promoting human welfare” (Miller, 1969). Later, Miller described Milgram’s experiments together with Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment, as “being ideal for public consumption of psychological research” (cited in Blass, 2002: 208). And indeed, Milgram’s studies, as Zimbardo’s, are clearly meant to be spread to a broad audience, the didactic and prophylactic objectives permeating the entire experiments from their very outset. In this paper, I will explore how the Milgram experiment in this way is caught up in the broader processes of psychologization. The Milgram experiments took place between 1960 and 1963. Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to study the willingness to obey instructions from an authority figure to perform acts that conflicted with one’s personal conscience. He came up with a experimental set-up where he could test the levels of obedience when people were ordered to punish another person by subjecting him to increasing levels of painful electric shocks – this person was a confederate actually receiving no shocks at all. Milgram situated his experiments in the tradition of experimentation in social psychology referring to Solomon Asch 1 , Kurt Lewin and others (Milgram, 1974: xiv). The work of these latter centred around the notion of conformity, which was the concern of social psychologists in the inter-war period as it was connected to the developments of the “mass society” (Stam et al., 1998: 160) 2 . Milgram writes that it was the horrors of the Nazi epoch which prompted him to shift the focus from conformity and the influence of the group, to obedience and the influence of authority (Milgram, 1974: 114- 1 Milgram had worked for Solomon Asch in Princeton (Parker*, 2002: 103). Note that this Ian Parker* is a British writer living in New-York, and is not to be confused with his namesake Ian Parker the critical psychologist from Manchester University, who I will cite further on in this paper (hereafter the British writer will be denoted with an * in the text). 2 For example Asch’s well known line discrimination study in which naïve subjects were pressured into making incorrect judgments about the length of lines by group pressure (Asch, 1951).