between 1961 and 1962
in the United States, within
the bounds of the prestigious Yale
University, Stanley Milgram was
subjecting 780 volunteers, rewarded
with 4.5 dollars per hour,
to an experience related to
obedience to authority.
Individuals of all ages
and employment backgrounds,
that is, people
like you and me,
recruited via an ad in a paper,
were put in the situation
of having to inflict pain,
suffering, on other people.
Suffering caused by a simple
electrical charge from 15 V
to 450 V, that is, if
they had really been administered,
shocks capable of causing death.
Struck by the atrocities,
by the horrors committed
during the Second World War,
Stanley Milgram asked himself some questions.
The personality type produced
by US society,
that is, men and women
raised with the principle
of respecting human rights
and the dignity of an individual,
this personality type, then,
could it become the
perpetrator of acts,
of gestures that went against
what someone’s conscience said,
against what someone’s
education had taught him or her?
How many would take part in this experiment?
How may would refuse this experiment?
How many would withdraw
along the way?
Of course, the real
purpose of the experiment
was never revealed to them.
It was instead presented as an
experiment on memory
and on the relationship between
pain and learning.
During his preparatory research
Stanley Milgram had
interviewed psychiatrists
to see and to evaluate the reactions
the volunteers would be likely
to have during
the experiment.
Judging that people not under
coercion would not be inclined
to make another suffer
the psychiatrists estimated
the percentage of people
capable or likely
to inflict 450 V, that is
the maximum charge, at 1%.
On the whole, the orders
would surely be rejected.
Unfortunately, the results of this
experiment would not confirm
this hypothesis, to the great
surprise of Milgram and his team.
So, now lets us introduce the framework
for this experiment as well as its staging,
which was particularly sophisticated,
and, we must admit,
particularly devious.
The experiment requires 3 people.
An investigator dressed in a white
shirt with a severe expression,
that is, the stereotype
of the scientist,
explains in advance
to the 2 volunteers
that one of them, called the teacher,
would have to inflict an
electric shock on the other,
the other being the learner.
This shock would be inflicted
if the learner made an error.
The greater the error,
the more errors the learner made,
the more the charge would be raised.
However, I’ll again point out that the
charge was simulated and that the learner
is an accomplice sitting on
and strapped into a chair,
an electrode attached to his or her wrist.
The learner would react progressively
following a pre-determined script.
Starting from 75 V, they start to tremble.
At 135 V they let out
some piercing cries.
At 150 V, they beg to be freed.
At 270 V, they scream in pain.
At 300 V, there is silence.
Now, the silence is
considered as an error
and the scientist orders
the teacher to continue.
After 30 errors the
fateful threshold of 450 V is reached.
After 3 charges of 450 V
the experiment is
considered complete.
For it to be
interrupted before its end
the teacher must question
the experiment’s justification
at least 4 times for
the scientist to stop it.
Now get this.
Almost 2/3 of participants
went up to the maximum charge,
and did so 3 times.
So we’re very far from the 1%
stated and estimated by the psychiatrists.
What should we take
from this experiment?
That 2/3 of people,
if we incite them, if we encourage them,
are able to give free rein
to their sadistic tendencies,
revealing their cruelty,
their sadism, their barbarism
beneath such a fragile
varnish of culture and civilisation?
No, Milgram tells us,
that is not what this
experiment teaches.
Because, in that case,
if humans were truly sadistic,
we wouldn’t express or show
signs of anxiety, of emotion,
of emotional tension,
indicating that 
we are under stress,
that we are struggling inside,
in the face of
a dilemma of, on the one hand,
the instructions we receive and,
on the other, our own conscience.
Between obedience on the one hand,
orders, the voice from on high,
and obedience to the self,
the internal voice.
Furthermore, it is interesting
that in one of the 18 variants
of the experiment led by Milgram,
where the teacher is placed
in the same room as the learner
while the investigator
is in another room
and provides
instructions via phone
the number of subjects
administering the maximum charge
falls to less than 20%,
that is, 1/5.
Without, however, showing
here, and this is very important,
the refusal to obey.
In other words,
as soon as the teacher had the option,
he or she tricked, schemed, and
lied to fool the investigator
without, however, ever
questioning the investigator’s authority.
That is the lesson we
must gain from this experiment.
The subject will generally
submit to authority
and place him- or herself
in what Milgram called agentic state
in opposition to autonomous state.
An individual is in an agentic state,
says Milgram,
when, in a given
situation
he or she accepts the
total control exerted on his or her actions
by a person granted a status
of superior legitimacy.
The individual, in some way, flees him- or herself.
He or she bends to
the will of the other,
even if this will,
the order given,
is contrary to his or
her conscience and values.
This means,
and this is important,
that it is less the order
given that is important,
whatever its content,
than the authority issuing it.
In other words, an order,
even if it is fair,
or unfair, scandalous,
or authorised, will be followed and applied
if it is issued by an
authority deemed legitimate.
This precisely echoes Eichmann’s
defence during his trial.
The Führer’s word is law
and the law suffers no exceptions.
At the other extreme
of the spectrum of reactions,
there are individuals
placed in automatic state,
a minority of individuals who
commit their entire character
to attempting to meet the idea
that they have of themselves,
and refuse to obey.
If the refusal,
if the non-cooperative attitude
remains in the minority,
it is, nevertheless, because to obey
proves less psychologically taxing.
To submit to authority
is to free oneself from anxiety,
to proceed with choices
whether they’re good or bad,
that is to say, to come undone, at the last,
under the weight of your own freedom.
It’s by keeping this in mind
that we can understand the
sense of staggering evidence
of a commander
from a Nazi camp,
the infamous and far too
well-known Treblinka camp,
named Stangl.
A cultured man of fauth,
husband and father
of a loving family,
he confided that he
didn’t consider himself responsible
bar in front of God
and in relation to his own conscience.
I alone, he added, knows what
I did of my own will.
And he added:
“That which I did against my own
free will, on that I cannot comment. ”
Against my own free will.
An entirely personal assessment
since it was regarding
900,000 dead people
that he was meant to respond
in front of the court and history
and he would be condemned
to life in prison for that.
Let’s look at another experiment that
is contemporary to Milgram’s
since it was conducted in
August 1971 by Philip Zimbardo.
Zimbardo who was,
as a small anecdote,
a schoolmate of
Milgram’s in the Bronx.
Everything started in the same way,
via an ad published
in a local paper
to recruit volunteers
to study the psychological
effects of life in prison.
Can the prison system help individuals
of a normal, ordinary profile,
to commit anti-social or
even violent acts?
Flat-rate compensation
of $15 per day was offered,
the equivalent of $90 today,
which was indeed
a considerable sum at the time,
and was a windfall
for young students
hoping to easily
earn some money.
24 volunteers were selected:
12 to play the
role of guards,
12 to imitate
the prisoners.
A fake prison was even
built in the basements
of the Stanford
Psychology Department.
An anonymising environment
had to be created,
conferring a sense of
irresponsibility,
and even of impunity to those
participating in the experiment.
A closed experiment where the volunteers
would be subjected to
constant pressure
from either an authority
or hierarchical superior,
like in the Milgram experiment,
or from the group.
Once again, listen to this, the
experiment was meant to last for 15 days.
It would only last 6.
And now let me explain
why to you.
To reinforce the
realism of the situation,
on day 1 at 06:00 in the morning,
the detainees were arrested in their
homes without having been warned.
They were taken to the police
station before being transferred
to Zimbardo’s
fake prison
where they were stripped and washed
before being forced
to put on a uniform,
a simple shirt that left
their genitals exposed.
They also had nylon stockings placed
on their heads to cover their hair.
Finally, they were each
given a serial number
which would be their
identity throughout the experiment.
As for the guards,
they also put on
a guard’s uniform,
and, as a more astonishing and
less realistic detail,
they were given aviator
sunglasses to prevent establishing
visual contact and therefore a
connection between the guard and prisoner.
As early as the second day,
a revolt exploded
at the heart of the prison.
3 prisoners tore off
their nylon stockings and
their serial numbers, and
blocked the entrance
to their cell
with their mattresses.
The guards took a stand
to suppress the rebellion
and, in order to prevent this type of
incident being repeated in the future
and in order to break the solidarity
that had emerged between the prisoners,
they placed 3 prisoners,
those considered
good and docile,
in one cell and offered
them preferential treatment.
As for the leaders,
they were isolated,
deprived of mattresses,
food, and showers.
The cruel aim was
to sew discord,
to create a climate of defiance
and suspicion between the prisoners.
In essence, to divide and rule.
On the contrary, the guards
developed a community spirit
by inflicting at times gratuitous
and often degrading punishments
on the prisoners,
such as early wake-ups
in the middle of the night, punches,
access to the toilets refused
on the guard’s whim.
However, after tests
carried out upstream,
nothing in the guards’
profiles, their personalities,
or their habits indicated that
they could so easily fall into
cruel, sadistic acts.
One of the guards, who was, however,
placed in the “hard” category,
was so unsettled by
the way the experiment stirred up
violence in him
that he requested to leave.
He didn’t recognise himself any more.
This behaviour went against
everything he thought he was.
Things were not going any
better on the side of the prisoners.
At the end of just 36 hours
one of them showed such
worrying signs of emotional disorders,
fits of rage, and screaming
to be freed.
During day 3 significant
events took place.
The first occurred
with the visit of parents
who would become concerned
about the state of health and fatigue
they noted in their children without,
however, querying the
experiment and its justification.
The second event took
the form of a rumour
which did not stop
growing throughout the day:
the freed prisoner,
the one freed on day 2,
was said to have faked
his illness and depression
to leave and, on the
outside, was supposedly organising
an expedition to free
his comrades from the hole.
Funny, you say?
Not at all, a paranoia
spread in the heart of the prison,
including among the scientific team,
and even spreading to Zimbardo
who decided to place the prisoners
in a warehouse for a few hours
to protect them from
the assault from outside.
Was he still acting
as an investigator
or as the director
of a fictive penitentiary centre?
The confusion of roles,
you must admit, is disconcerting.
On day 4 the prisoners received
a visit from a priest.
They all spontaneously presented
themselves to him using their serial number,
showing the work of
a phenomenon of depersonalisation
and loss of grounding
provoked by the experiment
and a total
internalisation of their role
just as a prisoner
would later testify:
“I started to feel
that my identity,
the person I was and
who had decided to go to prison,
was distant from me, had gone so
far as to no longer be himself.
I was Prisoner 416.
I truly was my serial number. ”
This shows the vulnerability
and fragility of “Me”.
In just a few days
the prisoners seemed
unable to find the means
of resistance in themselves.
Everything making up their
self-image deteriorated so greatly
that they lost contact
with their “intimate self”.
Where could the experiment
have led to
if it hadn’t been
interrupted on day 6
thanks to the intervention
of Zimbardo’s girlfriend
when she visited the prison walls
and realised what
was happening?
All of the participating parties,
voluntary guards,
voluntary prisoners,
and the investigative team
were so immersed in the
experiment and trapped in their role
that nobody was
capable of discernment any longer.
It was as if their moral sensibilities had evaporated.
When returning to this experiment
much later in 2007
in a work called
”The Lucifer Effect”,
Zimbardo noted
strong similarities
between what he did in 1961
in the experiment that I just
accounted to you and the atrocious acts
carried out by US soldiers
in the Abu Graib Prison
in 2003 in Iraq.
Beaten, struck, and
chained prisoners,
photographed in
humiliating positions,
forced to wear
female underwear,
plunged into darkness for
days on end,
burnt by cigarettes,
forced to masturbate in a group.
Faced with the question
of responsibility,
Zimbardo excused the soldiers,
because more than in the agents,
the power was embedded
in the situation.
It doesn’t matter who, he believes,
if you are placed in certain
specific circumstances,
you will not only
obey orders,
but also become
an agent of evil,
something Zimbardo
calls “the Lucifer Effect”.
