Behind the Shock MachineBehind the Shock Machine
All In The Mind
In 1961 Stanley Milgram conducted a controversial series of experiments which were said to show that we're all capable of evil in certain circumstances. Many of the participants are still traumatised. This is a panel discussion about the lessons and ethics of these experiments..
29:19•3 Jun 2012
Behind the Shock Machine: Obedience, Ethics and Lasting Psychological Scars
Episode Overview
- Milgram’s headline claim that most people go to maximum shock came from a single 40-person study and ignores many variations where most participants disobeyed.
- Gina Perry’s research shows that many volunteers still carry vivid memories and harsh self-judgements decades after the experiments and re-enactments.
- Modern ethics guidelines demand transparency, informed consent and clear discussion of possible harm, making Milgram-style deception unacceptable today.
- Justin Oakley argues that scientific objectivity should include empathy and sensitivity, rather than emotional detachment from participants’ suffering.
- The panel challenges the idea that participants were inherently "evil" and calls for more respectful, accurate public narratives about their actions.
“I think that we've all been tricked just the same way that those volunteers were tricked into believing that that experiment was real.”
Get ready to be moved by real-life accounts of how a psychology experiment from the 1960s still echoes through people’s lives today. This panel conversation centres on Stanley Milgram’s notorious obedience studies, where ordinary volunteers thought they were delivering electric shocks to a stranger because a man in a lab coat told them to.
Author Gina Perry, whose book *Behind the Shock Machine* re-examines Milgram’s work, explains how volunteers were drawn in by an advert for a "memory and learning" study, only to be cast as "teachers" ordered to increase shocks with every wrong answer.
As she puts it, "inside all of us is a concentration camp guard just waiting to be let out" is the story Milgram sold, but her archival work suggests a very different picture: across many variations, "in over half of the experiments that Milgram conducted, 60% of people disobeyed." Bioethicist Justin Oakley joins Perry and host Lynne Malcolm to unpack what these experiments say about character, authority and ethics.
He stresses modern standards of "transparency", "respect" and "sensitivity", arguing that scientific objectivity never required being "completely cut off emotionally" from participants’ distress. The episode becomes intensely personal when Perry’s research subjects and La Trobe University re-enactment participants speak up. Diane Backwell recalls being told, "you went the whole way...
you were like one of the people that did that to the people in the holocaust," and says the experience "has been just part of who I am ever since that day." Another Diane describes the long-lasting anger and the "shocking experiences" that have stayed with her for nearly four decades. Through these stories, the panel questions whether many volunteers have been unfairly branded as inherently "evil" and whether public narratives about obedience have harmed them further.
If you’ve ever wondered how far authority should go in science—and how far you might go under pressure—this conversation will give you plenty to sit with. What labels about human nature have you quietly accepted without questioning where they came from?
Do you want to link to this podcast?
Get the buttons here!
More From This Show
The latest episodes from the same podcast.