In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment on 40 people.
“You’re not getting any food today. Worthless sack of shit. That’ll teach you to talk back to me,” he snarled.
The door closed, and I could hear the sound of the latch. Even if it hadn’t locked, I was in no shape to climb the stairs to reach the door leading out of the cave-like basement.
I was alone, with nothing but the cold floor and the sloppily painted walls as my companions.
The people were tasked with teaching pairs of words to strangers and testing their memory skills.
I slowly sat up from where he had thrown me to the floor, wincing at the pain in my back. I felt tears well up and blinked them away. This did not deserve my emotion.
My thoughts turned to my family. My father was the worst. It was frigid looks and taciturn conversations in the house, but when I was in here, he would yell and scream… my mother was no better. I would limp back through the back door and she would be there in the living room, face only illuminated by her reading light. And I would never be able to tell what emotion was there behind her eyes.
Every time the learners got the words incorrect, the teachers were told to administer gradually increasing electric shocks.
I could tell one of my teachers. I could tell a police officer. But then I thought about my sister, 6 years younger than me. Based on how well they treated her, I knew that I had every right to despise her.
The learners were in on the experiment, and the shocks were fake. They would pretend to get an answer incorrect, and then play prerecorded sounds corresponding to the severity of the shock.
But sometimes I would be there when she came home from her day at school and cheerfully announced her arrival. Sometimes I would be there when she heard the glowing praise of our parents, and I would see her bright smile. So innocent. So young.
They started at the level of 75 volts. The teachers were given a sample electric shock as a demonstration of what it was like. The voltage increased by 15 each time, up to the maximum level of 450 volts.
I was so afraid of what might happen if someone were to find out. About where she would go. About what they would do to me… what they would do to her.
I heard steps approaching my dark prison, and the latch unlocking. My father threw open the door and stormed in.
The audio that would be played would start out with small expressions of pain and escalate to requests for the experimentation to stop. Eventually, the “learners” would play sounds of screaming. Sounds of hysterically begging to get out.
He screamed and slapped me. He grabbed me and told me that I should never have been born. I could smell the alcohol on his breath.
Eventually, it would escalate past 330 volts, an extremely painful shock enough to incapacitate a human being. There would be nothing but silence.
My father continued to ramble on. He told me the same story he would tell me every time we were here.
He told me the story about he had been so happy when I was conceived, so excited for his family’s future. He told me about how everything changed when I was born. He told me about how my birth had caused the death of his first wife. As he attacked me, I could see that his eyes were glistening with tears.
Everyone had expected for a vast majority of the subjects to stop the experiment quickly, before it escalated too far. They all thought that only a tiny percentage of people would carry out the experiment to its end.
“Dad? Dad!” A weak voice called out, and I saw my horrified sister in the doorway, warm light flooding the room.
My gut twisted with fear. Even through the stinging pain I wished that my father had remembered to close the door to the basement. No 12-year-old should have to see this.
When the test subjects expressed concern or reluctance to escalate the shocks, the experimenters said that it was absolutely essential that the experiment go on, and that they must continue.
My father stood up. “Go to bed, don’t worry about it. Everything will be fine,” he said, doing his best to adopt a soothing tone.
Her voice was shaking. Her eyes darted from my father stern expression to my fearful one. “What’s going on here? What’s happening?” She took a few halting steps down the stairs.
Contrary to expectations, every single one of the 40 participants increased the voltage up to 300 volts, enough to be severely painful and potentially fatal. 65 percent, 26 out of the 40, increased the voltage all the way up to the maximum of 450 volts, even after met with repeated silence.
“Go!” My father yelled, pointing at the door.
The experiment was repeated multiple times in a way so that someone else was pressing the switches to administer the shocks and the people were merely reading the word pairs. Only a tiny number of people refused to carry out the experiment.
My sister ran to us, pushing my father away. She grabbed my arm and frantically helped me up the stairs, ignoring his threats.
The psychological community was shocked. They had never expected that the amount of people who would disobey someone of perceived authority would be so few. They had never expected that taking action as a bystander to that kind of injustice would be so rare.
Together, we ran through the front door and out into the moonlit street. We ran until it was too painful for me, and I collapsed to the ground.
She sat on her feet and wrapped her arms around me, and I sobbed into her shoulder for what seemed like hours. I cried because of the years that I had lived with my family. I cried because she would have to experience pain and uncertainty at such a young age.
I cried, on a sidewalk of an unfamiliar street, and hugged my sister, wondering when she would have disobeyed.
