Seeing and Believing

April 18, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Who you gonna believe – my write-up or your lyin’ eyes?

The film of the Milgram experiments shows that the subjects, who thought they were inflicting severe and possibly lethal shocks on another human being, were under considerable stress.*

Now The Situationst has published an appreciation of Milgram’s work written by no less than Philip Zimbardo, himself no stranger to stress-inducing experiments. The bold-faced emphasis is my own addition to justify my translation above (the first line of this post). Zimbardo writes:

I believe that it was seeing his movie, in which he includes scenes of distress and indecision among his participants, that fostered the initial impetus for concern about the ethics of his research. Reading his research articles or his book does not convey as vividly the stress of participants who continued to obey authority despite the apparent suffering they were causing their innocent victims. I raise this issue not to argue for or against the ethicality of this research, but rather to raise the issue that it is still critical to read the original presentations of his ideas, methods, results, and discussions to understand fully what he did. That is another virtue of this collection of Milgram’s obedience research.

*The Times today notes that some of the CIA torturers had a similar reaction.

. . .watching [Zubaydah’s] torment caused great distress to his captors, the official said.
Even for those who believed that brutal treatment could produce results, the official said, “seeing these depths of human misery and degradation has a traumatic effect.”

I wonder if Bybee, Yoo, and the others who wrote the legal opinions saying that torture was not torture would have written them if they had actually seen what they were justifying rather than merely reading abstract descriptions. Actually, I don’t wonder. They would have done what Cheney told them to do, no matter what.

Stanley Milgram - Ghost Writer for the Bush-Cheney Lawyers

April 17, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

I showed the Milgram film in class this week. So when I looked at the New York Times this morning, I still had the echoes of the “Experimenter” fresh in my mind.

EXPERIMENTER: Although the shocks may be painful, they’re not dangerous.

There’s another version of this line that was in the script the experimenter used, though it doesn’t appear in the film

EXPERIMENTER: Although they may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on.

The Times published excerpts from the legal memos that justified the torture.



The torturers deprived detainees of sleep for as long as eleven days.

It is clear that depriving someone of sleep does not involve severe physical pain . . . so long as sleep deprivation (as you have informed us is your intent) is used for limited periods, before hallucinations or other profound disruptions of the senses would occur.

Waterboarding has long been recognized as torture, even by the US when other countries used it. [Christopher Hitchens, a journalist who supported the Bush Iraq policies, had himself waterboarded (he's in the right-hand picture), and immediately concluded that it was obviously torture.] Nevertheless, the Bush lawyers wrote,

The waterboard does not inflict physical pain. . . . . .In the absence of prolonged mental harm, no severe mental pain or suffering would have been inflicted, and the use of these procedures would not constitute torture within the meaning of the statute.

Detainees were doused with water as cold as 41 degrees Fahrenheit.

Given that there is no expectation that the technique will cause severe physical pain or suffering . . .

“Stress” positions.

Any pain associated with muscle fatigue is not of the intensity sufficient to amount to ‘severe physical pain or suffering’ under the statute, nor, despite its discomfort, can it be said to be difficult to endure.

What a charade. The people who ordered the torture surely let it be known to their hand-picked lawyers which legal opinion they wanted the lawyers to come back with. And just to make it easier for the lawyers to justify the unjustifiable, they minimized and lied about the suffering they would inflict. The lawyers wrote the desired opinions, and now everyone can use these opinions to avoid being held accountable.

For eight years, the Bushies and the conservatives spoke with great self-righteousness about individual responsibility. All the while, they rigged the system to make sure nobody would be held responsible. They weren’t even as honorable as Milgram’s Nazi-in-a-labcoat.

TEACHER: But he’s hollering. He can’t stand it. What’s going to happen to him? . . . .
Who’s going to take the responsibility if anything happens to that gentleman?
EXPERIMENTER I'm responsible for anything that happens to him. Continue please.
TEACHER: All right. (Consults list of words.) The next one’s “Slow” – walk, truck, dance, music. Answer, please.

Guns and Crime - Elsewhere

April 17, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

I was asked to be a guest blogger at Everyday Sociology Blog, a site run by Norton Publishing and intended for undergrads. I dug up some material on guns and crime. Here's the link.

Bloody Fantastic

April 15, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Susan Boyle had scarcely put down the mike and walked offstage before the video was up on the Internet. Within a few days, her performance of I Dreamed a Dream from Les Miz on Britain’s Got Talent was one of the most watched items on YouTube (currently 8 million views, and counting).


Why was everyone surprised? And why was everyone so pleased?

The standard answer to the first question is “attractiveness bias.” Physical attractiveness comes with a halo effect; we tend to see attractive people as smarter and nicer, as better workers, lovers, parents, etc. (see Lisa’s post at Sociological Images). If attractive is good, then unattractive must be bad. So we expect a very plain-looking woman like Ms. Boyle not to have talent.

There’s some truth in that. But we all know counter-examples – the good-looking singer  with a “relaxed-fit” relation to pitch. And even people who don’t follow opera may know the stereotype “Wagnerian” soprano – a woman who looks as though she’d be more at home in the Vikings’ offensive line but who has a wonderful voice. So we shouldn’t have been all that surprised.

Maybe what fooled us was not that Ms. Boyle wasn’t pretty but that she didn’t look like a performer. Her hair, her make-up, her dress, her walk – they all carried the message that this is someone who does not get up and sing in front of audiences. If she really wanted to be a singing star, she’d dress the part. So when she says she wants to be like Elaine Paige (who starred in all those Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals in London), the judges and the audience chuckle condescendingly. As she starts to sing, they are stunned – this is clearly someone who can sing – and by the second line of the song, they are all cheering wildly for her.

But why? It wasn’t just because she has talent.* My guess is that it was because she provided a new story-line for the show, one that might have been especially pleasing to British audiences, who may still retain some sense of class consciousness.

I’ve never seen Britain’s Got Talent, but I assume it’s the same as American Idol. The usual narrative is the Cinderella story – talent and hard work leading to success. We identify with the contestant and think: I, with just a bit of a break, could become one of them – the glamorous celebrities.

But success creates a conflict. It means I have to leave my world, my friends. (Leaving them behind is not a problem for Cinderella; all she has is some nasty step-relatives.) The American solution is to pretend that you can have it both ways. You can become the glamorous celebrity, and you can keep your unglamorous, ordinary friends. In fact, you can bring them along with you as your Entourage.

The Susan Boyle story* is different. It’s more one of class solidarity. She doesn’t become one of “them.” Instead, she remains one of us. She doesn’t leave her class, she represents it. So her triumph is a triumph for the group. Watching her force Simon Cowell and the others to eat their original snark is satisfying in a way that’s different from watching the usual schnook-to-celebrity scenario. And at the end, when her Scotland friends backstage ask her how she feels, and she says, “Bloody fantastic,” she speaks for all of us.


* I Dreamed a Dream is not an easy song. It changes key a couple of times, and its range of an octave and a half is a few notes wider than that of most pop tunes.

**I have no idea what will really happen or what Ms. Boyle will become. Maybe she’ll dye her hair blonde and wear black evening dresses like Elaine Paige. The story I’m talking about is the one that was played out in that seven minutes of television a few days ago.