Rod Dickinson
The Milgram Re-enactment Installation;
reconstructed room of the Milgram Experiment; audio recording of the
2002 re-enactment; video, transferred to DVD, 220 min., English, 2002
Rod Dickinson in cooperation mit with Graeme Edler und and Steve Rushton
www.milgramreenactment.org
In 2002, the
Milgram Re-enactment
was shown for the first time at the CCA in Glasgow. It is a
re-enactment of one of the most controversial experiments of the
twentieth century in social psychology.
In 1961, at the University of Yale, the then 27-year-old assistant
professor Stanley Milgram conducted the so-called Milgram Experiment,
which aimed to analyse the crimes of National Socialism from a
social-psychological perspective. The experiment tested the obedience
of individuals towards people in authority and also the willingness of
normal people to follow orders, even when the orders contradict their
conscience.
The participants in the experiment believed they
were taking part in a harmless experiment about the connection between
successful learning and punishment, but in reality it was their
obedience to the leader of the experiment that was being tested. A
scientist dressed in white asked the test persons to administer an
electric shock to a third person in a different room when they gave a
wrong answer.
During the course of the experiment the
intensity of the electric shocks was continually increased (the shocks
ranged from 15 to 450 volts). The goal of the experiment was to test
how obedient the test persons were towards orders given by the head of
the experiment. More than a thousand people took part. Although they
could hear screams of protest and pain from the next room (the screams
were recordings that were played back), two thirds of the participants
were quite willing to administer (deadly) shocks up to the maximum of
450 volts.
It appears that many people experience disobedience
as such a radical act that they prefer to abandon their moral and
ethical convictions temporarily. The Milgram Experiment confirmed in an
extremely startling and distressing way Hannah Arendt’s thesis of the
banality of evil (Eichmann in Jerusalem), which was published at the
same time.
Rod Dickinson’s Milgram Re-enactment of 2002 is an
exact reconstruction of parts of the original experiment. In exactly
reconstructed rooms, actors played the protocols of the experiments as
in a stage play. The audience followed the four-hour performance
through one-way glass windows, which were set into the walls. In this
way the spectators became actual witnesses of a (repeated) historical
event. It was easy to construct a reference to their own lives and to
themselves: How far would I go if I were in that situation? To what
extent does one witness such behaviour in everyday life?
Inke Arns
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