The Milgram is a new work under construction. The name is derived from Stanley Milgram, the American psychologist who gained worldwide fame in the 1960s for his experiments in which he had subjects administer electric shocks to other subjects. Two out of three people would do this if ordered to do so by a higher authority, such as a chief or an officer in an army. In 1961, Adolf Eichmann, the last of the major Nazis, was sentenced to death following a notorious trial in Jerusalem. The whole world wondered how it was possible that such a puny little man—he could have been your neighbor—had devised the almost industrial process by which millions of Jews were murdered. Milgram’s experiments seemed to provide a clear answer to this. For over fifty years, his conclusions were unassailable in psychology. When I learned about it as a first-year student, the ethical side of his research—fortunately, harming other people in the name of science was no longer possible in 1989—was indeed called into question, but not his conclusions. It was not until 2013 that psychologists took another close look at the lab reports of the experiments. And a different picture emerged: most people were not nearly as compliant under the influence of an authoritarian research supervisor. Many made their displeasure known clearly and wanted to stop when the reactions of the ‘student’ in the adjacent room became more intense. The new installation is therefore not a tribute to Milgram, but a “memento dubii”: remember to doubt. Seemingly hard scientific facts can, upon closer inspection, prove to be more fragile than expected, certainly in the humanities!
With this machine, I bring a number of classic psychological experiments, such as the Stroop test, the Go/No-go test, and the Trailmaking Test, to life. But every time you make a mistake, you are ‘punished’ with a spectacular lightning flash and accompanying bang on top of the installation.