The Best Australian Science Writing 2013

by Jane McCredie

  * * * * *

  The more I read, the more I understood how complicated the story I had assumed I had known actually was. It became clear to me just how enormous the pressure on Bill and others was. Milgram’s career depended on their obedience; all his prepara-tions were aimed at making them obey. In choosing ‘the boldest and most significant research possible’, Milgram was aiming for bold and significant results.

  In order to create the ‘strongest obedience situation’, he was already wrestling with how he could overcome people’s reservations and reluctance to inflict harm on someone else.

  From October 1960 until August 1961, Milgram developed, refined, and rehearsed his experimental scenario. It seems that Milgram’s theatrical flair overtook his scientific objectivity in his choice of actors. In a kind of mirror image of the results he was looking for, Milgram cast as his experimenter a man who would command obedience, and in the role of the ‘victim’ a man who looked sure to obey. He seemed unaware of how his vision was influencing his experimental design.

  Milgram trained the actors himself. He wanted to make sure that they and the script were as convincing as possible. He noted, ‘It took a tremendous amount of rehearsal. Two full weeks with constant screaming on my part, constant.’

  As I made my way through Milgram’s notebook, with its detailed instructions and scripts, I could see the setup that he had created was carefully crafted to make it difficult for people to disobey. I could see, laid out, the unfolding of a slow process of trial and error as he refined, tightened, and scripted a scenario that would deliver the results he wanted. Milgram would argue that his experiment merely revealed what was natural and universal, that ‘[t]he objects with which psychological science deals are all present in nature fully formed, all that the prince-investigator has to do is to find them and awaken them with the magic kiss of his research’. But it was clear to me that the papers in the archives told a different story: he knew before his first subject arrived on 7 August 1961, what sort of results he wanted to achieve, and he had used pilot studies and pretests to hone the design to achieve just that.

  * * * * *

  The next time Bill Menold and I met, Bush was out, Obama was in, and Bill was thrilled that we had ‘finally got rid of those lowlifes’. We sat in Bill’s dining room and Barbara moved around in the kitchen, making tea. Watson, their dog, pushed his nose against my hand and I scratched behind one large, floppy ear. Bill told me that a couple of years before he met Barbara he had been interviewed by the BBC, who were making a documentary about torture. Before he could propose to her, he had made her watch it. I asked if it was because he wanted Barbara to know his darker side. Bill laughed. ‘I don’t know why I did it,’ He leaned toward me and touched his heart. ‘But there’s a little evil in there, you know what I mean?’

  After the experiment ended, Bill tried not to think about it. He put it out of his mind for years. Then in the early 1980s, he dated a psychology professor who was teaching her class about Milgram’s experiments. When he told her that he’d been a participant, she ‘went nuts’ and immediately wanted him to talk to her class. ‘And I never gave it a second thought; I said “Sure”.’ Bill laughed sheepishly at his own naïvety. ‘So, I’ll never forget this, I’m fortysomething and these are eighteen-, nineteen-year-old kids, and I showed up – well, you would have thought Adolf Hitler walked in the room. I never really thought about it that way, you know?’

  This image – of Bill suddenly seeing himself as others saw him – would stay with me all the way back to New Haven and, later, Australia, probably because I had been guilty of the same thing, of making assumptions before I had even met him. The first time I had visited, I admitted to myself now, I hadn’t expected to like him. I had expected someone bad, a kind of monster. Instead, I had found myself drawn to him, and I could see why. He did not shy away from talking about the experiment; he had a kind of unflinching internal gaze when it came to his behavior in Milgram’s lab. He was gutsy.

  As I was leaving I asked Bill if he was glad that he had taken part in the experiment. He paused, then said, ‘I don’t know. Yeah, I think so. I guess so. Not that I’m terribly proud of it … but I’d rather know than not know’.

  Bill’s experience that night in 1961 has forced him to think about things others haven’t had to – a term that one critic of the experiment called ‘inflicted insight’. Milgram’s subjects learned unwelcome things about themselves as a result of their involvement in the obedience experiments, and they’re different from the rest of us because of that. Bill had told me, ‘Most people are card-carrying cowards. If they had been involved in something like that, they just wouldn’t want others to know. Most people want to be considered “nice”.’

  But according to academic Don Mixon, Milgram didn’t measure immoral behavior in his lab. On the contrary, he argued that what Milgram measured was misplaced trust.

  When I met Don in Australia, he wore a red wool beret perched on the side of his head, a flash of colour against the white of his hair. He looked exotic, intellectual, in bare feet on a freezing midwinter day. A tall and rather frail man, he folded his long frame into a chair that looked out to the afternoon sky over the Blue Mountains, outside Sydney. He reminded me of a proud eagle in his aerie, a house perched high on the aptly named Cliff Drive, with vertiginous views down sheer rockfaces.

  When Don enrolled in a PhD program in Nevada in the late 1960s, there was no question that he would do his doctorate on Milgram’s obedience experiments. ‘It was the only social psychological research that interested and excited me. I liked it because it was political. It seemed to show that ordinary Americans behaved in ways worse than those in Nazi Germany. They seemed to behave in a terribly immoral fashion.’

  Don wanted to repeat Milgram’s research but quickly realised that, ethically, he didn’t have the stomach to deceive subjects in the way Milgram did or to watch the stress that they would go through. He thought of using role-playing rather than deception. In his version of the research, Don set the scene for his actors – a term he preferred to ‘subjects’ – by telling them to imagine that they were teachers in a learning experiment, in the room next door was the learner, and in front of them was the shock machine. (He used a mockup of the machine.) Don followed the original script closely, instructing subjects to increase the voltage level with each wrong answer, describing the learner’s cries of pain, and urging subjects to continue if they hesitated.

  Don found that his subjects became engrossed in the experiment once it began – so engrossed, in fact, that they became agitated and distressed, caught between the commands of the experimenter and the cries of pain from the learner. Even though they knew that the experiment itself was a simulation, their emotional reactions were real. Dismayed by their reactions, Don had to call the experiment off. He shook his head and said slowly, ‘I wasn’t finding out anything that was worth the distress.’

  Don found the same results as Milgram but came to completely different conclusions. He argued that it wasn’t immorality that drove Milgram’s subjects to flip the switches but trust in the experimenter, who, despite the cries from the learner, calmly told them to continue and gave the impression that there was nothing to worry about. People were agitated because the experimenter’s behavior was so ambiguous and confusing in this context. According to Don, Milgram simply measured the faith that people put in experts.

  He found just the opposite of what he thought he found; nothing about subjects’ behavior is evil. In fact, people go to great lengths, will suffer great distress, to be good. People got caught up in trying to be good and trusting the expert. Both are usually thought of as virtues, not as evils.

  The only evil in the obedience research, Don came to believe, was ‘the unconscious evil of experimenters’.

  Milgram assumed that increased self-knowledge was a good thing. In an unpublished note about the ethics issues of the experiments, he wrote, ‘I do not think I exaggerate when I say that for most subject
s the experiment was a positive and enriching experience. It provided them with an occasion for self-insight and gave them a first-hand, personalized knowledge of some social forces that move human conduct’.

  But I began to wonder how it could be a uniformly positive experience when what people learned about themselves was shameful, painful, or confronting.

  Milgram may have regarded such self-insight as valuable, but just how subjects were able to integrate such unwelcome and disturbing insights about themselves is not explained.

  The night after I met Bill and Barbara, I listened to the interview I had recorded with Bill earlier that day. There was a long pause on the tape that I hadn’t noticed at the time, after I had asked him what he’d said to those students of his girlfriend’s back in the 1980s. After the initial shock of being treated like a Nazi, Bill told the silent, judging students: ‘It’s very easy to sit back and say, “I’d never do this or that” or “Nobody could ever get me to do anything like that.” Well, guess what? Yes, they can.’

  I was starting to believe that Bill was right.

  Obedience

  Psychology

  Australia’s endangered future

  Tim Flannery

  In late August 2009 a tiny, solitary bat fluttered about in the rainforest near Australia’s infamous Christmas Island detention camp. We don’t know precisely what happened to it. Perhaps it landed on a leaf at dawn after a night feeding on moths and mosquitoes, and was torn to pieces by invasive fire ants; perhaps it succumbed to a mounting toxic burden placed on its tiny body by insecticide spraying. Or maybe it was simply worn out with age and ceaseless activity, and died quietly in its tree-hollow. But there is one important thing we do know: it was the very last Christmas Island pipistrelle (Pipistrellus murrayi) on earth. With its passing, an entire species winked out of existence.

  Two decades earlier the island’s population of pipistrelles had been healthy. A few scientists had watched the species’ decline with concern, until, after the million or more years that it had played a part in keeping the ecological balance of the island, they could see that without action its demise was imminent. They had done their best to warn the federal government about the looming catastrophe, but they might as well have been talking to a brick wall. The bureaucrats and politicians prevaricated for three years, until it was too late. While Australians argued about the fate of the asylum seekers that shared the pipistrelle’s home, nothing effective was done to help the bats. Indeed, except for those few watching scientists, neither Australia’s press nor public seemed to give a thought to the passing of the species, nor what it might mean for Christmas Island, or our relationship with our country.

  The pipistrelle’s extinction was almost unbearably painful for me. In an attempt to avert it I had met with Peter Garrett, then the environment minister, and warned him of the impending loss. I had also brought offers of assistance and expertise from the Australian Mammal Society to his attention. The society was confident that the species could be saved – at a cost of perhaps only a few hundred thousand dollars. But Garrett was convinced by the orthodoxy that ecosystems rather than species should be the focus of the national conservation effort, and I got the message loud and clear that nothing would be done. Saving the bat wasn’t an impossible mission: it’s just that the government and the people of Australia – one of the richest countries on earth – decided it wasn’t worth doing.

  What really shook me about the episode was that it was the first extinction of a mammal to occur in Australia for 60 years – and therefore the first to occur in my lifetime. My original professional expertise lies in mammalogy and palaeontology, and before the pipistrelle’s demise I had believed the worst of Australia’s extinction crisis was behind us – that somehow my generation was wiser and more caring than earlier ones, and would not tolerate any more losses of Australia’s unique mammals. It’s now clear that those 60 years were just a lull in the storm, and that the pipistelle’s demise marked the beginning of a new extinction wave.

  Australia’s first extinction wave started to gather pace almost as soon as the First Fleeters stepped ashore, and by the 1940s it had carried away 10 per cent of the continent’s mammal species. No other class of organisms has suffered so grievously, and as a result mammals have become something of a yardstick by which we measure our long-term environmental impact. In 1791 a convict wrote about the white-footed rabbit rat, saying that it was a pest in the colony’s food stores. The soft-furred, grey and white kitten-sized creature was arguably the most beautiful of Australia’s seventy-odd native rodent species, yet it was destined to be one of the earliest victims of European settlement. Two hundred years ago it could be found in woodlands from near Brisbane to Adelaide, but the last record of it dates to the 1850s. Because foxes and rabbits had not begun to spread by this time, it is thought that a major factor contributing to its extinction was the end of Aboriginal fire management.

  The thylacine and the toolache wallaby were the largest creatures to succumb in the first extinction wave. Both had small populations and restricted distributions (Tasmania and the southeast of South Australia respectively), and are unique in being the only species that were hunted to extinction by Europeans. The thylacine was Australia’s largest marsupial carnivore and, being wolf-like in appearance, it was persecuted by sheep farmers, the bounty on its head outlasting the creature itself. The beautiful toolache (pronounced ‘toolaitch’) wallaby had the misfortune of being the fleetest member of the kangaroo family, and so was hunted to extinction for sport. These extinctions were, however, atypical: indeed, one of the most astonishing aspects of the first extinction wave was that its victims included what had been the most abundant and seemingly secure mammals in Australia.

  Among the victims that once abounded were a dozen kittento hare-sized marsupials, mostly wallabies, rat-kangaroos and bandicoots, as well as nine species of native rodent. All of these species vanished between the 1840s and the 1930s, and all inhabited southern and central Australia. Strangely, many remained common until the moment of their vanishing. For example, according to the pioneering zoologist Frederic Wood-Jones, in the early years of the 20th century in Adelaide the rabbit-sized marsupials known locally as ‘tungoos’ (brush-tailed bettongs and their relatives) were sold at nine pence per dozen for greyhounds to chase and kill. Yet just a few years later they were only a memory, with not so much as a single skin remaining in the state’s museum.

  The causes of these extraordinary extinctions are thought to have been varied. The cessation of Aboriginal burning doubtless had its effect, and until the 1930s bounties were paid by many state governments for the scalps of now-extinct creatures. But the depredations of foxes (which were spreading quickly by the early 20th century) and feral cats, and the wholesale destruction of native vegetation by livestock and rabbits, must also have been important causes. While the causes are disputed, the effect of the first extinction wave is clear: it gutted the biodiversity of the drier parts of the continent, and very few native mammals larger than a rat and smaller than a kangaroo can be found on Australia’s inland plains today. It’s the absence of such species – the so-called critical-weight-range mammals (which weigh between 500 grams and 5 kilograms), which were once among the most abundant of creatures – that has led me to characterise the national parks of Australia’s southern inland as ‘marsupial ghost towns’.

  The gathering second extinction wave is now mopping up the few surviving medium-sized mammals in Australia’s south and inland. It’s not difficult to predict which will be the next to become extinct, for, like the pipistrelle, their decline has been charted for years. There are 15 frogs, 16 reptiles, 44 birds, 35 mammals and 531 plants on Australia’s endangered species list, and among those closest to the brink are three mammals: the central rock rat, the bridled nailtail wallaby and the numbat. All hang by a thread, and with the single vexed exception of the saltwater crocodile, next to nothing effective is being done to halt their slide into oblivion.

&nbs
p; The most dismaying aspect of the second extinction wave is that it is emptying vast swathes of the continent that were untouched by the first wave. Australia’s Top End and Kimberley were, until recently, a paradise for medium-sized mammals, among them a close relative of the white-footed rabbit rat. The last two decades have seen this fauna all but exterminated in the Top End, even in our most valued and best resourced national parks.

  Perhaps it is excusable that Australians are unaware of the extinctions currently occurring in distant places like Arnhem Land and other regions of our far north. But astonishingly, we also seem blind to the perils facing species much closer to home – for example, the sand flathead of Port Phillip Bay. A fish familiar to every Melburnian who has ever dangled a line, its population has declined by 97 per cent over the past decade. That means that just three fish survive for every 100 that were present in 2002. While the reasons for the decline are unclear and may be multiple, overfishing is clearly a factor. Yet many recreational fishermen still angrily refuse to countenance the development of a system of marine reserves extensive enough to give the species a chance. I’ve seen tinnies lined up like taxis at an airport cab rank along the edge of the pathetically small Ricketts Point Marine Sanctuary (just 115 hectares), hoping to hook one of the fish it shelters. Because fishing is prohibited in the sanctuary, the place is a haven for amazing creatures, including the Port Jackson sharks that have been eliminated elsewhere in the bay. It is a reminder of what an abundant marine environment Port Phillip Bay once was, and could be again under good management.