Obedience experiments at LaTrobe University – disturbingly close to home

I’d been back and forth to the USA over four years doing research for my book on Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments, only to find an even more disturbing variation in my own back yard.

After the first broadcast of my radio documentary in 2009, I was surprised to get an email from a woman called Dianne Backwell who told me that she’d been part of a Milgram-type experiment at LaTrobe University in the early 1970s.

Until then I’d known about only one replication of the Milgram experiment in Australia. And that was at Sydney University.  The results had been published and I’d interviewed the two people who’d run it – Leon Mann and Wes Kilham.

Dianne told me she’d been a subject in the experiment and she was still upset about it. We made arrangements to meet once she arrived back in Melbourne from her travels. In the meantime, just by chance, my sister met a man at a dinner party who also recalled taking part in a Milgram experiment at LaTrobe. Unlike Dianne who’d been a subject, this man had conducted the experiment on a fellow student.

I trawled the web, looking for any reference to the experiments they described.  The only published reference to the LaTrobe variation of Milgram’s famous research was a footnote in a wikipedia article.

By the time I finally met Dianne Backwell, I’d uncovered a network of people who had been involved in either running the experiment at LaTrobe or who like Dianne had been the unwitting subjects. I interviewed eight people who had taken part in the experiments, and all of them whether they’d been seated in front of the machine or if they’d been playing the role of experimenter, still felt troubled by the experience.

I’ve estimated that based on the numbers of students enrolled in 1973 and 1974 – these were two years that people I’d spoken to had participated – that over 200 LaTrobe university students were recruited as subjects, making it the largest replication outside of Milgram’s original study at Yale in 1961 and 1962.

I know from Dianne that being able to talk about what happened and how she felt has helped. But just how many other people are out there, I wonder, who like Dianne and the others I spoke to, still feel disturbed and troubled by the experience?  If you’d like to share your memories of the experiment,  let me know.