In his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority, Milgram gave the fullest account of the various conditions he investigated. He reported 18 conditions. In the archives, Perry came across 24, although one, the ‘Educated Opinion’ condition, was not actually an experiment, but an estimation by psychiatrists and university students of the probability that average subjects would be fully obedient given the conditions described to them. Among the unpublished investigations, Perry discovered a remarkable condition that Milgram had kept secret. This was the study of ‘intimate relationships.’ Twenty pairs of people were recruited on the basis of a pre-existing intimacy. They were family members, fathers and sons, brothers-in-law, and good friends. One was randomly assigned to the teacher role, the other to the learner role. After the learners were strapped into the restraining device, Milgram privately explained the ruse to them, and encouraged them to vocalize along the lines employed by the actor in response to the shocks in previous conditions. The ‘intimate relationships’ study produced one of the highest levels of defiance of any condition: 85 %. It also produced a great deal of agitation to teachers as the learners begged their friends or family members by name to be released. One subject (#2435) went ballistic with the scientist’s pressure, and started shouting at him for encouraging him to injure his own son.

Perry speculated that Milgram was ambivalent about this condition for two reasons. On the one hand, ‘Milgram might have kept it secret because he realized that what he asked subjects to do in Condition 24 might be difficult to defend’ (p. 202). After all, he abused their mutual trust and intimacy to turn the one against the other. On the other hand, the results countered the whole direction of Milgram’s argument about the power of bureaucracy. Perry found a note in the archives in which Milgram confessed that ‘within the context of this experiment, this is as powerful a demonstration of disobedience that can be found.’ When people believed that someone was being hurt, and that it was someone close to them, ‘they refused to continue’ (p. 202). Given its implication, the finding was never reported.

This suggests that, to an extent, Milgram cherry-picked his results for impact. Perry notes that Milgram worked to produce the astonishingly high compliance rate of 65 %. He assumed that he needed a plurality of his subjects, but not a figure so high that it begged credibility. In pilot studies he tweaked the design repeatedly. At first, there was no verbal feedback from the learner, and every subject, when commanded, went indifferently to the maximum shock. Such a response would suggest that subjects did not actually assume they were doing anything harmful. The verbal feedback from the learner was introduced to create resistance. Milgram also explored a number of Stress Reducing Mechanisms and Binding Factors to optimize compliance. Stress was reduced, for example, by framing the actions as part of a legitimate learning experiment, and by advising the subjects that there was no permanent damage from the shocks. The binding factors included the gradual 30 step increments from the lowest to the highest shock level on the supposition that once they started, the movement up the shock scale would signal their acceptance of the protocol one step at a time.

Perry also found that there was often a Mexican standoff between the subjects and Mr. Williams as to their point of defiance. This was particularly evident in the all-female design. In their histories of the experiments Blass (2004) and Miller (1986) created the impression that the scientist would use 4 specific prods to encourage the subjects to continue, since that was what Milgram published. ‘If the Subject still refused after this last [fourth] prod, the experiment was discontinued’ (Blass 2004: 85). The subjects were always free to break off. After listening to the Female Condition (condition 20), Perry concluded: ‘this isn’t what the tapes showed’ (p. 136). Mr. Williams did not adhere strictly to the protocol. This was reflected in postmortem interviews with Dr. Errera, where three women from the Female Condition suggested that they had been ‘railroaded’ by Williams (p. 135). He would not relent in his pressure. In one case (#2026), he brought the subject a cup of coffee while she sat idle for 30 min before succumbing to repeated pressure to continue. Another subject was prompted a total of 26 times. This suggests, not only that the results could be cherry-picked between conditions, but also that in any one condition the scientist could elevate the compliance rate by departure from the protocol and the relentless application of pressure. The resulting 65 % compliance in condition 20 was equivalent to the previous highs achieved in two earlier conditions. In the remote feedback design (condition 1), the victim apparently pounded on the wall to signal distress. This reduced compliance from 100 to 65 %. In the cardiac condition, all the elaborate moaning, screaming and demands to be released (condition 5), resulted surprisingly in the same 65 % compliance level. How could such radically dissimilar feedback result in identical levels of compliance? This might be explained in part by the degree to which the scientist adhered strictly to, or departed from, the 4 prod protocol. As Perry’s analysis of the Female Condition suggests, the various treatments were simply not standardized. Milgram’s conclusion that there were no gender differences in aggression based on a comparison of outcomes in condition 5 and condition 20 does not bear scrutiny.

In his face-to-face dealing with subjects, Milgram assured them that their reactions were normal and understandable. Yet in his book he describes the compliant subjects as acting in ‘a shockingly immoral way’ (1974: 194). In his notes, he describes them as ‘moral imbeciles’ capable of staffing ‘death camps’ (Perry 2012: 260). In the 1974 coverage of his book on the CBS network ’60 minutes’ program, he portrays the compliant subjects as New Haven Nazis (p. 369), and asserts that one would be able to staff a system of death camps in America with enough people recruited from medium-sized American towns.