The Dogs of Pavlov

The Dogs of Pavlov is not a psychological research monograph by Stanley Milgram but a book by the Welsh poet and playwright Dannie Abse, comprising a play and a critical essay responding to Milgram's obedience experiments. Milgram is associated with the book because it includes his formal replies to Abse's charges, and library catalogues frequently list him as a co-author or contributor . The play dramatizes the Milgram paradigm in a psychological laboratory, while the accompanying essay argues that the experiments violated ethical standards by deceiving subjects and inducing severe distress. Abse frames the book as a moral intervention, asking whether such experiments can ever be sanctioned by an informed public, regardless of their scientific value .

Abse's objection is not merely that Milgram's experiments caused distress but that they were based on a hoax that stripped subjects of dignity and self-respect. He documents that subjects twitched, stuttered, suffered full-blown seizures, and approached nervous collapse, yet the experiments continued . Abse writes that even if post-experimental reconciliation were one hundred percent effective, he would still feel uneasy about experiments based on a hoax that causes men to lose their dignity . He grounds this in a broader principle: procedures involving loss of dignity and trust in rational authority are harmful in the long run and require the most thoughtfully planned reparations, if they are engaged in at all . The essay is a sustained argument that some knowledge is not worth the human cost of obtaining it.

Abse argues that Milgram's experiments produced no genuinely new knowledge. Human history, he contends, already teaches precisely what Milgram claims to have learned—that people have a frightening capacity to hurt each other in brutal deference to authority . If the basic outlines of the finding were already available from historical experience, then the experiments were not merely unethical but unnecessary. This charge shifts the burden of justification: Milgram cannot defend the experiments by pointing to their results if those results were antecedently known. The argument aligns Abse with other critics who questioned whether the obedience paradigm revealed anything beyond common sense, though Abse's version is distinctive in its literary and moral emphasis rather than its methodological focus.

Milgram's responses are included in the volume, and they reveal both engagement and evasion. In his first reply, Milgram objected to Abse's 'opprobrious terms'—bullshit, cheated, fraud—and argued that as a dramatist, Abse should understand that illusion may serve a revelatory function and that theater is founded on the benign use of contrivance . Milgram then defended the experiments on the grounds that subjects found their experience acceptable, citing post-experimental questionnaire data showing that 84 percent were pleased to have participated . A scholarly analysis of the exchange notes, however, that Milgram does not really engage the burden of Abse's concern and sounds complacent about the basic ethical questions .

The play and the essay are complementary instruments of the same critique. Abse states that he had wanted to take up the theme of obedience to an evil command in dramatic terms after reading about Milgram's experiment at Yale . The play stages the experiment as a moral trap, allowing audiences to witness the psychological degradation of subjects in real time rather than reading about it in a journal article. The essay then provides the analytical and ethical argument that the dramatic form embodies. This combination reflects Abse's conviction that literature can illuminate moral problems that scientific prose obscures, and that the dramatic representation of obedience may be more truthful than the experimental simulation of it.

Abse's critique intersects with Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, which Milgram himself cited as an intellectual context for his obedience research . Arendt argued that Eichmann was not a sadistic monster but an uninspired bureaucrat doing his job, and Milgram saw his experiments as providing scientific support for that view: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, can become agents in a destructive process . Abse's book, however, complicates this connection. While Milgram invoked Arendt to frame his findings as profound, Abse's essay suggests that the historical record already contained the lesson, making the experimental demonstration redundant and cruel. The book thus stages a debate about whether the laboratory can add anything to what history and literature already teach about obedience.