"Cyranoids": Stanley Milgram's Creepiest Experiment

Imagine that someone else was controlling your actions. You would still look like you, and sound like you, but you wouldn't be the one deciding what you did and what you said. Now consider: would anyone notice the difference? In this nightmarish scenario, you would be a "cyranoid" - in the terminology introduced by psychologist Stanley Milgram when he suggested that cyranoids - or at least, an approximation of them - could be a powerful research tool in psychology. Milgram is best known for his obedience experiments in which he convinced (or, perhaps, tricked) dozens of ordinary people to administer agonizing electrical shocks to an innocent victim. In fact, the shocks were faked and no-one got hurt, but the study quickly became infamous. For more about Milgram's obedience project, see here. By contrast, Milgram's cyranoids never got much attention. I'm really surprised that this topic hasn't been more widely discussed because, to my mind, the method and its implications are even creepier than the obedience experiments. Yet the first I heard about them was yesterday, when I read this new paper from British social psychologists Kevin Corti and Alex Gillespie. The authors describe how they replicated two of Milgram's cyranoid experiments. So what is a cyranoid? Milgram named his inventions after the 17th century French playwright Cyrano de Bergerac, whose life formed the subject of a 19th century play of the same name. According to the play, Cyrano was brilliant, but ugly. He succeeded in winning the heart of a woman by teaming up with a handsome but dull man. Cyrano secretly told his colleague what to say - literally putting words in his mouth - and thus created a hybrid personality who was both good-looking and charming. There are plenty of more moderntakes onthe theme. The theatrical Cyrano whispered his instructions into his proxy's ear. Milgram hit upon the idea of reproducing the same effect using modern technology. The 'source' spoke into a microphone and the 'shadower' listened through a hidden earpiece. He or she would simply repeat whatever they heard (with practice, this 'speech shadowing' is, apparently, easier than you'd think.) It's deceptively simple. Milgram claimed that people who meet a cyranoid are unable to detect the trick. As Corti and Gillespie put it