We’re all living a psychological experiment. Except the shocks and cries of pain are real.
Downtown Peabody welcomes visitors in October 2025. During World War II, Peabody was the site of a German prisoner of war camp. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)
What if an authority figure directed you to pull a lever that delivered a painful shock to an unseen victim?
If you’re like most people, you’d do it. And you’d keep doing it, at the urging of that authority figure, despite the howls of pain from the poor sap on the other side of the wall.
You’ve probably heard of the Milgram experiment, in which a Yale psychologist faked electric shocks to study the willingness of ordinary people to obey orders in conflict with their personal conscience. Nobody was really hurt, because no shocks were delivered and the yowls of pain came from actors. We’ll return to Milgram shortly, but let me explain how I got to thinking about the famous experiment in the first place.
It was Gov. Laura Kelly’s last State of the State address, delivered Tuesday.
“Kansans are the most civil, decent people on earth,” she declared.
I couldn’t agree more. But our nature is part of the problem.
Kelly, a Democrat, was trying to make a point about civility and bipartisanship in politics. She urged Kansas lawmakers, the supermajority of whom were Republicans, not to let the loudest and most extreme viewpoints “drown out the voices of the vast majority of Kansans, who want to see us work together.”
Problem is, the Legislature has ignored what the vast majority of Kansans want for years — and right-wing extremism already rules. That’s why we don’t have legalized pot or Medicaid expansion. About 65% of Kansans support recreational marijuana, and 74% think expanding Medicaid would help rural hospitals stay in business. Those figures are from the Fall 2025 Kansas Speaks public opinion survey by the Docking Institute for Public Affairs at Fort Hays State University.
Much of the daylight between what Kansans want and what we get is because of historic GOP majorities in the Kansas House and Senate, which routinely block any measure that might give joy or comfort to anybody but the rich. But some of the blame belongs to a collective culture in which Kansans are so desperate to be polite and cooperative, and not to be regarded as different, that we’ll defer to power even when we shouldn’t.
Not all Kansans are like this. I’m not. My journalistic training and the books I’ve read and the friends I’ve made have allowed me to transcend Sunflower bashfulness. But it hasn’t absolved my guilt about being different.
There’s no guilt like Kansas guilt, and it lurks inside us like a vestigial organ from our founding. Although admitted as a free state on the eve of the Civil War 165 years ago, Kansas throbs with the political memory of the struggle that made us bleed. In our collective conscience there nags the worry we haven’t lived up to our promise, that even though we helped end the stain of slavery we still struggle with other deadly civic sins. From racism to hunger to inequality, the job remains unfinished. Nobody today remembers the state’s founding, but every living and reasoning Kansan takes their catechism from the pages of history.
We Kansans are not only a civil lot, as a whole, but a decent lot.
Gov. Laura Kelly delivers her State of the State speech on Jan. 13, 2026, in the Kansas House. (Photo by Thad Allton for Kansas Reflector)
My definition of decency is behaving in a moral way, whether or not it conforms to accepted notions of respectability. You probably know a neighbor or a friend who has put their own self-interest aside to help you or someone else, and that’s the kind of approach Kelly specifically mentioned. Perhaps you donate food in a blessing box or give what you can to charity. But let me give you an historic example of Kansas decency in a time of trial.
During World War II, hundreds of thousands of captured German soldiers were sent to POW camps across America. Some of these camps were in Kansas, including one that held 100 or so prisoners at Peabody.
The POWs were billeted in town at a warehouse that had been turned into a prison. During the day the POWs were sent out to work, for meager pay, at surrounding farms, as long as the work was not dangerous and didn’t involve war production. POW labor helped alleviate a wartime manpower shortage at farms across Kansas.
“At first only the Mennonites invited the prisoners to work,” recalled Marian Franz, in the Mennonite Weekly Review in 1989. She had been an adolescent farm girl during the war. “Then others, observing the comfortable arrangement, employed them also.”
Franz wrote that she was more afraid of the armed U.S. guards than of the German prisoners. The Mennonites are historically known as pacifists and, during the war, many were conscientious objectors and given alternative service.
The German worked hard, were grateful for the quality of the food they were given, and even had a little time for hobbies such as sketching or whittling. The commander of the Peabody camp obtained soccer balls and boxing gloves for the prisoners. Even the guards who accompanied the prisoners to the field work developed a degree of trust.
“The original tension between the U.S. and German soldiers was relaxed by the hospitality that our Mennonite home and community extended equally to friend and foe,” Franz remembered. “As time went on fewer guards accompanied the prisoners. The guards no longer brought the guns into the house at mealtime. On occasion we sang together at the piano.”
Not everyone liked how well the German prisoners were being treated. Every time an American casualty list was printed in the papers, there were calls for some POWs to be executed. Once, when three farm women drove prisoners back their barracks in Peabody, they were unexpectedly met by a group of politicians, army officials and newspapermen who were conducting an official inspection. Wharton Hoch, a newspaper editor from nearby Marion, was particularly incensed. He condemned the practice of women transporting prisoners without guards, according to the Kansas City Times.
The commander of the four prison camps in central Kansas immediately put an end to the practice.
“When these prisoners first came to Kansas there was an urge on the part of the people to kill them,” the commander, Col. H.L. Shafer, told a town meeting, as reported by the Times. “Now there is a tendency to swing just as far the other way and fraternize with them. Treat them fairly but as prisoners.”
Franz became friends with one of the prisoners, Berthold Schwarz, who had been captured in North Africa after Erwin Rommel’s defeat. He returned to Germany at the end of the war. In 1988, Franz was reunited with Schwarz during a trip to Europe.
“It was evident the prisoner-of-war experience was emotional for Schwarz,” she wrote. “He pored over photos of how the Peabody prison looks today.”
I didn’t know of the German POW camp at Peabody until October, when I visited the historical society there and was surprised to see a wooden model of what appeared to be a twin-engine Heinkel bomber. It had been carved out of scrap wood by a German POW. There I also learned of “Spoils of Victory” by Daniel Markowitz, a 2025 novel about the German POW experience among Mennonite families in Kansas.
Franz, who for 24 years as director of the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund lobbied Congress unsuccessfully to establish the right of conscientious objectors not to fund wars, died in 2006. She was 76.
I’m not a pacifist. But I am worried about our current blundering into war, the increasing threat of nuclear annihilation, and the loss of the stabilizing influence of American power on the world stage.
I’m also not naive enough to think German prisoners during World War II were treated well in Kansas just because it was the right thing to do. Had they been Japanese prisoners, they likely would have been treated far worse, as were the Japanese Americans in the concentration camps at Manzanar and elsewhere. Also, there is the problem that the German POWs, decent people by appearances, were part of the Nazi regime. Hardcore Nazis, including SS officers, were barred from farm work, but even Rommel’s rank-and-file soldiers were fighting for fascism.
Which brings me back to Milgram and his famous experiment.
“Obedience, as a determinant of behavior, is of particular relevance to our time,” Milgram wrote in his 1974 book detailing his experiment. “It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders.”
In 1960, Milgram devised the test, in which subjects were paid $4 an hour to administer the shocks, ostensibly to study the effect of pain on learning. The subjects were the ones with their fingers on the button. There was an “experimenter” who directed the shocks be increased while a “learner” supposedly tried to memorize word pairs, but the learners were actually actors who were in on the scheme.
Milgram found that two-thirds of subjects turned their machines up to the maximum of 450 volts when told to do so, despite the cries of pain from the learner. Perhaps more disturbing, every subject was willing to inflict some pain.
There has been ample criticism of Milgram’s work, particularly from psychologist Gina Perry, who in 2013 wrote “Behind the Shock Machine,” in which she interviews the original subjects and concludes Milgram may have overstated his percentages and erred in his broad generalizations. Yet, Milgram’s results have been replicated so many times that his conclusions remain substantially valid.
The real unease with Milgram’s experiments, I think, lies in the central question that drove him to experiment in the first place: Why are otherwise decent people disposed to obey orders that result in cruelty, suffering and death to their fellow human beings?
It is the essential question of civilization.
On presidential Election Day in 2024 I visited several polling places in my town and observed, from a safe and legal distance, as scores of my neighbors cast their votes. The polling places for some of the precincts, like mine, were churches. For others it was a public building, including the municipal auditorium. It all went smoothly enough, with voters behaving cordially and the volunteer poll workers doing their jobs with efficiency and dedication. As I watched, I recalled the Trolley Problem, a thought exercise in which you’re given the choice to kill one person in order to save five.
But I was wrong. What I was watching was akin to the Milgram experiment in real life.
No experimenter was giving orders to shock, but each person voting had the memory of authority figures — politicians, preachers, activists, family members and even journalists — crowding the booth with them. There were no fake electrical shocks or cries of pain, but there were real cultural and economic shocks and actual pain for unseen human beings radiating beyond the ballot.
We can think for ourselves, but often we do not. Every day is an actual Milgram experiment. The key to casting a moral vote is to seek reliable information, find the moral compass within yourself and act accordingly.
Failure leads to severe moral dissonance.
Just take Coldwater. This Kansas town overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump and Kris Kobach. Yet, as Kansas Reflector Opinion Editor Clay Wirestone wisely points out, they also mourned the loss of their mayor, Joe Ceballos, who could face deportation after Attorney General Kobach filed fraud charges against him for voting without being a citizen.
Much of the rest of the country must be experiencing similar political vertigo. ICE is a murderous American masked police, the GOP-packed Supreme Court is poised to render yet more Dred Scott-like bad decisions, we’ve abducted the president of Venezuela and we’re risking the collapse of NATO by threatening to conquer Greenland.
Welcome to the new world disorder.
Most Kansans are civil and decent humans. But we need leaders, elected and otherwise, who will clearly denounce the moral collapse at the center of this political chaos, not call for more compromise or deference to authority. Now is the time not for civility, but for civil disobedience.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.