Selects: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti Experiment
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Hi everybody, it's your old pal Josh, and for this week's Select, I've chosen our episode from August of 2021, where we take a look at one of the most unethical social psychology experiments in the history of the field, where Dr. Martin Rokic assembled three men who each believed he was Christ, put them in a room together, and sat back and waited for the fireworks to start. And what came out of it is both an indictment and an inspiring affirmation of humanity.

And on a personal note, I would like to wish my sweet, sweet wife, Yumi, a very big happy birthday. Enjoy! Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. ♪

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Dave is here with us today, and we're all just quietly holding hands. Now we have to stop and come into the real world and start talking to you fine people for this episode of Stuff You Should Know.

My lip got caught in my tooth when I said you, and it came out a little weird. It's funny. My daughter finally lost her first tooth, and it's changing the way she talks. She's got a little funny little lisp, and she's always tonguing on it, and I'm like, I'm going to be there with you soon. I've got to get this front one redone. Right. So we'll redid. Yeah, I'm going to wait until right before we have live shows so I can pull that front tooth again. Nice.

That'll be a special treat for everybody, especially me. Oh, you were used to it. I really was. The worst was when you had that little case that you would put it in and it had vents so the smell could waft out of it. Yeah, I gave up after the first one on wearing that thing. I was just like, who cares? Yeah, no, it's great. It was very liberating. It was, as is this podcast episode.

I think this is going to be a good one because, Chuck, I've been wanting to talk about this for a really long time. This is one of those things that you like hear about and you're like, wait, what? That can't be right. And then you read a little more about it and a little more and it just keeps getting worse and worse. But yet it's it's just kind of one of the like a landmark study. Yeah. In the field of psychology that we're talking about today.

Yeah, the Three Christs of Hypsilanti. And I studied this. I remember this from studying it in psychology class in college and got kind of into it at the time. You started wearing like Three Christs t-shirts and stuff. I followed them on tour. It was great. I don't – for some reason I thought I read the book, but –

I don't think I read the book. I think we just covered the book in college and in a psychology class. Like, I don't think they made you read the whole book. We basically just kind of went over it. But I had been pretty fascinated for years. And, you know, eventually when Hollywood made a movie about it four years ago, I was excited and even paid to rent that thing. How'd that work out? Pretty good. I watched the first half hour and

And realize, oh, man, they've just sort of Disney-fied this thing and it's not good. Yeah. Although our buddy Kevin Pollak is in it and he's always great. Hey, that guy can steal a scene better than the Hamburglar. Yeah, the movie, just so everyone knows, is called The Three Crisps of Ypsilanti from Jon Abnett. Starring Richard Gere as the name-changed doctor.

And then the three Christs in the movie are portrayed by Peter Dinklage, one of my favorite actors, Walton Goggins. Yeah, he's great, man. I went back. I told you I was watching The Shield again. That guy was amazing in that. Oh, was he in that?

Yeah. Yeah, he played one of the main characters. He's just the best. And then what's the guy's name? Bradley Whitford, who's also great. Everyone in it is good. It just – it's one of those movies that they, I think, just over-sanitized and should have made a documentary instead. Mm-hmm.

But they didn't, and that's okay. And we don't have to talk about that movie ever again now that we have. Instead, I think we should start by giving a little background on the guy whose idea the Three Christs of Ypsilanti experiment was. And it was a researcher, a psychologist, a social psychologist. Your favorite? Mm-hmm. Named Milton Rokeach.

And Milton Rokeach had some ideas about what it was to make up an identity, what made up a person's sense of who they were. Yeah. And he basically had broken it out into beliefs, a series of different kinds of beliefs, which we'll kind of talk about here or there a little more.

But there's this anecdote that's frequently passed around that kind of like lays the early groundwork for this idea that someone's belief in who they are could conceivably be challenged. And it came one night when he was sitting around the dinner table with his wife and his two young daughters. And he accidentally, in like a moment of frustration, telling them to settle down at dinner, called one another by their opposite names.

And the girls just thought that was like the funniest thing they'd ever heard at first. Yes. Was that my cue? Yeah. I even stuck my finger up like, all right, now you. But you can't see it, can you? No, because we just listen to each other. Yeah, at first. And it was a little fun game. And then I think the five-year-old even said, you know, this is just a game, right? Dad and dad said, no, it's real.

And I hear him saying it in that voice. And, you know, pretty soon they were begging for him to stop. And I can verify that this is a thing. I've been, I think as a parent, sometimes you'll call your kid by another name as a joke, like

I know I've done it like called my daughter, my dog's name. If she's like she'll come into the room and like bark or something as a joke. I'll say, oh, you're Nico. And she'll say, yeah, I'm Nico. And then for a few minutes later, I'm like, hey, come here, Nico. And then it's fun for about five minutes. And then she's like, no.

I am not. So there is very much a thing to a child's identity, especially from their parents, where they kind of get their identity and seek their identity. When that is challenged, it is very quickly kind of traumatic. Yeah.

Yeah, and he learned a couple of things. One, you can very quickly challenge somebody or you can very quickly push someone to a state of like trauma or anxiety or panic even. Yeah. Just by simply challenging their identity by calling them the wrong name purposefully. That's right, Jerry. He also, right. Yeah, I know, Jerry. We just call each other Jerry. I think it would cancel each other out. Do it one more time and I will crumble. Okay, Jerry. Thank you for, oh, God.

But he also learned like, okay, there's consequences to this. You can't take somebody with a well-formed, well-developed sense of identity and I guess a normal sense of identity and push them to the edge, mess around with that sense of identity. There's harmful consequences to that. So he started to kind of explore this. And like I was saying, like he had broken everybody's –

belief system into a handful of different types of beliefs. And the belief that you are who you are, which is what we call our identity, he ascribed to primitive beliefs, which are just like basic truths in the same neighborhood as, you know, I'm wearing a headphone on one ear and I have the other one behind my head right now. I have brown hair. My name is Josh. You're Chuck. Like just basic truths of the universe that you,

Anyone you talk to is going to generally agree with. Right. That's where the personality comes from. Yeah. And that is the very bedrock and foundation of how we think about ourselves. And he already saw messing with that can be bad. So he was like, hey, why not take it a step further? Yeah.

Right, right. So what I was saying a minute ago with like how we saw that there's consequences to messing with a sane person. I just made air quotes if you couldn't tell from my intonation. Messing with a sane person's identity, you can't really do that.

But this is the mid-century in America. And there's a whole group of people that you can do basically whatever you want to with as far as mental stuff goes. And that were people who are suffering from mental conditions who were locked up in state institutions at the time. Yeah.

And so Rokic came up with this idea like, OK, wait a minute. What if I what if I got my hands on some mentally unstable people, some possibly diagnosed people and messed with their sense of identity, took their delusion and challenged it? That could be OK because, hey, their lives are basically useless anyway. I'm paraphrasing Rokic here.

And if something does come of it, there's a good chance that it could be positive instead. So let me have it. Let me add them, basically. Yeah, there's a quote here from the book. And big thanks to Dave Ruse for putting this one together. I know this was a huge. It's a tough one to wrangle, but he did a great job. Here's the quote from the book. Because it is not feasible to study such phenomena with normal people. He didn't even put in quotes.

it seemed reasonable to focus on delusional systems of belief in the hope that in subjecting them to strain, there would be little to lose and hopefully a great deal to gain. And like I read that sentence and I'm like, stop there, dude. Right. Yeah. That's like the perfect motto for the misguided intentions of the study. Yeah. Yeah. He is like indicted himself with that one quote.

Exactly. Just right out of the gate. And I read this commentary magazine article from 1964 by, oh, I can't remember who it was. I don't have it pulled up, but he's a famous poet at the time. Yeah.

And he was basically saying, like, you know, surely Ro Keech, the guy who's writing the book, well, understands that Ro Keech, the character, this doctor, is, like, out of his mind. And he, like, he's, like, slowly realizing, oh, wait, this guy, even the author of the book has no idea that the doctor character, who's himself, has any idea just how unethical this is. And that's a great example of it that demonstrates it right off the bat. Yeah.

Yeah, there's, I don't know if you listened to the Snap Judgment on this. Did you hear that? No. It was good. Snap, you know, great podcast or public radio program turned podcast. Sure. I've heard public radio before. I used to listen to a lot more of it.

Same here. Fresh air. I always still love fresh air. But it's one of those things where I just bulk it up. And then like when I'm painting a room in our house, I listen to just fresh air the whole time or something. You know what I mean? Yeah. When is Terry Gross going to have us on? Do we need to get to 20 years?

Would that do it? Yeah, I wouldn't even begin to bother her until we hit 20 years and then maybe, yeah. And then we just start asking? Basically. Hi, Terry. Hi. Yeah. So in that snap judgment, they pointed out that he, that Rokic actually read a Harper's article about two women who believed they were the Virgin Mary and

And that put an idea into his head. And I know that in his book, he also talked about being inspired a little bit by some stuff that Voltaire wrote about it, right? Yeah.

Yeah, there was a man in the 17th century that Voltaire wrote about named Simone Morin, who was deranged in the parlance of the time. And he thought that he was Christ. And so he was locked up in a madhouse and he met in that place, in that institution or asylum, another man who thought he was Christ.

And Simone Morin saw just how like crazy this guy seemed and was like, wait a minute, maybe I'm crazy. And in confronting this other guy who claimed to have the same identity, he regained his sanity to a certain extent. And unfortunately, he relapsed and ended up being burned at the stake for heresy. But there was a moment there where he had kind of like

been knocked out of his delusion. That's a huge deal. Like if you have schizophrenia or delusional beliefs, like if your mental disorder is to the degree where you hold delusions, and we should say a delusion is not like, you know, a made up belief where you know you made your belief up. Like this is what you think is real. It is real to you and you will defend it when it's challenged.

So the idea that somebody who was delusional could be knocked out of their delusion by being confronted with somebody else who had the same delusion, that is groundbreaking. And I can see why Roe Keech was like, there we go. That's it. There's my methodology for this experiment. Yeah, and I'm sure he was, you know,

He was turned on a little bit about the idea of three Christs or however many Christs he could find. He felt so hot. Well, I mean, not even like that. You know what I mean, though? But as a social psychologist, he was probably like, you know, this would make for a pretty mind-blowing experiment. Plus a great book title. It's one of the great understated book titles of all time. Yeah, it's not like the three Richard Nixons of Hispilanti.

No, and I mean like Ypsilanti is like this town outside of Ann Arbor where, you know, that's where one of the mental asylums were in Michigan at the time. And it's just like, you know, it might as well be Walla Walla or Lackawanna or it's just an unusual name in a town that doesn't really have much of a claim to anything. You know what I mean? Yeah, I'm sure all three of those towns are like,

Is he insulting all of us or none of us? No, no, it's not an insult. It's just, it's just, it's not like a hot happen in town. And it'd been like the three Christ of New York that loses something or the three Christ of London. It's just a rather generally unremarkable place. Guys, Ypsilanti, if you live there and you don't know that it's generally unremarkable, I'm sorry to be breaking this news to you. I don't mean it in an unkind way at all.

I know you don't. And I think generally back then that's where a lot of these institutions were because they needed like lots of land. And so they'll just leave it at that. And maybe take a break. Okay. To let everybody really stew on what I said. We'll take a break and we'll find out how he found his patience right after this.

Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees. Just ask the Capital One bank guy. It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast too. Thanks, Capital One bank guy. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A., member FDIC. ♪ music playing ♪

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All right, so we're back. There were 25,000 total votes

patients in the system in Michigan State, in Michigan State hospitals. And he went through all of these, you know, he sort of tried to cull them down to, ideally, to Christ figures. He found a man who thought he was Cinderella. He found a Mrs. God. And then about six people who thought they were Christ's

And three of them were really into this idea and really consistent with their belief that they were Jesus. And two of them happened to be at Ypsilanti. So he was like, this is perfect. I'll just transfer the third in and we'll get going. Yeah. And so these guys being inmates of the state at a time where Ypsilanti had like 4,000 people

4,000 patients in just this one institution. Yeah. And if you are already like on the margins of society and then moved into a place where you're with 4,000 other people on the margins of society, it's a really good place to get lost, to not get any real help. Sure. And so one of the things that was part of this experiment design is –

to make participating in these discussions, this group of these three Christ's as attractive to these three men as possible. Yeah. So they were moved to Ward D-23. They were given their own private day room to eat in, to sleep in, or not sleep in, but to hang out in. Yeah. Away from everybody else. They got some like place to stretch out and to have some company. Yeah, little perks. They got a lot of attention, a lot of perks. Like basically their lives were changed in...

like incalculable ways by being part of the study. And so when they say like these were voluntary meetings and these men were voluntary members of the study, that's definitely true. They were voluntary participants, but the perks on offer were just so amazing. Like you could not turn down, you know, participating in some degree. Yeah, exactly. So they were willing participants to,

In so far as, yeah, they got these great perks. Worth pointing out. So he changed the names of the guys to protect their families and to protect them to some degree. But we should go over sort of the bios of the three men. Should we say who played them in the movies? Will that help people? I don't think so. Okay. Okay.

I don't want to disparage those great actors' names again. Well, I mean, the acting, they did a good job. It was just the material. They're all great actors, you know? Sure. Yeah, I know. It's just when you write a... I don't want to call out the script writer, but it wasn't that good. So let me ask you this because I didn't see the movie. Was it like... And I loved the fact that they made a movie about Freddie Mercury and the other members of Queen. But was it like in the...

In the movie, what was the name of that movie? The Queen movie, that's what I called it. Bohemian Rhapsody. Bohemian Rhapsody, that's right. Do you remember like every time like Freddie Mercury did something brilliant, they would have Brian May, they'd do a pan in close up of him just looking like in awe and astonished. And that's maybe pushing it doing that once in a movie, but they did that every like 15 or 20 minutes.

Was it kind of like that same sentiment? It wasn't so much that. And again, I only watched the first act before I realized it was just really sanitized and like a feel-good type of thing.

I got you. Yeah. So not the real story. Sounds familiar or similar. Yeah. Right. Exactly. This is not a feel-good story. I wonder if it was performance art you accidentally stumbled upon. No, I mean, there was some tough stuff in there. It's not like it was completely like, hey, this is great. But it kind of reeked of like an Awakenings kind of thing. And I liked Awakenings. I got it. All right. All right. I liked Awakenings too. But it sounds like what you're describing is more along the lines of Greatest Showman, like that kind of sanitization. I didn't see that.

Okay. Did you? No, but remember we did that episode just tearing it apart. Yeah, yeah. We hadn't even seen it yet. We're comfortable doing that at times. Yeah, kind of, kind of. So the first guy was in his late 50s, Joseph Cassell, 58. He had been in the hospital for about 20 years and was Canadian, born and raised in Quebec.

And he was named after Josephine, his female relative in his family, named Joseph. And I think the big takeaway from his childhood was that it was not good. A very abusive father, very quick-tempered man who abused his mom. And his mom actually died while giving birth to her ninth kid. And so he had a rough go of it from the beginning.

I think his name actually was Josephine as well, and he went by Joseph. So he wanted to be a writer. I think, did you say he was 58 at the time? Yeah. Okay. And he did not really take to working outside of the house. He and his wife...

did not have a very like good relationship necessarily. He didn't want kids. She did. They ended up having three daughters and he later on came to believe that, um, they were not his children after all. And that, that may have been correct. Um,

But then things started to take kind of a turn for the worse in that he started to become really paranoid. He started to accuse people of poisoning his food. He became a bit of a hoarder, especially with books. And probably the greatest crime a man could commit in mid-century America, he did not want to work. Right. So that was basically that. He ended up getting sent to an asylum in Canada. Right.

And then on to Ypsilanti eventually. And he'd been in Ypsilanti for, I think, about 20 years or at least in and out of the hospital system for about 20 years. And for about 10 of those years, he had been he had decided that he was he was God or Jesus Christ or both.

Yeah, and by the time he got around to Rokic or Rokic found him, he was in a pretty bad state after those 20 years. He had about half of his teeth left in his mouth. He was still hoarding books, carrying around books everywhere. And when asked who he was, he said his name was Joseph. And he said that I am God. And I guess Rokic said, well, you'll do just fine. Splendid.

Yeah, so Joseph, despite his inability to take care of himself and the fact that he hoarded and all of that, he was a very sharp person. So remember to keep that in mind. He was very sharp and a good writer as well. Clyde—and these men's names were changed—

Clyde Benson, he was 70. He'd been hospitalized for the last 17 years. He was in pretty rough shape. He really was. And Rokeach definitely starts to recognize that pretty quickly after meeting Clyde and ends up almost letting him just stay in the group, even though he's not really participating any longer. Yeah.

But Clyde was apparently raised in an overprotected manner and didn't really learn how to make his own decisions and kind of ended up stunted as a result, which you can make your way through life like that if you want to. But he ended up turning to alcohol and became a really hardcore alcoholic to where it was starting to wreck his life.

Um, and apparently that came into, um, collision with, uh, a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia at some point, right? Yeah. And, you know, it seems like the drinking was the, um, anytime you have a undiagnosed condition like this and you, you pour alcoholism on top of it or any kind of, you know, drug addiction, it's going to, it's just going to be even worse. And, uh, eventually he was arrested, uh,

For public drunkenness, it was a pretty violent arrest. And in jail, he was violent. And he was saying he was Jesus Christ, that he was God, and that he was reborn through his first wife, Shirley. I believe she had passed away and he did get remarried. And it was Shirley, the queen of heaven. And at this point, they committed him to a mental hospital when he was 53, where he got that diagnosis. And he was the one that was...

easily the most far gone and tough toughest to reach and sort of walked around mumbling he also didn't have many if any of his teeth and but occasionally would like still had that violence in him where he would have these sort of violent outbursts but then kind of calm down again

Yeah. And when he did, he was very direct and to the point. And I don't think he was actually physically violent, was he? I don't think so. I think it just could be scary at times. Right. So he would say things like, I am him. See, now understand that.

Like that was the extent of how he would explain that he was God. He didn't need it to be challenged. And if you did try to challenge it, he would just shut you down kind of thing in a very, yeah, like you said, kind of a scary way. So Leon was perhaps one of the saddest of the three cases in that he was, had only been hospitalized for about five years. He was younger. He was 38 years old and he was,

the snap judgment is great because they had his two initial graduate assistants on Richard Bonnier and Ron Hoppe. So like real firsthand experience on the podcast. And they were saying that he was the one that,

broke their heart the most because he was the one that most likely could have been rehabilitated and uh it just tore them up that they and they liked him a lot he was a real personable guy and what it was very engaging with the stories and they really thought that they could have helped him had it not been uh you know in part by what happened with rokeach

Which is sad because that means that Rokic made things much, much worse for these people. And that's something to really understand that there were three men who were living, you know, their delusional lives in this state mental hospital, but they were generally unmolested until they were dragged into this study and messed with like in ways that you just don't do to other people, you know, and that their lives probably were worse, far worse than they would have been had they never met Milton Rokic. Yeah.

Yeah, so Leon's deal was his mother was almost certainly schizophrenic as well and had delusions, religious delusions. So he was raised in a household with basically a religious fanatic, and that impacted him from the very beginning. Of course, he ended up diagnosed with schizophrenia as well. But growing up in that kind of environment definitely, I think, led to the Christ thing.

For sure. Yeah. And he had like there was a time where he was living a normal life. He served in World War II. He worked at different jobs back in Detroit. He tried to go to college. He was trying to make a life for himself. But he suffered from fatigue, which I looked up is apparently a really tough comorbidity with psychotic disorders. Mm-hmm.

And it's like got a terrible positive feedback where, you know, the more tired you get, the worse your disorder is. And the worse your disorder is, the harder it can be to sleep. And it's just not good. So he had that. And then he also started hearing voices himself that were telling him that he was Jesus Christ.

And that didn't really jibe very well with his mother's own religious fanaticism because he saw that she was, you know, worshiping these other what he considered idols. Right. And he went on a...

bit of a violent tear once removing all of the all the pictures of the saints and breaking all of the figurines and all that stuff and demanding that his mother worship him as Jesus Christ and threatening that if she didn't he would strangle her and so that was enough to get him locked up for good he'd already been locked up one time for a brief period and then about six months after that he was locked up from then until the time that he met Milton Rokeach right and that was Walton Goggins and

Man. Sorry. So he went by, not Leon, and again, Leon was a fake name that Rokic gave him for the book. But he went by Dr. Domino Domino at Rex Reserum Simplis Christianis Puris Mentalis Doctor, which is Latin for Lord of Lords, King of Kings, Simple Christian Boy Psychiatrist.

But he asked everyone to call him Rex for short. And they said, thanks. Sure. Appreciate that. And he was, like you said, probably the most personable. Like Joseph, he was very sharp too. But also, like from a very early stage, he saw quite clearly what Roe Keats was trying to do. And he thought that it was...

morally repugnant, that it was not a nice thing to do to somebody, that you shouldn't mess with people like that. And he said as much multiple times throughout the study. Yeah. So this is when he hires those two grad assistants is when he finds the guys, gets this experiment going in earnest and

And, you know, his hypothesis was that if I can have these three men confront one another about them being the real Christ, that it could rock them into what he saw as reality and get them out of these delusions. And that didn't happen. Well, it didn't happen at all through the experiment. But initially, what they did was they really dug in.

And they each had their own way of doing so, but they each dug in and said, no, no, no, I am the real Christ. And they each had different sort of methods of dealing with the others, but none of them wavered initially. No, and it was like really –

It was kind of in and of itself just that finding that not only did they not have their identity shattered, but they just rebuilt and reinforced their identities however they could find a way to do it to their own satisfaction. That's a pretty big psychological finding in and of itself, you know, although it doesn't seem worth putting these men through that just to find that out, you know. Yeah, for sure. I think Joseph said –

Joseph was more one to sort of laugh it off. He said, there's nothing wrong. Yesterday I knew I was what I am. Today I am what I am. I'm not worried about losing my identity. And we also should point out that Joseph, and this was portrayed in the movie too by Peter Dinklage, he spoke with an English accent. He thought he was convinced himself that he was from England, that he was descendant of royalty, and that the hospital was an English stronghold.

Don't think I didn't notice you just slipped Peter Dinklage in there. I know. That only leaves one more, so I don't need to do the third.

So one of the other things about Joseph was his interpretation of why they were there in this study, why the three of these men had been brought together was so that they could sort out with the other two that they weren't Christ, that he was the one who was actually Christ, so he could do his work here on earth better without having these two basically harassing him or whatever. Yeah.

So then Leon, like I was saying, Leon was the one who kind of saw the most through Rokic's intentions and saw that they were just wrong. And like Clyde, I think Clyde said that they were a re-rise. That's what he considered the other two or a hick. Uh-huh.

Joseph said, you know, I am who I am. And also, by the way, we all know that I'm really God. And then Leon, he said that he said the other two were instrumental gods. They were hollowed out gods. They were possibly dead already. And machines were operating them and making them say these things.

But even in that, like he wasn't attacking them personally. It was what he felt forced to explain his position. And so that's what he said his position was. But as he was saying this, he would turn to Joseph. He would turn to Clyde and he would say, you know, I mean this, you know, respectfully, I don't mean to be to tear you down. Whatever your belief is your belief and I don't want and I'm not trying to take it from you. I have my beliefs and you have your beliefs and that's,

That's good enough. And so through that kind of like truce that was kind of established between these three men, they basically kept the researchers at bay. The researchers would try to come in and bust things up and get them to like argue or, you know, make them confront one another. But when left alone, those three men just generally did not argue about who was God. They avoided the subject altogether and just let the other ones be and just kind of

entered this live and let live kind of position, which I think is pretty heart heartening, you know? It is. And that was, that was one of the things that came through on that, uh, snap judgment with the two research assistants, uh,

was that their take was that these men were generally, like after the initial sort of denial stuff, that they were generally pretty respectful and wanted to give each other the space to believe that they were Christ if they wanted to. And this, what that showed was empathy. And that's something that none of them saw coming. At this point, Rokic is being kind of hassled by these two grad assistants saying, hey, listen, man,

These guys are kind of okay with this, and you're taking this thing too far. And eventually he ignored them basically, and eventually they quit before this next phase starts. Oh, okay. Because they didn't agree with what was going on because they saw these three guys that were generally respectful for one another. They saw Rokic would do things like a journalist wrote a story about them at one point that was obviously not flattering at all to the three Christs.

And Rokic read this aloud to them, like he was just trying to push their buttons and initiate this conflict. And the two grad assistants eventually were like, we're out of here. Yeah, that story in particular was about how Rokic was treating three psychotic men who thought they were Christ. And to read that to them is really mean. Again, he was trying to see what would happen if they were confronted with their identities being considered delusional by other people.

And Leon in particular didn't like that. He said that a doctor or a person who's supposed to be a doctor is supposed to lift up, build up, guide, direct, inspire. He said that what you've just done is deploring. And Rokic said, you know, deploring, I've traveled 75 miles in snow and storm to come see you. And Leon said, yes, but what was your intention in coming to see me, sir? Right.

And so he didn't put up with Rokic's BS at all, which is pretty cool, you know, to hold delusions and to have your delusions attacked like that and then to be able to push back, but also in still a respectful way. I think Leon's one of the great unsung heroes of 20th century America. Totally. Should we take a break before phase two? Yeah, I say we take a break, man. All right, we'll be right back.

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So before stage two starts, when things get really unethical, well, not before, this is kind of part of the unethical, the two grad assistants had left and he hires this new young pretty woman as a grad assistant and basically tells her to flirt with Leon and to see if he can make her, make him fall in love with her. And then he says,

And that's exactly what happened. And Leon fell in love with her and was destroyed when he basically came to realize on his own that that was never going to happen for him.

Man, it's just brutal. It keeps getting better and better. Yeah. Yeah. When those grad assistants said, you've gone too far, I think Rokic probably said something along the lines of, too far? I haven't even begun to go too far. Richard Gere said that. Just watch what's next. Yeah, but there was like upbeat music while he was singing. Yeah, like Salisbury Hill. Exactly. That is exactly what I was thinking of. Thank you for putting it into words, Chuck. So what happened next?

So what happened next is as follows. Rokic basically saw, like, these guys are not going for this, for the level of prodding that I've been doing. I'm going to really kind of turn up the heat. And he wondered if you took the members, people that were part of these patients' delusional belief systems and personified them, like pretended you were them, say, started communicating with them through letters or whatever. Yeah.

what would happen? Could you conceivably get these people to abandon their delusions under the guidance of these authority figures that were actually part of their delusions? It's really kind of mind-boggling when you lay it out in like a flow chart like that, you know? Yeah, this like just kept getting worse and worse. So he identified these authority figures and all three of them, I guess...

To his credit, he laid off of Clyde because, I mean, I don't know if it was so much empathy as it was he knew he wasn't getting very far with Clyde. Or maybe he was scared of what would happen if Clyde broke, you know? Yeah, because Clyde was definitely could be a little scary. But so he laid off of Clyde, but he found that Joseph said that a superintendent of the hospital named Dr. Yoder was

Y-O-D-E-R was his dad. And Leon said that he had a wife. He had a couple, his wife, the Blessed Virgin Mary, who was an uncle reincarnated as Michael, the archangel. Archangel? Archangel. Those are two different. So he was married to the Blessed Virgin Mary and had that uncle. Yeah, he had those two. Mm-hmm.

But he wasn't married to his uncle. He had another wife later on named Madame Yeti Woman after he stopped being married to the Blessed Virgin Mary because his uncle, Michael, the archangel, married the Blessed Virgin Mary. Right. It sounds a little confusing, but when you're dealing with stuff like this, I think it has to be a little confusing. Well, the upshot of it is Rokic started posing as Madame Yeti Woman.

and started a letter-writing campaign as Madame Yeti Woman, basically reaching out to say, hey, Leon, I just want to say hi, and I'm thinking of you, and let's start talking. So there was correspondence that was established as Leon's delusion, like wife, Madame Yeti Woman. Yeah, and we should point out that he supposedly had gotten, not supposedly, I think he did get the hospital's,

permission to sign off on this as long as he said, listen, it's all going to be positive stuff. I'm not going to be writing them letters saying to go start a fight or anything like that. So I'm going to send them positive messages and I'm going to stop if this becomes upsetting to these guys. And so they said, sure, go ahead. Yeah.

And so he did. He did go ahead first with Leon, I believe. And by this time, Leon had one of the things that he had done to transform his identity was to become Dr. Righteous Ideal Dong or Dr. R.I. Dong. And apparently the head nurse asked him directly, like, can I please not call you Dr. Dong?

And he said, yes, you can call me R.I., but everybody else called him Dr. R.I. Dung. And he did this, Rokic concluded, to basically make himself not worthy of being harassed anymore. But he was still secretly God, like he knew he was God. He was just pretending to be something else. And during that period, he became married to Madame Yeti Woman. So Rokic started addressing letters to Dr. R.I. Dung and basically saying, um,

you know, here's a dollar. Why don't you go buy yourself something nice in the hospital store and then share the change with Clyde and Joseph? And or one of the things that they would do is they would take turns between the three patients as who was going to lead the session that day. And one of the things you did when you led the session was you chose what song everybody's song at the beginning and at the end of the session, which is adorable. And

And so Madame Yeti Woman suggested that he choose onward Christian soldiers and he chose onward Christian soldiers. And so like to Rokichi seeing like there's this there's like an actual influence that is being exerted by this delusional figure. And also it demonstrates that that Leon is showing like he definitely believes Madame Yeti Woman's a person for sure.

Yeah, and eventually what broke it was, as posing as Madame Yeti Woman, asked Leon to stop using the name Dr. Dung. The name thing seems to have been a sticking point with a lot of people. Or maybe he just thought that that would, since he held onto that so strongly, that would have been like the toughest thing to make him do. Uh-huh. And...

that was sort of it. He was asked about the letter and Leon doesn't really say anything about asking to be, to drop the name Dr. Dung. He just starts talking more and more about God being both male and female and insane and sane and,

and said, I don't care for the insanity of God. And then said, I don't want any more letters and basically kind of shut it down. And so with Leon's letters in particular, there's a couple of like really sad things. Like the whole thing was sad to begin with, but there's this passage in the book where Leon gets a letter and Rokic realizes that he's holding back tears and

And he starts to ask him, like, why are you like, you know, are you happy? He said, yes, I'm very happy. It's a very pleasant feeling to have someone think of you. Like, like he was he was moved to tears by the idea that Madame Yeti woman was was writing to him and talking about caring for him and sending him money to go buy himself things with.

And rather than just say like, oh, we might want to back this off, Rokic used it to step that up and arranged for a meeting with Madam Yeti Woman. Yeah. But there was no Madam Yeti Woman who was supposed to show up. He was just he was going to get stood up from the outset. But still, Leon went to go meet Madam Yeti Woman and had his heart broken. I think it was after that that he stopped responding to the letters. Yeah.

Yeah, and when he said, I don't want these letters anymore, I don't want to receive them, you would think that that's when Rokic would say, all right, well, let's just stop this altogether. But he didn't because he remembered that Leon had another authority figure in his life, which was his uncle, George Bernard Brown, a.k.a. the Archangel Michael. And so he said, hey, I'll have someone call and pose as his uncle now. And this didn't work from the beginning. Leon –

I guess the voice was just so far off or maybe Leon was just really wise to it at this point, said, you know, no, no, no, this isn't even close to the voice. Goodbye and hung up. And then they asked him about the call and he said, I don't believe in mental torture, sir. So it seems like he was sort of onto him at this point or, you know, was onto him from the beginning, but onto him about this ruse.

I don't think he was on to him from the beginning. I think that he bought... No, I mean from the beginning of the experiments. He was wary of him. Oh, gotcha. I see what you're saying. But yeah, but it's really easy to forget because you're reading Rokic's accounts that these men weren't in on the idea that it was from Rokic. They believed that these letters were coming from their delusional figures. Yeah, that's the whole point. Which makes it just even more gut-wrenching when you stop and remember that, you know? Yeah.

So then he says, OK, all right, Leon's done. I'm done writing letters to him. Who can I write letters to next? And he moves on to Joseph, right? Yeah. So this was the one where the superintendent, the fictional Dr. Yoder, was the authority figure for Joseph, who he saw as a father figure. And so, of course, Rokic is going to play up this whole father figure thing in the letters.

saying that he loved him like a son. He just wanted the best things for him. And if you remember from the original sort of quick bio, Joseph's father was awful and abusive. So he's really playing into his deepest sort of insecurities here. Yeah.

Yeah, he said, be assured that I will always love you just exactly like a father who deeply loves his own son. It's really tough to even research this stuff. Yeah. So just like with Leon, through these letters as Dr. Yoder, he tried to get Joseph to start doing stuff, innocuous stuff at first. He stopped saying that he was from England and that he was from Quebec, started going to church services, that kind of stuff.

So there was an influence on Joseph just like there was on Leon using their delusional characters or delusional friends, authority figures, whatever. And I think even Dr. Yoder prescribed, the fake Dr. Yoder prescribed a placebo for Joseph's stomach ailments. He had like digestive problems or stomach hurt. And these placebo pills just fixed him right up. Yeah, so the stomach pills, placebos supposedly worked well.

And then he said, all right, well, that worked. So I'm going to give you pills now.

to basically cure your mind. And if you want to fix yourself for good, take these pills, which is, I mean, this is so far off the charts of unethical. Like, I can't even describe how far off the charts it is. And he said, basically, I think he said, he gave him an ultimatum. He says, I'm only going to continue to give these pills that will supposedly make your mind right. If you...

admit that you're in a mental hospital and it's not an English stronghold. And Joseph finally said, like signed something. And Joseph said, no, I'm not going to sign this. And he cut off this placebo medication that he believed might be fixing his brain. And it kind of petered out after that. And it was just like, it's just brutal to think about these guys going through this, like hope that they're getting better. And it was all fake.

Yeah, he apparently stopped writing to Dr. Yoder and moved on to JFK. Started writing letters to JFK asking to be one of his speechwriters because remember, he was a writer as well. Right. So Rokic is like, okay, all right, let's see what's next. Oh, nothing's next. This is the end of the line. He finally realized like, okay, this is...

not going anywhere. Not only had he not at all moved Clyde's delusions or Joseph's delusions, the only persons whose delusions had changed at all was Leon's and his had just gotten more complex and intricate. Certainly not any closer to reality. They got further away from reality because of this influence from Rokich and his experiment. And he has like a pretty rich line

little admission in the book that he says that we do not know to what extent our very presence, behavior, and questions may have influenced the results obtained, which is bizarre to say because the whole point of the experiment was that

to influence these people through this experiment. So it's a really weird thing that he even put it in there. From some of the stuff that I've read, kind of picking apart this book at the end, it really just kind of peters out. Like he's just kind of slashing in the air with his sword, trying to figure out, you know, what the point was of all of this stuff. And even without like a satisfying conclusion or end,

And it ended up getting published in 1964 and became like a really big success in the field of psychology, but also got widely criticized right out of the gate. Because even though this was mid-century America, and we're talking about mental patients in mid-century America who have very little rights or were treated very poorly.

Like there was still like a lot of people around really don't do this to human beings. This is not OK. Not everybody did. But some, you know, some critics definitely came out immediately. Yeah, it took Rokic a long time, though, to really kind of come to terms with what he had done. And he eventually did, though. About 17 years later, they reissued the book in 1981 and he wrote a new forward. He admitted in interviews in other places as well.

that he was also, you know, in a sense suffering from godlike delusions and that he was playing God with these men and regretted it. He regretted publishing. He said, I regret having written and published a study when I did. I don't know if that means that he wishes he could have reflected more on it or what, but... Yeah, I don't know either. He did sort of recant and say he didn't do the right thing. It's worth pointing out that this was

uh six years into uh his suffering from spinal cancer so i don't know if that had you know if knowing the end was near for him had something to do with his uh sort of self-reflection but he eventually died in 1988 at the age of 70 after a 13-year battle with spinal cancer and um you know left the

social psychology world sort of rocked. Like I said, I studied this in college and it became sort of like the Stanford prison experiment. It became worth studying

but not for the reasons that they initially launched the study to begin with. No, he finally figured out the point of the book, and the point of the book was for him to figure out that it was unethical what he was doing and to finally come to terms with what he'd done to these poor men and that you have a right to just be left alone and not have your identity challenged no matter what you believe you are, who you believe you are. And so he actually changed his methods. His general belief in the idea of belief systems changed.

remain the same, but he changed his tactics in that he got involved in self-confrontation where you try to present people with, you know, self-examination where they would examine what their values were, what their beliefs were, and then they would kind of be challenged on that. Like, okay, you believe in freedom. You place a high value on freedom, but you also rated equality pretty low, but isn't equality freedom for everybody? So you care about your freedom, but not other people's

freedom? How does that really jibe? And then the hope was that they would go back and self-reflect and be like, no, I really do care about freedom. I do care about other people. Maybe I should care more about equality and improve as a person. And that's ultimately how he ended up making his name starting in the 70s. Yeah. And I got to tell you, when you read some of his regret about it, he says things like, or he said things like,

And in the end, someone was cured and it was me. It just – that all bothered me a little bit too, how he still made it about himself somehow even though he did say he regretted it and everything. I just – I never heard as much regret about these three men before.

And just – and putting them in the positions of, like, they were the ones who helped me out in the end was just – I didn't like that. I know exactly what you mean. It just – it still smacks of self-involvement and egotism. And also, like, what happened to these men after the experiment was done? They were just cast right back into the general population. That's right. Like, used Kleenex, basically, to deal with what they'd just been through. It's just –

It's just rotten all around for sure. And at the very least, it does exist to make Milton Rokeach feel better. Right. You got anything else? No. I mean, if you want to see some of his later work that you were talking about, the value stuff, there are all kinds of really wacky YouTube videos from people about that stuff. Nice. And if you want to see the movie that they remade about this, don't. Nah.

Well, since I said don't see that movie, it's time, of course, for listener mail, everybody. I'm going to call this a guy who has the same step on a crack thing as I do. Okay. This is from Jared Miller. Hey, guys, I've got to say, Chuck is the only other person I've heard to express the same compulsion that I have. If I step on a surface that is different from the majority of where I'm walking, I try to get my other foot to have the same sensation. Okay.

This can be the line between the sidewalk segments or a traction sticker, an unpaved patch, etc. I gotta say, Jared, it's the same with me. It's not just cracks. It can be anything. Sure. Even which part of the foot is affected, same with me, dude. If I do it on my heel, I have to do the next one with my heel. It's very interesting. I've even found myself doing it with the colors of tiles on a patterned floor. Same here.

For me, it's about symmetrical sensations. I sometimes realize I'm doing it when I'm eating and have equal chewing time on each side. I don't do that.

You're like, Jerry, you're so weird. Yeah, you're really out there. Once I became aware of it at a fully conscious level, I also became self-conscious about it and tried different things to break myself of the habit. At times it's been as extreme as forcing myself to maintain an even gait no matter what. Yeah, I've done that. While consciously reminding myself that sensations are temporary and that it will even out or go away, especially if I ignore it.

Thanks for all the hours of entertainment. You were an early discovery of mine in the podcast world back in 2009, and almost none of the shows I started listening to back then are still going. That's our motto, Jared. Just keep doing it. Just no matter what. Everybody tells you to stop. Please, God, stop. Don't quit. You don't listen. So that's Jared in Anaheim by way of Idaho.

Way to go, Jared, from all over the place. I think Idaho. Or was it Iowa? I don't remember. Sorry. Idaho. I know. That's the worst thing to confuse. I apologize. So let's see. If you want to get in touch with us like Jared did, please email us, won't you? You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is Tracy V. Wilson from Stuff You Missed in History Class. Do you like podcasts, music, and audiobooks? Because when you subscribe to Amazon Music Unlimited, you get all three in one app. Imagine listening to your favorite podcasts and music on the go to work, school, the gym, or better yet, vacation. Now

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Welcome back, Ms. Klein.