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How Did Stanley Milgram Study Unethical

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During Stanley Milgram’s 1960’s study, he made subjects believe that they were harming another subject in order to test obedience. He did this by having the subject ask an actor, who was pretending to be another subject, to remember a word out of a series of words. Whenever the actor fail to get the word correct, the subject would flip a switch that he believe was administering an increasing electric charge. They were told not to stop and to continue increasing the voltage even after the actor began yelling and begging them to stop, and even after he stopped responding all together. The study was to see just how far people are willing to go to follow the orders of an authoritative figure. The results of the study showed that about half of the subjects were willing to keep going until the doctor told them to stop, while the other half refused to go on with the test once they thought they were harming another person. Some have taken his methods to have been unethical, and not worth any physiological damage that may have been done to the subject. It is arguable that he blurred the line on the APA’s guidelines of ethical principle on consent, and deception, but in my mind it was justifiable, and required in order to gather untainted information. …show more content…

Other phycologist have said that the stress of harming someone was to mentally damaging. I disagree with this notion because one, the subjects were told to do it, and were not forced to do it, and two, after the testing was complete the subjects talked with their “victim” and worked out that they had not actually done any real harm to him. Had that not been the case and the man was actually being shocked or the subject never learned that they hadn’t actually hurt someone, it would be a totally different

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In the article of “The Perils of Obedience”, written by Stanley Milgram, the experimenter explains that the experiment is to see how far a person could hurt a victim in a situation where he is ordered to do so. Also, in the article “The Stanford Prison

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This relates back to Of Mice and Men because of how George was under the control and being told what to do by a higher power and he had to obey even if it meant hurting somebody. A news reporter for ABC tried this experiment. In this experiment, an actor was in a different room behind a wall and the person who the experimenters brought in was behind the other side of the wall with a box containing different voltages on it. The person who was brought in for the experiment was told if the person behind the wall answered a question wrong they would have to send an electric shock to the person.

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During the 1960’s Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments to test how a person reacts to authority. He started these tests in response to World War Two and the reports of the German soldiers who claimed they were “just following orders’ when asked about

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He saw that the more personal, or close, the real participant had to be to the fake one, while they were being shocked, affected the obedience as well. He also noticed that if there were two other fake participants teaching that refused to shock their learners that the real participant would not comply. Finally, he tested the experimenter telling the real patient to shock the learner by telephone, instead of actually being there in person, reduced obedience as well (McLead). The Milgram experiment and the Nuremburg trials can relate extensively to explain how the Holocaust happened the way it did.

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Milgram’s experiment displays how much was situated in a time and how his life affected his choices, and his experiments have gained notoriety. The discursive approach to attitudes builds on a criticism of key assumptions and methods of the cognitive social approach and highlights the limitations of the experimental method for developing a comprehensive understanding of a phenomenon such as obedience. Through Gibson’s rhetorical analysis he highlighted the importance of the interaction between participant and experimenter which suggests that the standard view on experiments could do with revising. The experimental setting although it is great in most cases it can create a hostile environment with individuals acting out of character and therefore not creating the best results. Gibson has highlighted that the nervous anxious participants that were portrayed in the original papers were in fact passive and argumentative and that’s just by looking at it differently and examining different things such as the language people use to be persuasive.

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e Stanley Milgram Experiment video shows how people will do what they are influenced to do. They take people and give them the power to electrocute people if they get the answer wrong. Over half of the people continue to go up on voltage all the way until it’s at 450 volts. At this point the people think that the other person is dead. The reaction for the other half is scared and they stopped after a little while because they realized they are hurting someone else.

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Another contemporary experiment conducted in 2009 by Jerry Burger, replicated the method of Milgram’s experiment, but instead adjusting the ethical issues that were identified in Milgram’s study. The ways in which Burger’s (2009) study ensured principles like nonmaleficence were not violated included utilising a screening process to exclude participants with any negative mental issues, emphasising multiple times that they could withdraw at any time and still receive remuneration and using a lower set of voltage shocks up to 150V unlike Milgram’s which shocked up to 450 volts (Milgram, 1963). To aid the participants psychological wellbeing, when the experiment had concluded the participant was informed that the person was not actually shocked

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Like Psychologist Diana Baumrind did so in her article “Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments”. Where she makes it very clear that she disagrees with causing individuals stress and discomfort. In her article, Baumrind states “It is potentially harmful to a subject to commit, on the course of an experiment, acts which he himself considers unworthy, particularly when he has been entrapped into committing such acts by an individual he has reason to trust” which in this case the trustworthy individual would be Stanley Milgram. Baumrind also worried about the dangers of the serious aftereffects that may ensure because of the stress and discomfort Stanley Milgram’s experiment has caused. Even though Stanley Milgram states that “After the interview, procedures were undertaken to assure that the subject would leave the laboratory in a state of well-being.”

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When the Milgram obedience experiments were being conducted the core of the experiments were all based on the false impression that an electrical shock would be administered to another individual at the push of a button with an incorrect answer, when in fact they weren’t. If the Milgram experiments were not based on lies and each participant did in fact administer a shock to another individual in response to a wrong answer, I feel that the results would have been the same with no alternative result. The reason for this would be because from the very beginning of the experiment the participants already believed that they would be actually administering an electrical shock. The participant’s reactions and concerns before, during and even after the experiments were all real with their true feelings and thoughts about their participation of either walking away from the experiment or completing the experiment. If the participants were to know that the electric shocks they were administering were not real, then the whole purpose of the experiment would have been useless and unnecessary.

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While arguably one of the defining psychological studies of the 20th Century, the research was not without flaws. Almost immediately the study became a subject for debate amongst psychologists who argued that the research was both ethically flawed and its lack of diversity meant it could not be generalized. Ethically, a significant critique of the experiment is that the participants actually believed they were administering serious harm to a real person, completely unaware that the learner was in fact acting. Although Milgram argued that the illusion was a necessary part of the experiment to study the participants’ reaction, they were exposed to a highly stressful situation. Many were visibly distraught throughout the duration of the test

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The second standard he violated was that he invaded privacy by collecting sensitive information such as license plate numbers, which granted him with home addresses of the subjects. In order words, he was basically stalking them. The third standard he violated was that he published his findings. By publishing his research, he violated the privacy of his participants. The findings could have humiliated the participants especially if they weren’t openly gay or also the person could’ve feel offended by the

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In, “If Hitler Asked You to Electrocute a Stranger, Would You? Probably” Phillip Meyer discusses Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment and the probability of normal people electrocuting a stranger. Milgram’s experiment was originally to show that Germans were different, which would explain the Nazis and the Holocaust. However, what he found was even more shocking. Milgram discovered that most people, not just Germans, are naturally very obedient.

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The Milgram experiment was conducted to analyze obedience to authority figures. The experiment was conducted on men from varying ages and varying levels of education. The participants were told that they would be teaching other participants to memorize a pair of words. They believed that this was an experiment that was being conducted to measure the effect that punishment has on learning, because of this they were told they had to electric shock the learner every time that they answered a question wrong. The experiment then sought out to measure with what willingness the participants obeyed the authority figure, even when they were instructed to commit actions which they seemed uncomfortable with.

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Joshua, a man involved in the experiment, ““I shocked. I feel bad about that. I shocked but I only went to 150, I broke it off at 150.” He keeps repeating this, as though to reassure himself….

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As we all know, there wasn’t any electric shock being administered but the teachers assumed it was. I think the issue is was it right to deceive the participants of the study. I honestly don’t think the results are accurate because they were deceived and they believed that the learner was being shocked by electricity. The people who were the teachers were being empathic because they thought they were hurting the learners in the study. I think I would have had a different reaction and would not have been able to send the first electric shock.

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