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Is Milgram's Experiment Ethical Or Unethical?

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There is much discussion on whether Milgram’s experiment is actually unethical. In 1961 at Yale University, Stanley Milgram selected a group of participants for his experiment through a newspaper ad searching for male participants. To carry out the procedure, the participant was paired with another person; one of them played the teacher and the other was the learner. However, the experiment was fixed so that the participant was always the teacher, and the learner was someone who worked for Milgram, pretending to be a participant. The way the actual experiment worked was by hooking up the learner to electrodes, which would cause a shock administered by the teacher in the next room. The shock would increase in voltage, and would only be administered if, after hearing a series of words, the learner responded incorrectly to the question being asked. Eventually, some of the participants began to feel uneasy about the pain they were inflicting on the individual and insisted the experiment be discontinued. In spite of that, the scientist in the room urged that in order to be a successful study, the …show more content…

This happens when participants are misinformed or misled about the purpose of the experiment. In Milgram’s study, deception occurred when Milgram allowed the teachers to believe that they had been shocking the learners. He also made the volunteers believe that the learners were also selected, but they actually worked for Milgram. When, in reality, the learners had been unstrapped from the chairs before the experiment began. This violates the guidelines because full information was not disclosed about the study, and it led to distress among several participants. On the other hand, Milgram could justify his position by explaining that deception was needed to make the study more accurate and reliable. As long as it was followed by a debriefing, the participants would have an understanding as to why they were being

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In Dallas, Texas a man was brutally murdered by servant at home. The body was cut up into limbs and put under the wood planks. During the murder the victim scream and heard by neighbors. Three police officers went into the scene. The suspect acted like nothing happened until he went insane and confessed.

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In conclusion, I believe the way Slater presents her evidence is very convincing. She makes it a point to explain all of the controversial points that surround Stanley Milgram and his experiments. While we might not agree on all of her points, we both share the thought that Milgram and his experiments have affected positively despite the issues of its purpose, results, usefulness, and morality shroud the experiments in

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This Milgram research on respect to authority figures was a series of cultural science experiments conducted by Yale University scientist Stanley Milgram in 1961. They assessed the willingness of survey participants, men from a different variety of jobs with varying degrees of training, to obey the authority figure who taught them to do acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to think that they were helping an unrelated research, in which they had to distribute electrical shocks to the individual. These fake electrical shocks gradually increased to grades that could have been deadly had they been true. McLeod's article about the Milgram experiment exposed the fact that a high percentage of ordinary people will

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David’s claim that the Holocaust occurred because the Germans became unusually cruel is false based on the fundamental attribution error and Milgram’s experiments. The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to attribute other people’s behavior to internal factors, instead of accounting for situational factors. David committed this error when stating that Germans, as a whole, were “sadistic people with abnormal and twisted personalities”. David did not account for the immense pressure that the German public felt from Hitler during World War II. Although many atrocities were being committed, the Germans feared for their lives if they stood up for the Jews and disobeyed Hitler’s rule.

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In the experiment, Milgram uses purposeful deception as the teacher is the naive subject and is told they are participating in a memory and learner psychology experiment and are in charge of delivering shocks to the learner, who, in fact, is an actor. The majority of the participants in the study were obedient to the experimenter even though the experimenter "did not threaten the subjects with punishments such as loss of income, community ostracism or jail for failure to obey. Neither could he offer incentives" (Milgram 651). Despite having nothing to gain, the subjects continued participating in the experiment. The participants continued to administer shocks to the student because they were instructed to

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992 Words | 4 Pages

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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In his experiment there were nine guards and nine prisoners, the guards have a dark shade glasses and uniforms to show their authority to the prisoners. The result, power can influence behavior to turn bad. Then he talks about Milgram’s study on obedience

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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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Human experimentation can be extensively characterized as anything done to a person to figure out how it will influence him. Its principle target is the procurement of new exploratory information instead of treatment. In the event that a trial is at last advantageous to others or even to the subject himself, this doesn't imply that treatment filled a critical need. Humans have long been used as subjects for a variety of experiments.

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The blue eyed – brown eyed experiment in my opinion is indeed ethical. The issue at hand with this experiment is will it cause permeant future psychological damage. Jane Elliott conducted this experiment with her third-grade students which some would say it is too harsh of an exercise for a group that young; She wanted to teach her student that discrimination is wrong which have been a topic they discussed from the first day of school but felt the student would become confused with the fact she just honored Dr. king in the month of February and now she had to explain to them that he was assassinated because of discrimination. Jane Elliott agreed that this exercise can do Psychological damage if not conducted correctly but the benefits are remarkable.

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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 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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Name : Muhammed Irshad Madonna ID : 250509 Subject : Medical Ethics Due Date : 8/01/2018 Paper : 1-The Milgram Experiment The Stanley Milgram Experiment is a famous study about obedience in psychology which has been carried out by a Psychologist at the Yale University named, Stanley Milgram. He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. In July 1961 the experiment was started for researching that how long a person can harm another person by obeying an instructor.

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746 Words | 3 Pages

The experiment was executed well. Yet, there are unethical practices happened during the experiment. First, the participants were not fully informed about the experiment. The researchers did not explain to the participants the processes in conducting the experiment. The participants were not informed that they would be arrested by cops in their homes.

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His experiment was all a hoax. The shock machine was fake. All he wanted was to know how many people would be obedient and how many would be defiant. Much to Milgram’s surprise sixty-five percent of people did what were told of them, and only thirty-five percent were

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