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Stanley Milgram's 'Behavioral Study Of Obedience'

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Homework: Research Design Analysis and Critique Section C. Critique of Research Design (70%) This critique is on “Behavioural study of obedience” article by Stanley Milgram from Yale University. This article is an extract from the journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371-378. Milgram conducted an experiment in the year 1961 to study the struggle between obedience behaviour and conscience of a person. Based on his study, he wanted to analyse whether obedience to an authority can be destructive in a laboratory experiment. He conducted this study to understand or generalise the findings to the case of Nazi battle in World War 2 to investigate if Germans obeyed to an authority and how easily an ordinary person can be persuaded to …show more content…

However majority percent said that they were fine to be a part of the experiment. However, I feel that the thought of harming other human under pressure of obedience itself is not less than actually harming people. It is one and the same. This study even after years kindled a debate of ethical treatment of study participants. Even though the debriefing is done and further interviews conducted with the participants, still some amount of unethical treatment is present in this study. Moreover, when it comes to the protection of the participants they were exposed to extremely stressful situations and most of them were distressed. They displayed signs of anxiousness such as trembling, sweating, laughing nervously, biting lips and digging fingernails. Most of them also requested to allow them to leave the lab. But Milgram defended that he debriefed the participants after the study and followed up with them after one year to know and make sure that it caused no harm to them. And results found that 83.7 percent of participants stated that they were happy to get involved into the

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