Stanley Milgram's Experiment

Milgram’s Experiment “The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority” (“Quotes”). Stanley Milgram’s research has been a controversy since the 60s, he was devoted on figuring out the conflict between obedience to authority and the personal conscience. Milgram is a psychologist who designed a psychology experiment in which people think they are delivering actual shocks to a stranger strapped into a chair in another room. Subjects are told that it is about memory. But, in reality, the experiment is about conformity, conscience, and people’s free will. Milgram is simply trying to come to terms about the Holocaust and to test people’s tendencies to comply with authority figures. His

Another one of his experiments that he did was “Leave a Letter” and it proved that the pro white letters get mailed more often in white neighborhoods and pro negro letters get mailed more often in black neighborhoods. In another experiment, Milgram looked in New York to have participants look at pictures of the sites and try to identify those sites. Milgram has two agency theories that he explains the behavior of his participants: The autonomous state and the agentic state. The autonomous state simply means that people direct their own actions and then take responsibility as the result of those said actions. Then, the agentic state is that people allow others to direct their actions and then just pass off the responsibility of the consequences to the person that is giving the orders. According to Milgram, in order for a person to enter the state of “agentic” the person giving the orders is perceived as being “qualified” to direct other people’s behavior and then the person that is being ordered about is also able to believe that authority figure will accept responsibility for what happens. Was Milgram’s experiment biased? Milgram’s study was conducted with only males, so, do the findings transfer to females as well? What would happen if the experiment was only females? Milgram’s study could not be seen as a representative

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, deception means, “a: the act of causing someone to accept as true or valid what is false or invalid: the act of deceiving resorting to falsehood and deception used deception to leak the classified information” (“Deception”). The reason why deception was involved was because the participants actually believed they they were shocking a real person and they were unaware that the learner was part of Milgram’s study. Milgram argued that, “illusion is used when necessary in order to set the stage for the revelation of certain difficult-to-get-at-truths” (McLeod 2007). The second ethnical issue was the protection of the participants. The participants in this experiment were exposed to stressful situations that could have psychological harm and many of them were distressed. Many of the participants pleaded to stop, but the authority figure had them continue. But, Milgram argued that this situation was short-term, because once they saw that the learner was in fact fine, their stress level decreased. The final ethnical issue was the right to withdrawal. They should make it plain and simply to the participants that they have the right to withdrawal anytime throughout the experiment. The experimenter gave the participants four statements, which mostly likely discouraged the