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Was Stanley Milgram's Study Of Obedience Unethical?

1263 Words6 Pages

In 1963, Stanley Milgram, a professor at Yale University, conducted a study on obedience to authoritative figures which focused on how far the participant would go to obey the experimenter even if they thought they were harming someone. He first assembled 40 male participants, ranging in age and occupation, telling them that the study was about learning. The participants even received $4.50 just for showing up (McLeod). Separately, each participant was introduced to another participant who was actually a part of the experiment. The experimenter then described the role of the “teacher” and “learner” in the study and made the participants draw to see which role they would take. Making the participants draw made the sampling look random, but …show more content…

She condemns Milgram’s sampling technique saying in the article “Classic Dialogue: Was Stanley Milgram’s Study of Obedience Unethical?” that, “his sampling techniques are seldom of a scope which would justify the meaning with which he would like to endow his results”. This shows how she doesn’t believe the results of this study could be generalizable since the participants volunteered to take part in the study for the money and would inherently obey the experimenter. The fact that Milgram’s study was held in a laboratory also makes it hard to generalize the results to a real-life situation. Baumrind believed that Milgram’s experiment was unethical because of the amount of psychological stress brought onto the subject, Milgram’s lack of awareness for the subjects’ well-being, and the possible harmful effect on the subject’s trust of other authorities in the future. She brings into attention how even though the subjects were only following orders from the experimenter, they may still take responsibility for their actions and dwell on the fact that they could’ve actually hurt someone. It terms of procedures, Baumrind criticizes the way Milgram tried to assure that the participants left the laboratory in a state of well-being. She says that it would be hard to get rid of that amount of psychological stress inflicted on the participant, and Milgram’s casual reassurance is not reliable. She also points out how the objective manner in which Milgram reports the participants’ discomfort by stuttering, trembling, and profusely sweating contradicts the way he graphically presented these disturbances. Baumrind further states how signs of tension should not be seen in a participant, even though Milgram says he didn’t expect them to react that way and the tension was only

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Among multiple issues including giving misleading information, the most dominate is the lack of consent Milgram received from his subjects to participate in such a test (102). While I do see that this is immoral, there is no way that Milgram could have completed his experiments effectively if he had done it morally. The first issue is if he explains what is actually going to happen during the experiments, that would obviously hurt the integrity of his results. Also, going back to how the experiments help us, if those who participated knew what was going to happen, it wouldn’t have affected them as severely. It was the shock that the experiment gave that brought their life choices into question.

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Again, Baumrind dismissed Milgram’s experiment insisting that his selection method was not of sufficient scale to validate his results and would make it hard for colleagues who might hold diverging theories to reproduce his results. In Baumrind analysis of Milgram’s experiment she fails to see a correlation between Milgram’s experiment and the relationship between German authority figures and members of the SS. Baumrind also states that she would still question the validity of Milgram’s study even if it was reproduced outside of New Haven and the confines of Yale University as well as how illustrative of human behavior the sample could be when using subjects who volunteered to take part in an experiment conducted outside of a

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