Milgram's Ethical Theory

Ethical Guidelines that are Broken in Milgram's Study on Obedience The ethical guidelines suggest that debriefing the participants after the experiment is essential, which Milgram has done it thoroughly in order to reveal the aim and the true purpose of his study. Although he did not expect the out come of his research, but his ethics shows that the research is beneficial of understanding the welfare of World War II.

This essay will look at an important key psychological experiment carried out by the renowned social psychologist Stanley Milgram which was carried out in the early 1960’s (Banyard 2012) to determine how far ordinary people would go to inflict pain to a fellow human based on instruction from an authority figure, and that of the replication of the experiment which was carried out by Burger in 2009 (Byford 2014) to determine if the same level of obedience was still applicable in the 21st Century, as was observed in the original study some 40 years earlier. The

This Stanford Experiment violated a few of the Five General Principles of Ethics. The young men were offered $15 a day to participate in a study that lasted for one to two weeks that “wanted to see what they psychological effects were of becoming a prisoner or prison guard” (Zimbardo, 1999). One being “Principle A: Beneficence and Nonmaleficence” which

The study was set up as a "blind experiment" to capture if and when a person will stop inflicting pain on another as they are explicitly commanded to continue. The participants of this experiment included two willing individuals: a teacher and a learner. The teacher being the real subject and the learner is merely an actor. Both were told that they would be involved in a study that tests the effects of punishment on

The Milgram experiment was conducted in 1963 by Stanley Milgram in order to focus on the conflict between obedience to authority and to personal conscience. The experiment consisted of 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, and who’s jobs ranged from unskilled to professional. The roles of this experiment included a learner, teacher, and researcher. The participant was deemed the teacher and was in the same room as the researcher. The learner, who was also a paid actor, was put into the next room and strapped into an electric chair. The teacher administered a test to the learner, and for each question that was incorrect, the learner was to receive an electric shock by the teacher, increasing the level of shock each time. The shock generator ranged from

The purpose of Stanley Milgram writing his “The Perils of Obedience,” is to show to what extent an individual would contradict his/her moral convictions because of the orders of an authority figure (Milgram 78). He constructed an experiment wherein an experimenter instructs a naïve subject to inflict a series of shocks of increasing voltage on a protesting actor. Contrary to Milgram’s expectations, about sixty percent of the subjects administered the highest voltage shock. (Milgram 80). According to Milgram, experiment variations disproved the theory that the subjects were sadists. (Milgram 85). Milgram states that although the subjects are against their actions, they desire to please the experimenter, and they often

Stanley Milgram’s obedience study is known as the most famous study ever conducted. Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment that focused on the conflict between personal conscience and compliance to command. This experiment was conducted in 1961, a year following the court case of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram formulated the study to answer the question “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” (Milgram, 1974). The investigation was to see whether Germans were specially obedient, under the circumstances, to dominant figures. This was a frequently said explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II.

In Stanley Milgram’s article “The Perils of Obedience,” several people volunteer to participate in Milgram’s experiment. It consists of a learner and a teacher. When the learner fails to memorize a word pair, the teacher applies a shock to the learner. The shocks increase in severity with each wrong answer, attaining a maximum voltage of 450 volts. Milgram states many psychiatrists he interviewed before the experiment predicted most subjects would not go past 150 volts, or the point at which the learner starts to ask to leave (Milgram 80). In his first experiment, twenty-five out of forty subjects continued the experiment until the end (Milgram 80). After several more experiments at different locations, Milgram obtained the same results. Milgram

The APA ethical guidelines help to ensure that all psychological research maintains the integrity that it does not do harm or conflicts with the majority of the human populations moral ethical codes. However, in some situations the APA ethical guidelines must be viewed as just that: guidelines. If a study has the potential to benefit humanity as a whole and does not result in the permanent or irreparable harm to a human being then some guidelines must be permitted to be stretched or even broken in the interest of human advancement and scientific progression. After all the goal and responsibility of a psychologist is to enhance our understanding of human behavior as well as to find ways to use this information to better society and humanity

In 1974 Stanley Milgram conducted the classic study of obedience to authority. The study looked into how far individuals would be willing to go, and were asked could they deliver increasingly devastating electric shocks to a fellow human being, as they were requested to do so by the professor in charge of the experiment.

In fact, the experiment heavily relied on deception, and would have quite possibly been jeopardized had it not been for the deception involved in it. Subjects were told they would be participating in a different experiment in all aspects; the experiment would be one in which they were "teachers," trying to reinforce concepts through "punishment" (shocks) on a "learner". The deception involved in this and similar experiments during this time was enough to spark a serious conversation about research ethics during the time, and how the guidelines surrounding them needed to be drastically improved

Though they are to be held in the highest regard, cost/benefit is also a factor when conducting the study, that is, do the costs outweigh the benefits of the study? Based on the information discovered from this experiment, I would say the benefits do outweigh the costs, including the emotional damage that might have been caused to the participant. Not only did we discover the level of obedience the ordinary person has for authority, we also came to a possible understanding of how the massive genocide of innocent people that occurred during WW II was possible. When questioned during war criminal trials, the subject of obedience to authority continuously came up. Those who committed the horrific acts of antisemitism simply proclaimed that they were following orders.

The main ethical issue with this experiment was the use of deception as the participants did not know the truth behind this study. Participants believe that they were shocking the learners and they were under severe stress due to this is possible that they had suffered psychological injuries. The participants have the right to withdraw from the study if they wanted; however, this was not made clear to them. Also, participants did not receive enough information about the study.

At this point, the Teacher and Learner were separated into different rooms where they could communicate but not see each other. The Teacher was then given an electric shock from the electro-shock generator as a sample what the Learner would supposedly to receive during the experiment. After the Teacher was given a list of word pairs which he was to teach the Learner. The Teacher began by reading the list of word pairs to the learner. The teacher would then read the first word of each pair and read four possible answers. To respond the Learner would press a button to indicate their answer, if the answer was wrong the teacher would shock the Learner with the voltage increasing by 15-volts for each wrong answer, if correct the Teacher would read the next word pair. The subjects believed that for each wrong answer the Learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks. After a series of wrong answers the Learner would start complaining about their heart, afterwards there would be no response from the Learner at all. Many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the learner at this point in the experiment. Some paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment, while most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects even began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress when they heard the screams of the

One might think that this experiment will stimulate the new research in the area of human obedience, but this did not occur. Despite the difficulties and the courage of Burger to conduct a partial replication of the original study, it did not produce any different outcomes and did not spark any new ideas in psychology (Burger, 2009). Instead, the researcher had to deal with an enormous amount of different commentaries and controversy. My main rationale for disapproving the Burger’s study is ethical characteristics of the Milgram paradigm. More specifically, now we have the Ethical Rules of the APA, which tell us that researchers should honor rights of participants to privacy, confidentiality and the right to withdraw the experiment. However, Milgram’s paradigm clearly challenges these fundamental rights and creates even more ethical dilemmas. Another rationale that I can include is the infliction of increasing pain on an unwilling participant, a characteristic that is unacceptable in modern psychological studies. Therefore, I would disapprove such experiment, because of ethical non-compliance and little contribution to the field. As for me, I view following ethical practices in my dissertation project work as a crucial element for success. It will allow me to produce reliable, meaningful and relevant scholarly data that would not be a subject to ethical