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Ethical Issues of the Milgram Experiment

Apa Style

SUMMARY OF MILGRAM ARTICLE

The Milgram (1963) article is about an experiment that was conducted on the Yale University campus on obedience. A newspaper ad and mailers were sent out to advertise for participants for an experiment that offered 4.50 just to show up and brought in 40 participants ranging in age, education level and occupation. The participants were told that the study had to do with memory and that one participant would be the learner and the other would be the teacher. The teacher would be responsible for shocking the learner every time that learner got a wrong answer and that each time the learner was shocked, the voltage of that shock would have to increase with the highest level of shock being clearly labeled as dangerous on the fake -but very professional looking- shocking machine. The participants did not know that the learner was a trained person working with the experimenter. Although a low amount of people were predicted to obey the experimenter in giving the more painful shocks, most participants did and over half of them administered shocks all the way up to the highest one.

ISSUES OF RESEARCH ETHICS

There were a lot of things unethical about this experiment. The main one being that the participants were lied to be about what they were participating in. As a researcher it was Milgram’s (1963) job to invent an experiment were his hypothesis could be tested but also were participants would be informed of what they were participating in. This leads to the unethical issue that this experiment caused most of the participants extreme distress, which was an indirect result of them being lied to about the experiment. The fact they that also used the Yale campus and the Yale name of the fliers is also unethical since the article stated that Yale had no hand in the experiment, particularly as a safeguard should the experiment go wrong. This just added even more to the participants’ fake sense of assuredness that the experiment was legitimate and the false sense of security they felt that their psychological well being would be looked after, which is was apparently not from the study.

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YOUR ETHICAL STANCE AS RESEARCHER

From a researcher’s point of view, I feel that an ethical code is important in experiments not just for the well being of the participants but also to ensure that the results are measuring what they are supposed to. When you do unethical things in experiments it skews the entire experiment, which greatly allows for your results to answer another question completely which defeats the purpose of a researching using less wholesome measures in the first place. Milgram’s (1963) study, for example, set out to measure obedience in people but instead tested people’s reactions to their personal moral judgments and humanity and reactions to mild threats. This is evident in the participants’ reactions during the time they spent shocking the ‘learner.’ If I were a child and my mother told me to go to bed and I did, then I would be being obedient. If they experimenters told the participants to shock the other person and they did, then they would be being obedient. But there is no sign of that in the experiment which is why they listed the prompts that they had to use in order to get the participants to continue. If my mother told me that I had to go to bed after I expressed not wanting to I would assume that there was a level of threat in that mild statement and if I went to bed then it would be out of a generalized fear or a fear of consequences much like participants would have felt when the experimenter told them that it was important that they continue and that they had to even after they expressed a desire to stop.

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If I would have done this experiment, I might have had the same set up but I would have told the participants that this experiment was about testing obedience. That way the participants would have gathered that we were testing the obedience of the ‘participants’ that we were shocking. If they didn’t want to continue then I would only ask them to continue once in a normal tone with no pressure. This way I could ensure that I was measuring obedience and not their response to fear or sense of obligation.

REFERENCES (APA STYLE)

Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371-

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