How Did Stanley Milgram Study Unethical

During Stanley Milgram’s 1960’s study, he made subjects believe that they were harming another subject in order to test obedience. He did this by having the subject ask an actor, who was pretending to be another subject, to remember a word out of a series of words. Whenever the actor fail to get the word correct, the subject would flip a switch that he believe was administering an increasing electric charge. They were told not to stop and to continue increasing the voltage even after the actor began yelling and begging them to stop, and even after he stopped responding all together. The study was to see just how far people are willing to go to follow the orders of an authoritative figure. The results of the study showed that about half of the subjects were willing to keep going until the doctor told them to stop, while the other half refused to go on with the test once they thought they were harming another person. Some have taken his methods to have been unethical, and not worth any physiological damage that may have been done to the subject. It is arguable that he blurred the line on the APA’s guidelines of ethical principle on consent, and deception, but in my mind it was justifiable, and required in order to gather untainted information.

Other phycologist have said that the stress of harming someone was to mentally damaging. I disagree with this notion because one, the subjects were told to do it, and were not forced to do it, and two, after the testing was complete the subjects talked with their “victim” and worked out that they had not actually done any real harm to him. Had that not been the case and the man was actually being shocked or the subject never learned that they hadn’t actually hurt someone, it would be a totally different