Stanley Milgram’s All I can say to these experiments is “Wow” to me I saw it as inhumane. The interviews confirmed that an everyday normal person can cause pain and suffering to another. Milgram also noticed that the inclination toward a particular characteristic or type of behavior of the teacher was to devalue or demean the learner, to help to internally justify the teacher’s behavior of continuing to conduct the shocks in which it helped to continue the process of the experiment. The experiment gave an enormous amount of insight into the human behavior and the human obedience. By just following orders we commit horrors for the sake of just plain greed etc. I understand in any kind of group there is a hierarchy and obedience to the
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.
In the experiment, Milgram uses purposeful deception as the teacher is the naive subject and is told they are participating in a memory and learner psychology experiment and are in charge of delivering shocks to the learner, who, in fact, is an actor. The majority of the participants in the study were obedient to the experimenter even though the experimenter "did not threaten the subjects with punishments such as loss of income, community ostracism or jail for failure to obey. Neither could he offer incentives" (Milgram 651). Despite having nothing to gain, the subjects continued participating in the experiment. The participants continued to administer shocks to the student because they were instructed to
There were two groups in this experiment, the teachers and students. All of the volunteers to the experiments were the teachers and they had some actors play the students. The idea was to punish the students for their wrong answer through a shock treatment (http://nature.berkeley.edu/ucce50/ag-labor/7article/article35.htm 1). Throughout the experiment, they began to realize that the “test subjects”
What takes away this pressure? As each experimentee is told to inflict pain upon another human being they consider what makes it okay to do so. For instance, as a child if someone tells you to perform an act and you get in trouble for what you were told to do, a child would say, “They told me to do it.” Here it is the same instance. The experimentees are able to put full responsibility onto the shoulders of the experimental scientists because they were told to commit the action.
He saw that the more personal, or close, the real participant had to be to the fake one, while they were being shocked, affected the obedience as well. He also noticed that if there were two other fake participants teaching that refused to shock their learners that the real participant would not comply. Finally, he tested the experimenter telling the real patient to shock the learner by telephone, instead of actually being there in person, reduced obedience as well (McLead). The Milgram experiment and the Nuremburg trials can relate extensively to explain how the Holocaust happened the way it did.
The participants in the experiments actually believed they had administered painful electric shocks to another human being, and were visibly distressed throughout the experiment. Although they were not forced to stay and complete the experiment, they were consistently encouraged to keep going despite their obvious discomfort. Milgram (1974) was very careful to debrief all of the participants thoroughly, and followed up on them for some time after the experiment. Despite what many people view as a questionable ethical conduct, 83 % of the participants indicated that they were glad they had taken part in the
Like Psychologist Diana Baumrind did so in her article “Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments”. Where she makes it very clear that she disagrees with causing individuals stress and discomfort. In her article, Baumrind states “It is potentially harmful to a subject to commit, on the course of an experiment, acts which he himself considers unworthy, particularly when he has been entrapped into committing such acts by an individual he has reason to trust” which in this case the trustworthy individual would be Stanley Milgram. Baumrind also worried about the dangers of the serious aftereffects that may ensure because of the stress and discomfort Stanley Milgram’s experiment has caused. Even though Stanley Milgram states that “After the interview, procedures were undertaken to assure that the subject would leave the laboratory in a state of well-being.”
Your intellectual and emotional reaction to what you read. Regardless of how useful the founding of this experiment was, I found it highly disturbing that these prisoners were practically treated as “lab rats”. The experiments were not carried out on none human subjects before they were introduced to the experiment. Also, I think that experimenting on a highly influencable population is just plain wrong.
While arguably one of the defining psychological studies of the 20th Century, the research was not without flaws. Almost immediately the study became a subject for debate amongst psychologists who argued that the research was both ethically flawed and its lack of diversity meant it could not be generalized. Ethically, a significant critique of the experiment is that the participants actually believed they were administering serious harm to a real person, completely unaware that the learner was in fact acting. Although Milgram argued that the illusion was a necessary part of the experiment to study the participants’ reaction, they were exposed to a highly stressful situation. Many were visibly distraught throughout the duration of the test
1. Stanley Milgram's conclusions in regards to his experiment were that 84% of the participants reported they were glad they were a part of the study and 1% regretted participating. Also, Milgram's participants revealed they learned to become "less likely to mindlessly obey authority figures and more likely to speak up for themselves and others" (Ruscio 56). Zimbardo's first conclusion was his experiment was out of control because the guards were escalating their abuse towards the prisoners. Second, he questioned the morality of his study after Christina Maslach visited the prison and said "It's terrible what you are doing to these boys!"
Since the beginning of the human existence, man has always dominated and ruled over one another be it empires, corporations, or small groups. Authority and obedience has always been a factor of who we are. This natural occurrence can be seen clearly through the psychological experiments known as The Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Both of these studies are based on how human beings react to authority figures and what their obedience is when faced with conflict.
The Milgram experiment was conducted to analyze obedience to authority figures. The experiment was conducted on men from varying ages and varying levels of education. The participants were told that they would be teaching other participants to memorize a pair of words. They believed that this was an experiment that was being conducted to measure the effect that punishment has on learning, because of this they were told they had to electric shock the learner every time that they answered a question wrong. The experiment then sought out to measure with what willingness the participants obeyed the authority figure, even when they were instructed to commit actions which they seemed uncomfortable with.
Almost as if it is an experiment itself. Humans are capable of horrible things and, given the right circumstances they will crumble and give into these capabilities. Although this experiment is only done on men and you cannot draw a complete conclusion on all people, watching the film undeniably leaves me with a different outlook on humans in
Obedience to Authority experiment, which was also known as the Milgram experiment, was considered as one of the most famous and ethically criticized experiment in psychological history. In 1961, Milgram performed the first of a series of experiments to test how far individuals would go in obeying orders given by authority, even when the orders could violate their moral standards and cause harms to innocent individuals. In the experiment, the subjects were told that the purpose of the study was to test how punishment effects the learning. Milgram selected 40 normal adult men between the ages of 20 and 50 from different backgrounds and occupations as the experimental subjects. The participants were assigned the role of the teacher, whereas a
Considering the findings of the Milgram’s experience I do not think the scientific community overreacted. There are guidelines to doing scientific experiments, and one is if the experimented is in any danger the test could be canceled. As I was learning about the Milgram’s research I felt a little uncomfortable, just knowing that the “teachers” are shocking people who answer wrong. Nonetheless, to find out the “learners” were actors it eased my mind.