Why is the Milgram experiment so controversial?
There is ongoing debate about whether the Milgram experiment was ethical. Opponents argue that because participants were not informed of the experiment’s topic beforehand, it inflicted mental stress and anxiety to the participants.
What are the implications of the Milgram experiment?
Milgram’s experiment was deemed unethical because of the amount of stress participants felt during the test, and the experimenter urged participants to continue even when they wanted to quit. The treatment of human participants came to light after Milgram’s experiment, causing the APA to change the way they are treated.
What is a major problem with the original Milgram study?
The original Milgram study has a number of major problems. His study was unethical because Milgram lied to his respondents. The Asch conformity study has a major flaw. In ignoring the importance of race, class, and gender in conformity, Asch failed to recognize the importance of these factors.
What was unethical about Milgram's study?
Milgram Experiment as an Unethical Study The Milgram experiment was argued to be unethical by many researchers, including Diana Baumrind. The main concern was related to the treatment of the study’s human subjects who experienced some unfavorable reactions to the task they were asked to perform (Slife, 2009).
What ethical guidelines did Milgram break?
He concluded that under the right circumstances ordinary people will obey unjust orders. Milgram's study has been heavily criticised for breaking numerous ethical guidelines, including: deception, right to withdraw and protection from harm.
What is a major problem with the original Milgram study?
what is a major problem with the original Milgram study? Milgram lied to his respondents, making his study borderline unethical. The field of social psychology studies topics at the intrapersonal level.
What did Milgram's experiment reveal about human behavior?
The Milgram experiment suggested that human beings are susceptible to obeying authority, but it also demonstrated that obedience is not inevitable.
What was the result of the Milgram experiment?
Milgram was horrified by the results of the experiment. In the “remote condition” version of the experiment described above, 65 percent of the subjects (26 out of 40) continued to inflict shocks right up to the 450-volt level, despite the learner's screams, protests, and, at the 330-volt level, disturbing silence.
What is a reasonable critique of the original Milgram study quizlet?
Ecological validity: Milgram's original study took place in an artificial laboratory setting at Yale University. This was not the participants usual setting and so the study lacks ecological validity.
What is one the main takeaways of Milgram's obedience study quizlet?
1. Milgram is measuring if people will be obedient, even when it goes against moral conduct. 2.
What impact did the Milgram study have on participants quizlet?
Participants were assured that their behaviour was common and Milgram also followed the sample up a year later and found that there were no signs of any long term psychological harm. In fact the majority of the participants (83.7%) said that they were pleased that they had participated.
What was the Milgram experiment quizlet?
What was the Milgram Experiment designed to do? An experiment that Stanley Milgram designed to see what people would do when forced between obeying authority and listening to their conscience and morals.
What was the purpose of the Milgram experiment?
The Milgram Experiment was a series of experimental studies that took place in the 1960s to investigate how willing subjects were to obey an authority figure even when their actions directly conflicted with their personal conscience.
Who came up with the idea of the Stanford Prison Experiment?
In 1971, Professor Philip Zimbardo came up with the idea of... Stanford Prison Experiment Summary The Stanford Prison Experiment Summary is a famous psychology experiment that was designed to study the psychological impact of becoming a prison guard or prisoner.
Did the learner have electric shocks?
In reality there were no electric shocks and the “learner” was an actor, but the participant had no way of knowing this and as far as the teacher was concerned, they really were obeying instructions and administering electric shocks to another individual in a separate room.
Why is Milgram's experiment controversial?
Milgram’s experiment has been widely criticized on ethical grounds. Milgram’s participants were led to believe that they acted in a way that harmed someone else, an experience that could have had long-term consequences. Moreover, an investigation by writer Gina Perry uncovered that some participants appear to not have been fully debriefed after the study —they were told months later, or not at all, that the shocks were fake and the learner wasn’t harmed. Milgram’s studies could not be perfectly recreated today, because researchers today are required to pay much more attention to the safety and well-being of human research subjects.
What was the purpose of the Milgram experiment?
The goal of the Milgram experiment was to test the extent of humans' willingness to obey orders from an authority figure. Participants were told by an experimenter to administer increasingly powerful electric shocks to another individual. Unbeknownst to the participants, shocks were fake and the individual being shocked was an actor.
How did the electric shock experiment work?
If the learner responded incorrectly to a question, the teacher would be asked to administer an electric shock. The shocks started at a relatively mild level (15 volts) but increased in 15-volt increments up to 450 volts. (In actuality, the shocks were fake, but the participant was led to believe they were real.)
How many participants did Burger find obeyed?
Burger found that participants obeyed at similar levels as Milgram’s participants: 82.5% of Milgram’s participants gave the learner the 150-volt shock, and 70% of Burger’s participants did the same.
How many teachers were in the experiment room at once?
Another version of the study brought three "teachers" into the experiment room at once. One was a real participant, and the other two were actors hired by the research team. During the experiment, the two non-participant teachers would quit as the level of shocks began to increase. Milgram found that these conditions made the real participant far more likely to "disobey" the experimenter, too: only 10% of participants gave the 450-volt shock to the learner.
What was the most famous experiment of Stanley Milgram?
In the most well-known version of Stanley Milgram's experiment, the 40 male participants were told that the experiment focused on the relationship between punishment , learning, and memory. The experimenter then introduced each participant to a second individual, explaining that this second individual was participating ...
What is Milgram's interpretation of his research?
Milgram’s interpretation of his research was that everyday people are capable of carrying out unthinkable actions in certain circumstances. His research has been used to explain atrocities such as the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, though these applications are by no means widely accepted or agreed upon.
Abstract
In recent history, Hitler was able to confirm many people into believing as he did: the Aryan race was superior and those who were not Aryan needed to be exterminated, particularly the Jews.
The Experiment
Once the men were chosen for the study, they were given instructions, time, and dates to meet in a lab. In the lab, the chosen man and a second man would draw a sheet of paper from a pool. The paper either had “teacher” or “learner” printed on it, the paper chosen was the role you lead.
The Results
Believe it or not, fourteen out of the forty participants (teachers), obeyed up to and past three hundred volts. “65% (two-thirds) of participants (i.e., teachers) continued to the highest level of 450 volts. All the participants continued to 300 volts.” (McLeod, 2017).
What was the first ethical dilemma with Milgram's experiment?
The first ethical dilemma with Milgram's experiment is deception . The experimenter deceived the participants, who were made to believe that they were truly inflicting pain on the learners and were purposely put in a position of high stress.
Who said it was hell in there?
One participant, William Menold, who had just been discharged from a Regimental Combat Team in the U.S. Army and participated in 1961 said, "It was hell in there" (Blass 115), describing how it felt to be in the laboratory during the experiment.
Did Milgram lie about the purpose of the experiment?
Some teachers even believed they had badly hurt, or even killed the learner, causing a lot of distress (Nairne 435). Milgram also lied about the purpose of the experiment. While it was truly to measure obedience, he told his participants that he was studying the effects of punishment on learning.
What Were the Milgram Experiments?
"The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act." - Stanley Milgram, 1974
How many people refused to go along with Milgram's experiments?
When other people refused to go along with the experimenter's orders, 36 out of 40 participants refused to deliver the maximum shocks. 6
Why Is Milgram's Study Still So Powerful?
So why does Milgram's experiment maintain such a powerful hold on our imaginations, even decades after the fact? Perry believes that despite all its ethical issues and the problem of never truly being able to replicate Milgram's procedures, the study has taken on the role of what she calls a "powerful parable."
What would happen if an authority figure ordered you to deliver a 400 volt electrical shock to another person?
If an authority figure ordered you to deliver a 400-volt electrical shock to another person, would you follow orders? Most people would answer with an adamant "no." However, the Milgram obedience experiment aimed to prove otherwise.
How much did each participant get paid for participating in the Milgram experiment?
In exchange for their participation, each person was paid $4.50. 1
What percentage of participants in Milgram's study delivered the maximum shock?
The average prediction was that around 1% of participants would deliver the maximum shock. 3 In reality, 65% of the participants in Milgram’s study delivered the maximum shocks. 4
Why were participants carefully screened?
Participants were also carefully screened to eliminate those who might experience adverse reactions to the experiment.
What are the ethical issues of the Milgram experiment?
There are 3 main ethical issues with the Milgram experiment: deception, protection of participants, and right to withdrawal. Each of those issues, as well as Milgram’s argument, is discussed in detail below: 1) Deception – The participants actually believed they were shocking a real person, and were unaware the learner was a confederate ...
What did Milgram argue about the effects of the stress test?
Milgram argued that these effects were only short term. Once the participants were debriefed, their stress levels decreased. Milgram also interviewed the participants one year after the event and concluded that most (83.7%) were happy that they had taken part.
Why were prompts justified in the study?
Milgram argued that the prompts were justified because the study was about obedience and orders were necessary. Milgram pointed out that although the right to withdraw was made difficult, it was possible, and that 35% of participants had chosen to withdraw (McLeod, 2007).
When did Milgram's experiment start?
The experiments began in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question:
What did Milgram investigate?
Milgram (1963) examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials.
Why did the experimenter wear a gray lab coat?
In the original baseline study – the experimenter wore a gray lab coat as a symbol of his authority (a kind of uniform). Milgram carried out a variation in which the experimenter was called away because of a phone call right at the start of the procedure.
Why did Milgram investigate the Germans?
Milgram (1963) wanted to investigate whether Germans were particularly obedient to authority figures as this was a common explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II. Milgram selected participants for his experiment by newspaper advertising for male participants to take part in a study of learning at Yale University.
What is the agency theory of Milgram?
Milgram (1974) explained the behavior of his participants by suggesting that people have two states of behavior when they are in a social situation: The autonomous state – people direct their own actions, and they take responsibility for the results of those actions.
Why do people obey orders?
People tend to obey orders from other people if they recognize their authority as morally right and/or legally based. This response to legitimate authority is learned in a variety of situations, for example in the family, school, and workplace.
Who was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person?
Milgram (1963) was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person.
When the same experiment was re-done with two additional teachers in the room, but whom were also actually part?
When the same experiment was re-done with two additional teachers in the room, but whom were also actually part of the experiment, and they refused to administer the shocks, the research subjects were dramatically less likely to administer the shocks either.
What happened to the learner in the experiment?
The teacher asked the learner questions, and each time the learner got one wrong, they were told to give them an electric shock. The size of the shock went up with each incorrect question. Now, the learner, being in on the experiment, intentionally got a lot of questions wrong, but was not actually receiving physical shocks.
When participants in the experiment had to physically place the hand of the learner on a plate that administered the shock,?
When participants in the experiment had to physically place the hand of the learner on a plate that administered the shock, they were less likely to continue shocking.
Is the Milgram experiment unethical?
One of the things he mentioned was the Milgram experiment, and it got me thinking. The experiment itself was unethical, and may not have been very valid anyway.
Milgram’s Famous Experiment
Critiques of The Milgram Experiment
Variations on The Milgram Experiment
Replicating The Milgram Experiment
- One of the biggest criticisms of the Milgram Experiments was the extreme psychological stress inflicted on the participants. Many were reported to be very uncomfortable about what they were being asked to do, although a large number of the participants in the early experiments were later said to be very grateful to have taken part.
Milgram’s Legacy
Sources
- Milgram’s experiment has been widely criticized on ethical grounds. Milgram’s participants were led to believe that they acted in a way that harmed someone else, an experience that could have had long-term consequences. Moreover, an investigation by writer Gina Perry uncovered that some participants appear to not have been fully debriefed after the...