Poll: Do you think the Milgram Experiment was unethical?

[kailus13]

Difference being that in the Milgram experiment people were volunteering to be experimented on.

Until they wanted to stop, asking at first, then begging. The "experiments" continued regardless.

Untrue. If the subject kept asking to stop after 3 predetermined responses, then the experiment would be halted. That didn't happen too frequently.

I meant that the "victim" kept asking to stop. The "experimenter" continued onwards to dangerous levels.

 

[excalipoor]

Faced with dangerous orders in the real world, they could easily thinking that those wasn't real either. The important thing is that they went through with it, not the line of reasoning why (as long as said rationale is not the direct result of a flaw in the experiment.)

But I'm saying it is a flaw in the experiment. The situation is much too absurd for your average Joe to buy without reservations.

The difference between real world experience and the experiment is that you know you're being studied, you know it's a controlled environment, but all you know about the experiment itself is what you're told. If they had let the subject and the actor see each other, the results would have been wildly different.

 

[Darkasassin96]

The experiment was designed to examine whether or not the excuse, "I was just following orders" would hold up in court

Most of us look at the nazis and tell ourselves that we would never have followed those orders but this experiment proves that most people would.

An authority figure is someone that we are psychologically forced to trust, there is also the consideration that all blame would be put on them because they were the one who ordered it.

As for the ethicality(is that a word?) of the situation is perfectly fine, it was a psychological experiment where nobody got hurt and the people understand truths about themselves and perhaps have a little sympathy for the nazis. Nobody got hurt, everyone could have backed out at any time.

There are several variants on this experiment that some might find morally questionable and they all had very similar results. One involved a dog trainer, a puppy and a very real electric shock to the puppy.

Another variant involved twelve people, six prisoners, six prison guards, that were given a basement made to look like a prison that they couldn't leave for two weeks. Lets just say that after six days the scientists weren't able to watch what was going on and they cut it short.

That experiment was more or less to test what would happen if you gave someone authority over someone else.

AS long as no humans were hurt I am perfectly fine with any experiment done, and if any pain is inflicted on a human they should always have the option to back out, which strangely none of the prisoners did.

 

[WanderingFool]

One thing that always bugged me about the Milgram Experiment (See here for explanation) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment] is that even though what it told us about human beings and their capacity for evil was important to know

No, it is not "capacity for evil". I don't know why I've seen this term repeatedly - it's an experiment to see how far would people go when following the orders of perceived authority figures.

I was going to say that.

I studied this in college (mandatory Psych class), it was a experiment to determine if a person would continue to submit to authority (the researcher in charge of the experiment) and continue the experiment or would disobey them for the sake of the learner and stop the experiment.

From what I recall, not to many people stopped, most likely because they were just doing what they were told, and felt if anything happened, it would fall on the researchers head.

 

[snekadid]

It is a question of the human capacity for evil since anyone participating in the test with any morality would not participate since they would have to either accept that the "victim" volunteered for a test in which they would be electrocuted repeatedly in which case they would be judged as either mentally ill or incompetent and thus incapable of giving consent in any legal fashion or the person running the experiment is lying and the "victim" is not a volunteer. Either case results in the test subject not being a morally viable.

OT: Completely ethical, as those same negatives earned through the test are the result of learning more about humanity as a whole. The more you know, the less happy you'll be.


CAPTCHA: perfect world
So very ironic.

 

[Astoria]

The only unethical part I found about it is that participants weren't really allowed to stop when they wanted to. Once a participant wants to stop you have to let them but in this case they were strongly urged to keep going dispite multiple objections in some cases. It probably also screwed the results a bit. Apart from that though I don't see a problem with experiments like this as long as the participants are told exactly what happened afterwards and that they aren't evil for going through with it.

In most cases, as long as no physical harm is done to people or animals and the basic ethical guidelines are follwed (volunteering, confidentuality ect)then they should be allowed to go ahead. If experiments like this one were allowed to be conducted we could find out not only that authority has a strong hold over us but why and what specific elements control us more than others. Hell, theoretically, you could keep it going until we found a way to prevent something like the Nazis ever happening again. Well worth bending a few rules if you ask me.

 

[Vegosiux]

But I'm saying it is a flaw in the experiment. The situation is much too absurd for your average Joe to buy without reservations.

Actually that's exactly why it's not a flaw in the experiment. Average Joe does not know whether or not the situation is real.

Imagine the situation actually was real. Average Joe would still not know whether it's real or not, just like he didn't know before. As far as Average Joe and information he has are concerned, everything is identical. Therefore it's reasonable to expect that the identical Average Joe will act on (as far as he knows) an exactly identical situation in the exactly identical manner - invoke denial.

Whether or not the situation was "real" is completely irrelevant to the results, because Average Joe does not have that information.

The difference between real world experience and the experiment is that you know you're being studied, you know it's a controlled environment, but all you know about the experiment itself is what you're told.

But the volunteers were told that they were conducting the experiment. That the "victim" was the one being experimented on, not themselves.

If they had let the subject and the actor see each other, the results would have been wildly different.

Well, or if Average Joe was told "Oh by the way, this isn't actually happening, we are just wondering how far you'd go following orders."

But that's exactly the point. Average Joe had to be kept in the dark about it.

 

[thethird0611]

So, im graduating with a Psychology degree this semesters, maybe I can put this in perspective.

Let me put this out there first, the Milgram experiment was a valuable experiment. Many many experiments today are actually based off of it.

Now to the meat, HOLY SHIT YES IT WAS UNETHICAL. Many people here are saying 'Oh, they could of stopped at any time, it was a psychological experiment, da da da da da." Its actually a study that made our ethics evolve. I dont know how yall think this would be anywhere near ethical, but it isnt. Funny enough, Milgram saw this and made his test different and more ethical to continue them.

First off, no, they couldn't stop at any time. The pressure put on from the experimenter made them continue. Psychological ethics state, if someone wants to quit and leave, you let them. This experiment showed that you can coerce people into staying, and that is unethical.

Second off, it could be psychologically harming. "Oh, they knew it was a scientific study, oh, it wont hurt them later on." These explanations dont do squat. Just because its a scientific study doesnt mean that we have free will to do anything we want to them, they look to us for -safety- during the experiment, both physically and psychologically. Onto the next point... It can easily affect someone later in life, since this is about -torturing- someone, and to top it all off, the recordings that were played first talked about 'heart' problems, then went silent even more the questions. Many people thought that they did major harm to this person,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yr5cjyokVUs

Seriously guys, dont try to be arm chair psychologist and see this as ethical. Psychology has high ethics to protect our participants, and anything that could provide physical and psychological harm is heavily critique before, during, and after the experiment. Hell, my own experiment now uses deception and provokes a high sense of envy in a participant, so I need to put it on my consent letter, carefully watch the participant in the study, and debrief them after.

 

[excalipoor]

Whether or not the situation was "real" is completely irrelevant to the results, because Average Joe does not have that information.

Sure, but I'm saying that if Joe doesn't believe it to be real, then the entire experiment is superfluous.

But the volunteers were told that they were conducting the experiment. That the "victim" was the one being experimented on, not themselves.

Why would they need volunteers to conduct this hypothetical experiment if they weren't supposed to take any part in it themselves? Suspicious!

But that's exactly the point. Average Joe had to be kept in the dark about it.

And that's why it doesn't replicate the situation, because the Nazis most definitely knew they were caging up human beings for whatever purposes.

 

[rob_simple]

I remember discussing the Milgram Experiment with my Psychology teacher and saying even if ethics didn't forbid it, it still wouldn't work today. She was going round the room asking who, in that situation, would have turned the dial all the way up and I was the only one to raise a hand.

When she asked why, I said, 'because I know there is no way they'd let me actually kill someone.'

The way society works now, with such a heavy emphasis on blame culture, means that it's most likely that anyone you got to participate in the test would be cynical enough to know it wasn't real and do whatever you told them to; I don't think it would work anymore, as a test of obedience.

I think it's a fascinating experiment, and I think ethical bollocks hinders research far too often, but even if similar experiments could be conducted today I think the way our perception of the world and other people has changed would render the results redundant.

 

[kailus13]

Faced with dangerous orders in the real world, they could easily thinking that those wasn't real either. The important thing is that they went through with it, not the line of reasoning why (as long as said rationale is not the direct result of a flaw in the experiment.)

But I'm saying it is a flaw in the experiment. The situation is much too absurd for your average Joe to buy without reservations.

The difference between real world experience and the experiment is that you know you're being studied, you know it's a controlled environment, but all you know about the experiment itself is what you're told. If they had let the subject and the actor see each other, the results would have been wildly different.

There was a variation where the subject had to hold the actors hand to a metal plate for the experiment to continue. 30% of subjects carried out the experiment to it's full extent.

 

[DoPo]

One thing that always bugged me about the Milgram Experiment (See here for explanation) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment] is that even though what it told us about human beings and their capacity for evil was important to know

No, it is not "capacity for evil". I don't know why I've seen this term repeatedly - it's an experiment to see how far would people go when following the orders of perceived authority figures.

I was going to say that.

I studied this in college (mandatory Psych class), it was a experiment to determine if a person would continue to submit to authority (the researcher in charge of the experiment) and continue the experiment or would disobey them for the sake of the learner and stop the experiment.

From what I recall, not to many people stopped, most likely because they were just doing what they were told, and felt if anything happened, it would fall on the researchers head.

Precisely, equating that to "evil" is just stupid. And it's especially jarring when the Wikipedia article OP links to in order to explain what the experiment is, explicitly calls it by the full name Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures. In no shape or form is this hinting at "evil". I remember another thread [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.373637-How-Evil-Are-You] a few months back (OK, it was actually almost a year back) which also said that the experiment had something to do with evil. And I've seen other people also using the same connotation.

 

[Ken Sapp]

Sorry, got the Milgram experiment and the Stanford Prison experiment confused.

The Milgram experiment I don't see as being unethical, since there is no potential for physical harm and subjects are free to end their participation at any point. The idea as I understood it was to find out how far people would go in following instructions from an authoritative figure.

The Stanford Prison experiment was definitely unethical and flawed from the very beginning. With too few controls and far too many variables I don't think it could have yielded any usable data. The researcher also removed his own objectivity by personally participating in the experiment.

The United States only has a good record of ethics in research for about the last fifty years though as some of the experiments our own government carried out in the first half of the century on convicts and military men only barely fall short of those carried out by the Nazi's during WWII. We need to be reminded of our own mistakes in the pursuit of greater knowledge so that we do not repeat them, but the knowledge even from those unethical experiments is valuable.

 

[excalipoor]

There was a variation where the subject had to hold the actors hand to a metal plate for the experiment to continue. 30% of subjects carried out the experiment to it's full extent.

And that alone dropped the amount of subjects finishing to less than half of the initial result.

 

[thethird0611]

Whether or not the situation was "real" is completely irrelevant to the results, because Average Joe does not have that information.

Sure, but I'm saying that if Joe doesn't believe it to be real, then the entire experiment is superfluous.

But the volunteers were told that they were conducting the experiment. That the "victim" was the one being experimented on, not themselves.

Why would they need volunteers to conduct this hypothetical experiment if they weren't supposed to take any part in it themselves? Suspicious!

But that's exactly the point. Average Joe had to be kept in the dark about it.

And that's why it doesn't replicate the situation, because the Nazis most definitely knew they were caging up human beings for whatever purposes.

Look bud, let me tell you about this. Through the 4 years of my psych degree, ive seen this experiment in the general aspect, the social aspect, the behavior aspect, the learning and conditioning aspect, and let me tell you...

They DID think they were hurting someone. They did believe they were the one conducting the experiment, and it was unethical.

This experiment, while unethical, was done freaking well. That is what PSychologist do, we work within ethical boundaries and can deceive you easy.

Hell, my own experiment, I deceive people into a high sense of envy to a confederate, and none of them have even caught on that this experiment was supposed to do that. Its even in the consent form, and some of the reactions during the debreifings just show how participants dont catch onto these things.

 

[thethird0611]

Sorry, got the Milgram experiment and the Stanford Prison experiment confused.

The Milgram experiment I don't see as being unethical, since there is no potential for physical harm and subjects are free to end their participation at any point. The idea as I understood it was to find out how far people would go in following instructions from an authoritative figure.

The Stanford Prison experiment was definitely unethical and flawed from the very beginning. With too few controls and far too many variables I don't think it could have yielded any usable data. The researcher also removed his own objectivity by personally participating in the experiment.

The United States only has a good record of ethics in research for about the last fifty years though as some of the experiments our own government carried out in the first half of the century on convicts and military men only barely fall short of those carried out by the Nazi's during WWII. We need to be reminded of our own mistakes in the pursuit of greater knowledge so that we do not repeat them, but the knowledge even from those unethical experiments is valuable.

So, because I believe in ethics, im replying to more people than usual in this thread xD

The things is, you have to look at the Psychological aspect in these experiments to. These participants believed they were being made to electrocute a participant over and over, worse and worse. During the experiment, the recording even talked about 'Heart Problems', and after it got to the XXX switches, the participant went silent. Even while silent, if they didn't answer the question, the 'authority' figure made the participant -still- flip the switch.

Remember, both the Milgram and the Prison Experiment are apart of why our Psychological ethics are so strict against any type of harm.

 

[CrystalShadow]

And that's why it doesn't replicate the situation, because the Nazis most definitely knew they were caging up human beings for whatever purposes.

Yes. But they were also indoctrinated to believe what they were doing served some greater good of some kind, and it still doesn't negate the issue of deferring to authority even when you suspect what's going on isn't right.

Meanwhile, if you want a conspiracy theory, maybe the reason results like this aren't popular is because they show people follow authority more often than not...

And if you run a system (such as, say, an organised government), being able to count on most people being obedient no matter what you ask them to do is really a very useful trait for those in charge...

After all, if I want you to do something questionable, my life is becomes a lot simpler if you do what I tell you to just because I told you to do it, than if you actually question what it is you are being asked to do.

Military training also seems to explicitly encourage the behaviour too. Following orders is what soldiers do.
If your superior officer tells you to shoot a couple of people, that's what you do... Or... You get into a lot of trouble, more likely than not. (Which could get you a reprimand, a court-martial, or even being shot yourself on the spot depending on which military you are part of, and the circumstances at the time...)

 

[kailus13]

There was a variation where the subject had to hold the actors hand to a metal plate for the experiment to continue. 30% of subjects carried out the experiment to it's full extent.

And that alone dropped the amount of subjects finishing to less than half of the initial result.

It's still 5 times higher than what they initially thought would happen. I'm curious, if you say the experiment was flawed, what would you do to rectify that?

 

[Kilo24]

Faced with dangerous orders in the real world, they could easily thinking that those wasn't real either. The important thing is that they went through with it, not the line of reasoning why (as long as said rationale is not the direct result of a flaw in the experiment.)

But I'm saying it is a flaw in the experiment. The situation is much too absurd for your average Joe to buy without reservations.

The difference between real world experience and the experiment is that you know you're being studied, you know it's a controlled environment, but all you know about the experiment itself is what you're told. If they had let the subject and the actor see each other, the results would have been wildly different.

That's incorrect. Other scientists thought the same and tried different approaches. For example:

Charles Sheridan and Richard King hypothesized that some of Milgram's subjects may have suspected that the victim was faking, so they repeated the experiment with a real victim: a "cute, fluffy puppy" who was given real, albeit harmless, electric shocks. They found similar findings to Milgram: half of the male subjects and all of the females obeyed to the end. Many subjects showed high levels of distress during the experiment and some openly wept. In addition, Sheridan and King found that the duration for which the shock button was pressed decreased as the shocks got higher, meaning that for higher shock levels, subjects showed more hesitance towards delivering the shocks.

In any case, I doubt that the symptoms of stress that the participants displayed were faked, nor that they would have occurred if the situation was too absurd to be believable. Those symptoms were pretty intense, too:

In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40)[1] of experiment participants administered the experiment's final massive 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment; some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment. Throughout the experiment, subjects displayed varying degrees of tension and stress. Subjects were sweating, trembling, stuttering, biting their lips, groaning, digging their fingernails into their skin, and some were even having nervous laughing fits or seizures.

Let's say that, despite all the experimental design focused around minimizing the possibility, the whole thing is precisely absurd enough that the learner had more-significant-than-realistic doubts about the process but not absurd enough to avoid having disturbed the hell out of the subject. It's certainly possible, I suppose. And it's very difficult to detect whether or not that affected things.

So, let's take a different approach. Let's say that we'll make the whole thing clearly fictional, say by having the learner be a clearly computer-generated person on screen, to figure out whether or not the situation being even more absurd would matter. If the situation being fake did matter, then you'd get far different results from that experiment than all the ones with that misleading, and the subjects would be experiencing pretty much no stress. It's such an obvious assumption that it's really not worth even running an experiment on.

Well, apparently that assumption is wrong.