Poll: Do you think the Milgram Experiment was unethical?

[Mr.Squishy]

Ethnical, unethical, it doesn't matter. A truth is a truth.

Experiments are useful, people that are unwilling to accept that humans are immoral are not. I fully agree with you that it's a good thing people realise who they truly are. It's pointless to try to hide people from what has been shown to be their own nature.

This. Besides, this experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment both highlighted social tendencies in humans that helped put our whole species into perspective, and were hugely influential.
Besides, no-one got physically hurt or mutilated, so that's a plus.

 

[AT God]

It was unethical but I don't think it crossed a line since no one was actually hurt and the subject was later told they were not actually hurting anyone.

 

[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.

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.

I do not find anything unethical about the way the Milgram experiment was conducted. In my opinion, the Milgram experiments cause no harm, although they do reveal a basic flaw in the way most people respond to authority. The subjects were told that they could stop at any time and the calm orders to continue the "experiment" they thought they were participating in were merely a prod. They were not bound to a chair and told that they would not be unbound unless they complied. They complied willingly, even if against what their own conscience may have been telling them. Had there been someone actually wired up to receive voltage though... That would definitely have carried it into the territory of harm and unethicality.

 

[mParadox]

It would've been unethical... IF Milgram hadn't later 'reunited' the subjects and the guy in the electric chair. That one act immediately dissipates any threat of psychological trauma which might have occurred.

Also, Milgram's original theory was based on the crimes of the Nazis. He wanted to see whether Germans were different in nature. And think in that context, racism at an all time high. What better way to rile the people than say that Germans are by default more heartless than the average citizen of the world? So his original hypothesis failed. People will obey, if the order comes from someone holding the position of legitimate authority.

But you were asking about the ethics of it, so there you go.

 

[excalipoor]

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.

I'm not trying to argue against the power of authority, or whether Nazis were evil or not. All I'm saying is that the parameters weren't the same.

I'm curious, if you say the experiment was flawed, what would you do to rectify that?

In a controlled environment, following any sort of widely accepted code of ethics? No idea.

*snip*

I don't even know what you think I'm trying to say anymore. That the test subjects weren't in emotional distress, regardless of whether they had doubts about the legitimacy of the experiment or not? Of course they were.

How do people react when they see a magician cut a woman in half? They know full fucking well it's an act, but that doesn't do much to make it less grotesque. Doubt works both ways.

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.

I'm not saying the subjects had it all figured out, but that they had a way to justify their actions to themselves. Either by having doubts about the legitimacy of the situation, or by believing they weren't directly responsible. The subjects weren't abandoning their morality, they were trying to work around it. You have to believe what you're doing is either right, necessary...or not true.

Next you're going to tell me that the experiment was never about morality to begin with. I know that, but that's the way some people see it, and I think that's bullshit. And with that said, I'm not going to argue this further. I am just an armchair psychologist after all.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

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

Except the "victim" is a paid actor and not a volunteer. The only volunteer in the room is the "teacher" who is ordered to give the shocks by the experimenter.

OT: I see no problem with the experiment's ethics. The volunteers were polled later and most of them had positive feelings about it, so clearly none of them were "damaged" by the experiment as the opponents to it feared.

Also, there was a new version in 2004 with an AI that sounds pretty interesting.

 

[McMullen]

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.

If I understand you correctly, you feel that these experiments were unethical because they made people uncomfortable?

My original point was that learning truths about oneself is often uncomfortable, even though it is vital to our development. The subjects of the experiment realized this and 84% said they were glad they participated, some even thanking Milgram for it.

If a single person refuses to examine their flaws because it makes them uncomfortable, we tend to treat that as a sign of immaturity, yet that's what we're doing as a society with the Milgram experiments.

Personally, I worry more about the damage to society through our ignorance of other collective flaws because of similarly deceptive but (in the long term) harmless experiments that we're not conducting.

This is a concern I've had for over a decade, and I'm posting it here because 1) it seems senseless to me and 2) if there is a good reason for not doing them, I'd like to know what it really is.

So I'd like to hear from you if there's more to it than people feeling uncomfortable, anxious, or depressed about what they learned about themselves.

 

[Anti Nudist Cupcake]

No one got hurt, participants CHOSE to participate and could stop whenever they wanted.
Not unethical at all to me.

I stayed up two nights ago reading about the holocaust. I was horrified at how people could do such things, I was truly baffled. These experiments could help us understand.

How can we hope to combat evil if we deny that it exists?

 

[Therumancer]

The problem with the Milgram experiment is that it lacks any kind of appropriate context. WHY your being asked to do something is generally more important than what your being asked to do. Memorizing word pairs as part of an experiment known to be an experiment (albiet of a differant kind) is somewhat differant than say torturing a terrorist, or engaging in mass murder of people known to be a threat to society. In the latter case we're talking about a nazi like extermination of Jews, or a Khymer Rouge like purge of "city people", it's important to understand that those things did not happen in a vaccum and there were massive propaganda vehicles behind them, and there was indeed a grain of truth (whether anyone wants to admit it or not) hidden in each that was built upon.

In general people will sacrifice personal morality for the greater good, IF they can be convinced that the greater good will be served. It's actually a positive attribute, even if it's one that tends to be exploited. Your typical person might not say engage in murder on a personal level, but if society as a whole (or just as a majority) decides to do something they will do their part. It's sort of like how I point out that I believe in breaking the very cultures of enemies of the US, and a number of very intense reactions to things like illegal immigration, but I'm not exactly sitting on the Mexican border waiting to snipe Coyotes with a high powered rifle. I believe desicians like that, no matter how much I personally support them, are not the kinds of things that should be decided by an individual, not to mention being pointless unless it was done on a large scale. It's very much the differance between a soldier killing during war, and a psycho killer. Likewise when you get past some of my stronger opinions on how to handle things I would probably wind up acting in support of a number of things I don't personally agree with on an individual level for the greater good if I could be convinced of it... which again comes down to propaganda and/or the leadership abillity of the people calling the shots.

The point I'm getting at here is that 3 out of 100 people (the results of the Milgram experiment I believe) is actually a surprising ratio of sociopaths, which I suspect might have something to say about the Yale college campus at the time. Simply put you'd have to be a murderous sociopath to be willing to kill someone for the reasons presented in that experiment and the way it was done. Basically someone who has been looking for a reason to kill another person simply for their own enjoyment and is happy to find an excuse to do it. On the other hand if someone was told to administer potentially lethal electric shocks to a terrorist, and told that hundreds of lives could be in the balance I'd imagine the vast majority of people would do it to a potentially lethal level. The odds would probably go up to "perfect participation" if the person delivering the shocks was convinced that the lives of one of their loved ones was in jeopardy. The odds of proving this are kind of unlikely though as there aren't many contexts in which you could frame such an experiment that would get your average person to believe they were needed to conduct such an interrogation though.

 

[Comocat]

I'm not sure that the experiment is unethical not because it made people feel bad about themselves, the Wikipedia section seems pretty anemic for a set of experiments that lead to the widespread adoption of institutional ethics panels. Ethical guidelines in science are important because for every classic experiment like this you have 50 failed experiments. Just because the outcome is interesting doesn't give it ethical justification. I also take issue with the fact that "nobody was hurt" makes it ok. I would suggest most university faculty are ill-equipped to deal with the follow-up for incredibly personal experiments like this. At best the outcomes of experiments like this are "hmm that's interesting" so I definitely think ethical review panels are essential.

 

[Krantos]

noone got (physically) hurt so i don't see much of an ethical problem

Pro-Tip: Psychological Experiments are also concerned about the psychological harm that can be caused to subjects. The Milgram Experiment wouldn't be allowed today, because there are ethics boards who have to review studies and determine whether they involve undue risks to the subjects emotional and mental well being.

Did we learn valuable things from the experiment? Yes, but that doesn't necessarily justify the risks.

Trust me, if all we were concerned about was the physical health of subjects, there are some seriously fucked up experiments we could be running.

 

[Jayemsal]

The experiment shows us that our moral code is easily abandoned when we are faced with an authority. That is the entire point, this isnt about a lack of understanding electricity, this is about showing that we are capable of doing horrible things to each other, as long as we can diffuse responsibility.

 

[Mr F.]

What we have here is basically a ban on introspection at a society level.

No. What we have is a ban on badgering people into thinking they've tortured someone to death because you think that the knowledge that could be gleaned might be useful.

This.

The reason why we have ethics committees (Something I might look into. Only just started my BA and I am already thinking about my MA.) is to stop experiments which are unethical from happening.

We do not know before an experiment happens if it will be useful or not. And if by being part of an experiment you are scarred for life, irrevocably damaged and everything else, well, you probably do not much care if the experiment enlightened the world.

I mean, you get stuff like the Tuskegee experiments. They were bad and any modern ethics committee would stop that from happening. Early psychologists got away with just about anything. Like giving a child a phobia of mice to see if it was possible.

I went for the second option. It was unethical and should not have happened yet it did enlighten us. However, just because this one experiment did enlighten us does not mean we should bin ethics.

 

[Evil Top Hat]

From what I can tell from the Milgram Experiment, it didn't quite show how "Evil" people are, but rather how little people know about electricity (What is dangerous and what is safe) and that they will rely on scientists to ensure them that they need to do science, because science.

If I'm not wrong, the experiment involved a direct mic with the guy getting shocked. The whole idea of the experiment was that he would start screaming more and more as the test went on. You don't need to be a scientist to know that hearing somebody say "GAAAGGHH" is usually a bad sign.

Even if I'm wrong on that one, I refuse to believe anybody could think that 5000 volts sounds like a safe number.

 

[TAGM]

The thing is, at least in terms of psychology (as far as I understand it, at least, and as I'm taking a degree in the thing, I should hope I understand it right!) the question isn't about causing harm, per-say, but causing Unnecessary harm. If the harm caused is due to a key part of the experiment, something the experiment can not do without, and the experiment could garner important test data, And that test data possibility outweighs the harm it may cause, then that (just about) falls into the area of ethical. (Of course, what counts as useful data and unnecessary pain is a tricky subject at best, but that's why we have ethical committees to decide it.)

Here's what I think of it: The experiment, as it stands, was ethical. The pain it may or may not have caused was a necessity, because otherwise the experiment would pretty much have fallen on it's face. The general idea behind it was to test how far people could be pushed by authority figures into doing something you didn't actually want to do, and finding something that people didn't want to do besides accidentally killing a bloke would have been difficult at best. So any psychological harm that may have been caused was almost a necessity.

So yes, the experiment was ethical.
Running the experiment nowadays, however? Less so.

We've now got more questions about why this happens. People are raising objections to how the experiment works even here, and it was even run fairly recently with pretty much the same results, which at least implies that we haven't changed in a good 40-50 years. in essence, we've learned just about all we can from this experiment - especially because it's been run with nearly every outlaying parameter being changed. Running the experiment would be unethical, not necessarily because the experiment itself is unethical, but because the experiment is, by and large, now unnecessary - If you want people to find out the depths people will go because of authority figures, you don't really have to run the experiment, just show people previous experiments and explain it. Until we can come up with a very good reason to re-run it, it's unnecessary - which means the pain it causes is unnecessary.
At least, that's my best guess on why it's been deemed unethical. It could be that we're all pansies, but who's to say.

P.S.

During the experiment, the recording even talked about 'Heart Problems'...

Not to be a pedantic bastard (Well, OK, I am, but still), but I believe that mentioning heart problems was only part of experiments after the first, to see if it would have any change in obedience. As in, "If we say this person has heart problems, will they still shock them to death?"
Indecently, for those curious - experimentation found that this is one of the few parameter changes that actually have no effect good or ill - as in, just as many people "shocked" a "person with heart conditions" as someone without.

 

[Chairman Miaow]

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.

I think it'd be relatively easy for someone to convince themselves that these are scientists, that they know what they're doing, and that they wouldn't ask you to do anything genuinely dangerous. You grab a random person off the street, and what are the chances they know just how much is 15 volts, or 450?

Unethical or not, I don't think it does a very good job at replicating the conditions.

The machine was clearly labelled with "danger" at a certain point. The "victim" also fell silent afterwards. Most people carried on even after the "victim" appeared to have fallen unconcious.

The article I read said that when asked the researcher would tell the subject that it would cause no lasting harm. Although it was wikipedia.

 

[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.

I think it'd be relatively easy for someone to convince themselves that these are scientists, that they know what they're doing, and that they wouldn't ask you to do anything genuinely dangerous. You grab a random person off the street, and what are the chances they know just how much is 15 volts, or 450?

Unethical or not, I don't think it does a very good job at replicating the conditions.

The machine was clearly labelled with "danger" at a certain point. The "victim" also fell silent afterwards. Most people carried on even after the "victim" appeared to have fallen unconcious.

The article I read said that when asked the researcher would tell the subject that it would cause no lasting harm. Although it was wikipedia.

I can't find anything that supports that article. I have managed to find what the labels on the machine were. "Shock levels were labeled from 15 to 450 volts. Besides the numerical scale, verbal anchors added to the frightful appearance of the instrument. Beginning from the lower end, jolt levels were labeled: "slight shock," "moderate shock," "strong shock," "very strong shock," "intense shock," and "extreme intensity shock." The next two anchors were "Danger: Severe Shock," and, past that, a simple but ghastly "XXX.""

 

[Lawnmooer]

If I'm not wrong, the experiment involved a direct mic with the guy getting shocked. The whole idea of the experiment was that he would start screaming more and more as the test went on. You don't need to be a scientist to know that hearing somebody say "GAAAGGHH" is usually a bad sign.

Even if I'm wrong on that one, I refuse to believe anybody could think that 5000 volts sounds like a safe number.

Well, when the people got concerned by the screaming the scientists told them to continue and that it was fine, which generally a lot of people would trust (It may be painful, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's lethal. For example, stubbing your toe on a table leg > Painful, but not lethal (As far as I'm aware))

Then when it comes to the voltage, it was increased in 15 volt increments, which to most people sounds like a very small number. Especially if people don't know the dangerous and lethal amounts of voltage.

 

[Kilo24]

The point I'm getting at here is that 3 out of 100 people (the results of the Milgram experiment I believe) is actually a surprising ratio of sociopaths, which I suspect might have something to say about the Yale college campus at the time. Simply put you'd have to be a murderous sociopath to be willing to kill someone for the reasons presented in that experiment and the way it was done.

The 3/100 figure is the highest fraction of people that anyone who was consulted prior to the experiment thought would go all the way to the maximum voltage value. The actual figure in the first trial was 65%, and generally hovered around 61-66% in similar trials (including many conducted across a large variety of locations.)

Given the nature of the feedback, it seems that the majority of people across the world are indeed "murderous sociopaths".

The problem with the Milgram experiment is that it lacks any kind of appropriate context...

The Milgram study showed that the majority of people were willing to follow unambiguously dangerous orders without any context beyond that of an opt-in experiment. I don't see how the context you're discussing is relevant to the study, unless you think the number is lower than it should be. Indeed, that the majority of people followed orders without that context suggests that it is not so critical an element as you seem to believe. Conforming to expectations is a powerful behavioral drive to the vast majority of people.