Study As The Participants example essay topic

The Milgram study, conducted in 1961-1962, shocked and fascinated the scientific community with not only its disturbing findings, but also with its questionable experimental methods. The experiment in itself consisted of placing an individual in a situation in which they would be forced to choose either to obey or disobey commands given by an authoritative person that were contrary to their own morals, sense of socially acceptable behaviour and humanity. This essay will concentrate on whether the study was of great scientific and moral benefits or if the costs and potential harm to the participants were but one factor in making the study an unethical disgrace. A major factor to the argument of the study's lack of ethics is the intensive emotional distress and deep conflict, which the participants were subject to, due to the research procedure. The research procedure called for participants (or teachers) to give 'learners' electric shocks of increasing voltage when a wrong answer was given to their question, increasing from 15 volts to, eventually, 450 volts, with warnings such as 'Danger severe shock' amongst the descriptions. As the experiment went on and the voltages increased, subjects began to show signs of being highly disturbed and distressed.

Milgram noted, "Persons were observed to sweat, tremble, stutter, bite their lips, and groan as they found themselves increasingly implicated in the experimental conflict". (Milgram, 1965, cited in Public and Private Conformity). These actions show how deeply distressed the participants were. The participants themselves questioned the ethics of the study at the time. Milgram described instances where subjects became engrossed in the technical machinery, possibly seeing themselves as mere technicians so as to transfer ethical responsibility to the experimenter, (Milgram, Obedience to Authority, 1974). Milgram termed this an 'agent ic state', the participants stop seeing themselves as responsible and see themselves as an agent for another, i.e. the experimenter.

Milgram also used the term 'Counteranthropomorphism' - where subjects come to view the experiment as an entity unto itself, divorced from human control. The participants dehumanized the learners, muttering things such as 'why doesn't the dumb guy get it right?'. In each experiment, subjects 'averted their eyes (and often their heads - sometimes in an awkward and conspicuous manner) from the subject" (Milgram, 1974). The fact that they were causing someone pain was extremely distasteful to the participants to the extreme that they went to ridiculous lengths to avoid looking at the consequences of what they had done, though they continued to give shocks. All these factors combine to make the study unethical in some views; as such profound distress cannot be forgotten or assuaged by merely being told that the whole study was a deception.

After the experiment was concluded, there was reconciliation between the teacher and learner to prove no harm was done and a debriefing from the experimenter, to help participants understand what the study was actually about. There was no recorded psychological support for any lasting effects that may have been caused by the experiment, which counts against the study as the participants long-term sanity is vital. Although participants underwent highly emotional distress during the experiment, 83.7% of the subjects involved indicated they were happy to have participated, whilst a mere 1.3% admitted to being sorry to have participated, (Milgram, 1964). Though many find the use of electrical shocks to be abhorrent, electric shocks are not a foreign concept to psychological experiments. It is widely accepted that certain levels of 'harmless pain' is a small price to pay for scientific knowledge and new discoveries. Thus, Milgram deemed participants emotional distress as 'necessary pain', classing it as an unforeseen by-product of the study's scientific inquiry.

In reference to the profoundly disturbed behaviour, Milgram said; "Momentary excitement is not the same as harm" (1974, Milgram, cited - Obedience and Civilization, Mixon). Within the scientific community, the study's ethics were questioned by many psychologists at the time, one of which was Diana Baumrind, who had her critique of the study's ethics published in the 'American Psychologist' in 1964, with Milgram replying in the same issue. It was later revealed that Professor Baumrind has 'considerable difficulty publishing her 1964 paper and no success at all in publishing a rebuttal to Milgram's reply" (Mixon, 1989, Obedience and Civilization). If more critiques of Milgram's study were published at the time, then perhaps public perception of Milgram's work would have been different. People have challenged the ethics on these grounds, but it is possible these arguments are wrong. It is feasible that the study wasn't as unethical as was first thought because, during the actual experiment, the experimenter accidentally gives away a vital truth - that the shocks are harmless.

Through their experimenter's behaviour and body language, subjects may have assumed that they knew for a fact that the learner was not being harmed, yet were unsure, where-upon the tense behaviour showed through. This was proven by the fact that if the experimenter behaved as if surprised by the learners' outcries at the shocks, as in three experiments, all participants disobeyed the experimenter. Within a 'deception study's uch as this, where the participants do not know the true nature of the study, it is hard to know whether the participants would be at risk as the results are as yet unknown. Milgram was surprised at the level of obedience he gained in the experiment, so he did not knowingly put the participants at risk; therefore, the study is not entirely unethical. Despite the research procedure's questionable ethics, the findings and conclusions of the study have been praised by many. In view of the study, which is supposed to be analogous to Nazi Germany, the Nazi war crimes are not difficult to comprehend.

Milgram himself suggested that one of the major factors accounting for the Holocaust was the willingness of human beings to obey authorities even when obedience is 'wrong'. This was proven by the fact that the experiment was repeated many times, with different groups of people, yet the results stayed the same. Whilst Nazi's had the excuse that they believed that killing Jews was right, or failing that they could claim to fear the wrath of superiors due to disobeying commands, Milgram's subjects suffered no penalty for refusing to obey. This was a giant step, because it revealed that fear and belief were not the only motivating factors in obedience, they showed that normal people could be made to act destructively without threat and also that persons need not be evil to act in destructive and inhumane ways. Milgram's experiment is important as it shows that "that in a concrete situation with powerful social constraints, our moral sense can easily be trampled". (Blass, 2002).