...that the Milgram Disobedience Study was ethical. Waltenburg asserted that deception is common place and warranted in many psychological research studies. She provided an example in which research participants are frequently provided with sugar pills versus other subjects given the drug being tested. Regarding Milgram’s study, Waltenburg stated that Milgram properly conducted an interview with all subjects just as soon as the study was over with and that all participants appeared to be well. This response will feature scholarly evidence that deception, while common place, is never ethical; and Milgram did not properly conduct debriefing interviews with all participants...
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...Questioning Authority: A Rethinking of the Infamous Milgram Experiments By Liliana Segura, AlterNet Posted on February 12, 2009 Between 1963 and 1974, Dr. Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments that would become one of the most famous social psychology studies of the 20th century. His focus was how average people respond to authority, and what he revealed stunned and disturbed people the world over. Under the pretense of an experiment on "learning" and "memory," Milgram placed test subjects in a lab rigged with fake gadgetry, where a man in a lab coat instructed them to administer electrical shocks to a fellow test subject (actually an actor) seated in another room in "a kind of miniature electric chair." Participants were told they were the "teachers" in the scenario and given a list of questions with which to quiz their counterparts (the "learners"). If the respondent answered incorrectly to a question, he got an electric shock as punishment. The shocks were light at first -- 15 volts -- and became stronger incrementally, until they reached 450 volts -a level labeled "Danger: Severe Shock." The actors were never actually electrocuted, but they pretended they were. They groaned, shouted, and, as the current became stronger, begged for relief. Meanwhile, the man in the lab coat coolly told the test subjects to keep going. To people's horror, Milgram discovered that a solid majority of his subjects -- roughly two-thirds -- were willing to administer the highest levels...
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...Milgram (1974) conducted many experiments based on obedience the most familiar experiment is experiment 5 which took place in 1963. The objective of experiment 5 was to see what factors would influence an individual to obey, the situational factor in the experiment using electric shocks shows although the situation from an outside perspective may seem morally wrong, for example, inflicting pain on another person is something that people would not choose to do unless put under a difficult situation like the participants were. The fact that Milgram researched this topic gives us great insight on human behaviour. According to Milgram a cause of obedience is authority, indicating the environment and individuals a person is surrounded by dictates how obedient a person can be. In 1971 Zimbardo also carried out research on obedience conducting a prison experiment....
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...The Milgram Experiment was conducted by Stanley Milgram who was a psychologist at Yale University. He invented this study to explore the issue of authority. Milgram wanted to understand obedience. Milgram asked the question, “What is there in human nature that allows an individual to act without any restraints whatsoever that allows us to act inhumane and not limited by compassion or conscience.” This experiment allowed insight into the topic of conflict between obedience to authority and conscience. How far would people proceed in obeying authority if it involved hurting another person? In order to conduct this experiment Milgram used male subjects from 20 to 50 years old. The authority figure told the subjects they were testing to see if people...
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...such as the Holocaust and why crimes of obedience are so prevalent in society. Are all people capable of committing crimes of obedience given the right situation? Is there a certain disposition or combination of personality traits that leads to crimes of obedience? Situations are unique and dispositions vary; attempting to distinguish what causes these occurrences is a complex task that has been the subject of numerous studies, yet no concrete answers are found. Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments ignited the flame of a subject that, instead of diminishing over time and becoming obsolete as a result of improved methods and new ideologies, has remained at the forefront of social and behavioral psychology. Modern research faces the critical challenge of attempting to study obedience under much more restrictive guidelines than previous studies; the results that are produced can only hope to shed light on one component of obedience and use other studies to synthesize a more complete explanation. The predecessor to all of this modern research was the Milgram obedience experiment and all of its variations. It has remained a fixture of social psychology for so long for several reasons: the enormity of the results (65% of a normal population of American men is willing to administer dangerous shocks to innocent learners), its magnitude (over 1000 people tested in 18 variations), its clarity in defining how situation influences the obedience of participants, and the questions...
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...the investigation at any time and be assured of confidentiality. However, in some cases these rules can not be fully complied with and only after safeguards have been put in place, especially for children or those that have a disability, can deviation from the guidelines take place. However, there will always be conflict between participants and psychologists needs or expectations of the experiment. In some experimental situations the participant will not be fully informed of what they are taking part in so the psychologist can achieve a non-biased outcome from the results. This could be classed as harmful to the participants as the outcome of being deceived could lead to psychological harm. In Milgram’s (1963 cited in Hill, 2001 p24) study participants took part in the obedience to authority experiment. At this time the ethical guidelines were not as strict and this has brought outrage to some of his critics, Baumrind (1964) in particular is extremely critical of his approach and outcome of the experiment. Baumrind (1964) argued that the participants were not protected from harm throughout the experiment and they did not have fully informed consent. Her concerns were that the participants could have been psychology affected long term and the end result does not justify the means. She also implied that the participants were forced by the experimenter to shock the confederate; this was not the case as the participants were free to leave at any time....
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...AS Psychology - Unit Two Social Psychology Social Influence Student workbook Name: .................................................................................. Form: ................................................................................... Teacher: .............................................................................. Specification requirements Social psychology Candidates will be expected to demonstrate: • Knowledge and understanding of concepts, theories and studies in relation to individual differences • Skills of analysis, evaluation and application in relation to individual differences • Knowledge and understanding of research methods associated with this area of psychology • Knowledge and understanding of ethical issues associated with this area of psychology. |Content outline | |Social influence |Conformity (majority influence) and explanations of why people conform, including informational | | |social influence and normative social influence | | | | | |Types...
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...complex field of study; the ethics for individual and social are undefined. Though ethical codes could stretch back through history of the Ancient Greek. There have been many up to date versions of ethical codes since then, such as being respected when taking part in psychological research conducted (McGaha & Korn, 1995). Within the departments of psychology there are various ethics committee, the aim of every department is to avoid participants experiencing distress and making sure participants welfare and dignity is kept. Ethics within psychology means the researcher’s key focus have to be to reduce any sort of discomfort or risks which are involved within the study. Also preventing the participants from experiencing any long-term undesirable consequences as well as having to notifying participants on all features of the study which could have an influence on their decision to take part (Hobbs, 1948). Throughout the psychological history many research studies have been conducted by various psychologists. There have been some which have been ethically critisied, with the lack of ethics taken into consideration. The most commonly discussed research study which has many ethical issues is known to be conducted by a behavioral psychologist Stanley Milgram (1963). Leading to many discussions Milgram (1963) purpose of his study was to investigate how far an individual would obey a figure of authority (Bernstein, 2011). Stanley Milgram (1963) introduced his well-known study on obedience...
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...Born on August 15th, 1933, Stanley Milgram was an American social psychologist. He is most notable for his Milgram experiment, a controversial experiment that drastically changed the way social psychologist’s looked at obedience. Early Years and Education In his early years, Milgram lived in the Bronx. By the time he had reached college age, his family had moved to Queens. Here, Milgram attended Queens College in New York. In 1954, he would receive his Bachelor’s degree in political science. From here, his interests shifted to psychology. He applied to Harvard University’s graduate program in Social Relations but was initially rejected due to never have taken a single psychology course in his undergraduate years. Later, he was able to gain...
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...OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY The Power of the Situation in Milgram's Obedience Experiments Ahsan Chishty Ohlone College POWER OF SITUATION AND OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY The Power of the Situation in Milgram's Obedience Experiments Stanley Milgram is a name universally known for the Yale professor who shocked the world with his experiments on obedience. In 1961, Milgram along with many other colleagues devised an experiment after receiving a grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct an experiment in response to the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Milgram wanted to know if Germans under the rule of authority figures did exactly what they were instructed to do by those of higher power than them due to the fact that many of the explanations for the Nazi atrocities was simply that Nazi soldiers were following orders. After placing an ad in the New Haven Register for a learning experiment on the study of memory. According to Thomas Blass (2009), offering participants $4.50 and a paid bus fare for an hour of their time seemed to be the biggest factor that attracted people to the ad but several of the participants also agreed to be a part of the study to learn something about themselves, expand their curiosity about psychology, or because they were fascinated by memory and hoped to understand it better through an experiment like Milgram's. The subjects were introduced to a man in a lab coat who would administrate the experiment. Subjects...
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...1960s, the social psychologist Stanley Milgram did a famous research study called the obedience study. It showed that people have a strong tendency to comply with authority figures. Milgram’s Obedience Study Milgram told his forty male volunteer research subjects that they were participating in a study about the effects of punishment on learning. He assigned each of the subjects to the role of teacher. Each subject was told that his task was to help another subject like himself learn a list of word pairs. Each time the learner made a mistake, the teacher was to give the learner an electric shock by flipping a switch. The teacher was told to increase the shock level each time the learner made a mistake, until a dangerous shock level was reached. Throughout the course of the experiment, the experimenter firmly commanded the teachers to follow the instructions they had been given. In reality, the learner was not an experiment subject but Milgram’s accomplice, and he never actually received an electric shock. However, he pretended to be in pain when shocks were administered. Prior to the study, forty psychiatrists that Milgram consulted told him that fewer than 1 percent of subjects would administer what they thought were dangerous shocks to the learner. However, Milgram found that two-thirds of the teachers did administer even the highest level of shock, despite believing that the learner was suffering great pain and distress. Milgram believed that the teachers had acted...
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...Obedience “Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to.” (Milgram 631). In Stanley Milgram’s 1963 study Perils of Obedience, he finds that human beings, when ordered by an authority, will commit atrocious acts against another human being. He proves this through an extensive scientific study. In this study, he pulls from a multitude of different social classes and cultures. Asking, the subjects to bring bodily harm to another person in the form of increasingly stronger electric shocks, ranging from 15 to 450 volts. The role assigned to the test subjects is that of "teacher" and "learner."The learner is put in a room and strapped to an electric chair, the teacher is in another room where they can see the learner. The teacher is seated next to a huge machine that administers the shocks. The scientist starts commanding from near by. He begins by calmly demanding that the teacher shock the student if the student does not accurately repeat a set of words that progressively advance in difficulty. The results of his 1963 study were shocking, even the people he sought to predict the outcome, which includes a variety of people from psychiatrists to college students and middle class adults. Interestingly enough, Milgram states that, “with remarkable similarity they predicted that virtually all subjects would refuse to obey the experimenter” (Milgram 634). As opposed to the 1 in 1000 predicted , close to 80% of the ‘teachers’ would in fact follow...
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...Individual Programmatic Assessment: Exploring a Classic Study in Social Psychology Daryl Bonelli Psych/620 January 25th, 2016 Colleen Story Individual Programmatic Assessment: Exploring a Classic Study in Social Psychology Introduction Norman Chomsky once wrote “I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.” There is a true feeling of what authority can do if placed in situations that require someone to follow instructions. What happens to someone when they follow the orders of another person in authority? An experiment conducted by psychologist Stanley Milgram reveal how situationism applies to study results. How would this experiment differ if the participants were from various races, cultures, gender groups? A summary of the study and how it was conducted Stanley Milgram is a psychologist who conducted a study based on obedience during the 1960’s, and this experiment produced startling results. Questions still arise about the experiments validity, but the impact on psychology remains to be one of the best measures to assess how authority plays a role in obedience. In 1961 after the Trial of WWII criminal Adolph Eichmann, Milgram started his study. Stanley Milgram's experiment built on the idea of obedience...
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...Stanley Milgram is one of my personal academic heroes and one of the reasons that I gained an interest in psychology many years ago. After studying his experiments and reading “Obedience to Authority” about six years ago, I truly began to admire his Avant-garde ways of approaching the science. I am an avid student of social issues and studying this “rock star” of social psychology has heightened my senses and allowed me to look beyond what the masses consider socially unacceptable in the name of discovery. The following is a reply to a video entitled “Into the Mind: Mind Control” which focuses on famous experiments conducted to discover the “whys” behind certain behaviors. While the video highlights a number of psychological experiments, this short work will focus on Stanley Milgram and answer the following: what are the ethical inferences and did his results justify the manner in which the experiment was conducted? According to Milgram (1984), “The case touched on a fundamental issue of the human condition, our primordial nightmare. If we need help, will those around us stand around and let us be destroyed or will they come to our aid? Are those other creatures there to help us sustain our life and values or are we individual flecks of dust just floating around in a vacuum” (Memorable quotes). The Experiment: Why this Approach? At a rudimentary level, human behavior and all of the questions that revolve around it is why psychology exists. Man studies the differences...
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...Describe a Study: The Milgram Experiment of Destructive Obedience Systemic obedience of institutional authority can result in destructive consequences. In the events of the Holocaust, the atrocities committed in concentration camps would not have occurred on such a mass if not for the obedience of Hitler’s forces (Milgram, 1963). For the purpose of observing the particularly destructive effects of obedient behavior, Stanley Milgram of Yale University conducted a controlled experiment in 1961 to observe what influences obedient responses to the commands of a figure in authority (Milgram, 1963). Summary of Experimental Procedure Subjects 40 male subjects were used in this experiment. They ranged from the ages of 20 to 50. They also came from a range of occupations and different educational levels (Milgram, 1963). The subjects were not informed about the true motive of the experiment. They were told that the...
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