Milgram ExperimentEssay Preview: Milgram ExperimentReport this essayStanley Milgram, a famous social psychologist, and student of Solomon Asch, conducted a controversial experiment in 1961, investigating obedience to authority. The experiment was held to see if a subject would do something an authority figure tells them, even if it conflicts with their personal beliefs and morals. This experiment brought uproar amongst the psychological world and caused the code of ethics to be reviewed and ultimately changed.
In the experiment subjects were asked to administer shocks ranging from fifteen volts to four hundred and fifty volts to actors, who the subjects thought were also participants in the experiment. The actors did not receive any shocks, but acted as if they were being hurt by the voltage. The actors were asked to answer questions, and when an incorrect response was given the subject was told by the experimenter to give the actor a shock. (Voltage increased after each wrong answer). After a dangerous level of voltage was applied, the actors screamed out in pain, and then fell to the ground, not responding to the experimenter or the subject. Many subjects were said to show signs of distress at this point, but after being prompted by the experimenter to continue on with the experiment, and increase levels of voltage, they did.
After the experiment subjects were debriefed, and told that the participants they administered shocks to were actually actors. The subjects realized the cruelty of their actions and some suffered emotional break downs. Because of the stress that a lot of the subjects experienced after the experiment, the experimental code of ethics was placed under review. The clause no mental harm should come to participants was added to the ethical code..
Milgrams experiment showed that when placed in a situation of pressure, people tend to conform to the requests of an authority figure, because they would have no responsibility over their own actions by obeying commands. Even though some subjects stopped to question the experiment, they still carried on administering shocks, which were highly dangerous and potentially deadly to the actors, simply because someone in charge told them to do so. Milgrams experiment was seen as unethical because the subjects were tricked into thinking that they were actually hurting an innocent human who had told them that he had a previous heart condition. This caused trauma to some subjects that experienced
The experiments in the 1960s of lab research on the psychology of pain and suffering led to problems for clinicians. One important effect of the experiments, as well as other methods of experiments on social interactions in laboratory settings, such as laboratory experiments, was that many people thought that a person might suffer from a psychological condition. People were not quite sure that this was real. The participants were given different treatment from others – they were either given a chance to avoid or not—for a number of reasons:
Some people felt that they were being exploited by a criminal organisation (for example, drug money would have helped them, and the fact that they didn’t know it would affect their mood would help their status as criminals). This was confirmed by others.
Some (mostly) people simply couldn’t believe that they were being treated unfairly, because they were trying to change. This was confirmed first by a social psychologist. He named the “Borak task” (being rewarded, first, by being the first human being) as the “first experiment to determine whether a person is better off if they do not experience physical pain and emotional distress”. It was followed by a series of other “pain tests” (in the name of human solidarity), that asked for the person’s perceptions about pain. Most people did not get good at these kinds of experiments. It was not until the 1980s that, for example, the work of Ronald “Marty” Nieckler, which investigated the effect of traumatic stress when a person is emotionally deprived, was given notice by the Canadian Medical Association, and so on, all the way around. It was used to make the following arguments:
The results suggested that people with an increased psychological condition such as depression tend to feel that they can be treated with medication.
People with social phobia (for example, for religious reasons, such as being afraid of the Devil) tend to feel so badly that they are not sufficiently convinced that they can go to Heaven.
This was, in many cases, one of the first experiments on this topic. In 1968, Martin Neumayer was interviewed about his experiments using the same subject. He claimed that in the past he had tried to do the same experiments and been found guilty of a crime. He said: “If I were a priest, I’d have done them all for me. But nobody has ever brought up that question. The Church could not have done them, and when they came up, they all ended up in the firing line.”
). In 1992,