Milgram Experiment

The purpose of the Milgram Study conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale University was to understand how much harm an ordinary man would be willing to harm another person at the insistence of an authority figure. The objective was to find out how far participants were willing to shock another person, to obey an authority, at the cost of performing acts which conflict their conscious. The Milgram Study was a series of social of social psychology experiments; volunteers were enlisted from the New Haven area, were between the ages of twenty and fifty years old, and had careers ranging from unskilled worker to professional. They engaged in this experiment under the impression Yale was conducting scientific research on the effect of punishment …show more content…
The procedure began with the participant to be paired with another gentleman and they drew pieces of paper to find out who would be the ‘learner’ and who would be the ‘teacher’. The draw was created so that the participant was always the teacher, and the learner was one of Milgram’s associates (pretending to be a real participant.) The learner was taken to close room where he was strapped to a chair resembling an electric chair, to receive electric shocks when he gave an incorrect response. Then the teacher was in another room with a box that was to shock the learner volts ranging from 15 volts, labeled slight shock to 375 volts indicated Danger: Severe Shock, to a ghastly 450 volts labeled XXX. Stanley Milgram had grown up as Jewish in the Bronx of New York City; as a result he was interested in how Nazi Germany was able to recruit ordinary people to commit the horrors and atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust (Macleod 1). The study's outcome was 65 percent (26 out of 40) of the participants shocked the learner to the full extent reaching the 450 volts. Many of the men who reached the final massive volt displayed symptoms of nervousness, and tension, including biting their nails, sweating, and trembling, groaning, agitation, displaying nervous fits of laughter and seizures, and digging their nails into their skin …show more content…
The participants went through extreme emotional stress and insight as a result of going through with the experiment. 84% said in response they were glad they participated in the experiment and learn about themselves (Milgram 1). Six years later, while the Vietnam War was at enduring in the far east one of the former participants wrote Milgram, thanking him for teaching him about the effect an authority can have on one's actions. He wrote “While I was a subject in 1964, though I believed that I was hurting someone, I was totally unaware of why I was doing so. Few people ever realize when they are acting according to their own beliefs and when they are meekly submitting to authority ... To permit myself to be drafted with the understanding that I am submitting to authority's demand to do something very wrong would make me frightened of myself ... I am fully prepared to go to jail if I am not granted Conscientious Objector status. Indeed, it is the only course I could take to be faithful to what I believe. My only hope is that members of my board act equally according to their conscience.” This study does not reflect ethics in research because the participants go through deep emotional distress, for example, agitation, digging their nails into their skin, and trembling. Another way the experiment was unethical was the participants who were being

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