Stanley Milgram's Essay

According to this week’s forum post instructions, I was assigned the yes view in regards to our chosen topic. Therefore, I must state that Stanley Milgram’s study of disobedience was unethical for numerous reasons, however, the two reasons that will be discussed include deception, and psychological harm to the human subjects involved. In regards to deception, the participants were misled as to the exact nature of the study for which they had volunteered, Milgram made them believe they were administering real electric shocks to a real participant, and those involved in the study were not given a clear option to withdraw at any given time during the experiment (Slapes, 2006). This high stress condition had the potential to cause long term psychological impairment and even Milgram documented that a participant was under such traumatic stress that his body went into a seizure (Slapes, 2006). …show more content…
Milgram did not want future subjects to be contaminated by accounts from prior subjects about the true nature of the experiment, and so he withheld such information until the experiment was over, and then mailed a fuller explanation to subjects a year later (Brannigan, 2013). During the time in which Milgram conducted this study in 1963 there were no Institutional Review Boards, Research Ethics Boards (REB) or any ethics committees established to determine what is acceptable in an experiment, and to also certify that studies protected and respected human subjects. It wasn’t until 1966 in the U.S, that Public Health Service required the establishment of ethics committees at research institutions, and the final regulations concerning policies governing research on human subjects were issued in 1981 by the Department of Health and Human Service and reissued a decade later in 1991 (Marshall,