Analysis Of Milgram's Obedience

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At the Nuremberg War Criminal trials of World War II in 1961, Adolf Eichmann claimed that he had merely obeyed orders in organizing the Holocaust. "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders?" (Milgram, 1974).In order to find out the answer of that question, Stanly Milgram, a psychologist, had conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. He wanted to know would people really harm another person if they were ordered to by an authority figure even though that particular action is against their conscience. The participants were 40 males of different ages, educational and occupational background. They answered a request for volunteers …show more content…

According to McGhee (2001), Milgram’s obedience studies are ‘probably the most…disturbing, more discussed, most criticized, and most notorious in the history of psychology’. One of the ethical issues that had been pointed out is the harm to the participants. Baumrind (1964) had raised a question, “were appropriate measures taken to protect the participants from the stress and emotional conflict they undoubtedly suffered?”. The participants were exposed to extremely stressful situations that may have the potential to cause psychological harm. In his defense, Milgram argued that these effects were only short term. He did debrief the participants fully straight after the experiment and also found that there were no signs of any long term psychological harm after he had followed up those participants in a period of time. Besides that, the issue about deception was indicated on that his studies too. The participants actually believed they were shocking a real person, and were unaware the learner was a Milgram’s confederate. In this respect, Milgram (1977) had acknowledged that the use of ‘illusion’ which is a term he preferred to ‘deception’ had posed ethical dilemmas for the researchers. The right of the participants to withdraw from the experiment also had been taken as a conflict to current ethical guidelines. The four verbal prods which had been

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