Controversial Milgram's Obedience

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Hello Ladies and Gentleman; I am here to explain to you why the controversial Milgram Obedience study was undoubtedly ethical. The main thing to remember, when judging the experiment is that modern day criticisms have the benefit of hindsight. A few decades ago, Europe had been mentally scarred by the atrocities committed during the Second World War, and they were looking for answers. Milgram's generation needed conclusive answers about the 'final solution', and some closure on this chapter of human history. According to the article “Obedience to authority: Current perspectives on the Milgram paradigm” this study asked a big question, an important question, the ultimate question about blind obedience—how far will a person go in inflicting severe …show more content…

He debriefed participants thoroughly, gave them the right to withdraw, kept their results private and confidential, and did actually try to protect them from harm; even going as far as to check up on them a year later to check if there was any long lasting damage. The commands Milgram used were appropriate in order to find accurate results for his research and minimal discomfort for the participants was controlled for in the experiment. This demonstrates that Milgram did carry out the correct ethical procedures required, for this kind of experimentation and only using deception when required for the experiments. Because Milgram's obedience studies are often used as the prototypical example of why strong protection of human subjects in research is needed, some researchers, including many psychologists, assume that it was this research that was responsible for the development of stronger federal guidelines and requirements for local institutional review boards (IRBs). It can be argued that few studies in the history of psychology have produced, or at least contributed to, so many seminal changes in psychology. Because of Milgram's obedience research, psychologists have become more acutely aware of ethical issues in their research, and the result has been changes in ethics codes and procedures for the review of research proposals in universities, government and military agencies, and federal funding agencies. Moreover, the obedience studies resulted in sweeping changes in the broad fields of personality and social psychology, including a diminution of the importance of person or trait variables accompanied by an exceptionally strong emphasis on the power of situations as behavioral determinants, new models that highlighted person-by-situation interactions, new interpretations of linkages of attitudes and behaviors, and a shift in research from laboratory studies to field

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