Analysis of the Ethics of Milgram’s and Burger’s Obedience Studies in Light of Their Experimental Results.

Stanley Milgram’s (1963) study of behavioral obedience sought to understand the nature that drives humans to submit to destructive obedience. In his study, Milgram deceived his subject volunteers into believing that the experiment they were submitting themselves to involved learning about the effects of punishment on learning. Under this pretext, a subject “teacher” was to administer electric shocks to a confederate “learner” for every wrong answer in a word-pairing exercise. The subject was to administer shocks in increments, even when the learner protested. The experimenter’s role was to pressure the subjects to continue when they wanted to stop (Milgram, 1963). In doing so, Milgram sought to gauge what it is that influences his subjects to either defy or obey orders. The experiment caused an uproar, not only because of the unexpected compliance of the subjects to harm another, but also because Milgram seemed to ignore that the signs of anguish the participants exhibited during the experiment would subject them to potentially harmful levels of stress. These subjects were placed in an environment that provoked unhealthily stressful emotions, which is not only detrimental to the subject’s health but also speaks poorly of the priorities Milgram’s research group took to ensure the well-being of his participants (Blass, 2004, p. 117). The experiment shed light on the ethics of human experimentation and consequently influenced the creation of the Belmont Report (1979), a series of federal guidelines for the protection of human research subjects, published some fifteen years after Milgram’s studies. With regards to the report, Milgram’s execution of his experiment would prove to violate some of these guidelines, restricting exact replication of the study.
2. Nevertheless, the experiment was replicated by Jerry M. Burger in 2009. Burger’s (2009) replication adhered firmly to the ethical guidelines previously established three decades ago. His ultimate aim in his

References: Blass, T. (2004). The man who shocked the world: The life and legacy of Stanley Milgram. New York, NY: Basic Books. Burger, J.M. (2009). Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? American Psychologist, 64(1), 1-11. doi: 10.1037/a0010932 Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371-378. doi:10.1037/h0040525. National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. (1979). The Belmont report: Ethical principles and guidelines for the protection of human subjects of research. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.