Ethical Issues In Milgram's Experiments

Milgram’s study had been introduced by Stanley Milgram in 1963, who was a psychologist who wanted to understand why Nazi soldiers followed orders. Milgram argued that the soldiers were following orders through successive obedience and decided that it was the social situation of the time, that caused these normal soldiers to kill innocent people(Yogi,2015). Milgram had used 40 male participants during his experiment who he paid $4 an hour for their time, who he told that the experiment would be about a “learning and memory” game (Yogi,2015).

Milgram’s experiment was extremely assessed, mainly from an ethics point of view. The study was a catalyst in which experiments were ruled by. It was such experiments that lead to the British Psychological Society 2009. Applying a set of guidelines to make sure a code of good practice when leading experiments involving people. The ethics that will be considered to recognised whether Milgram’s experiment was ethical are; deception, right to withdraw, consent and debriefing (Slater,2006).
The experimenter betrayed the participants in doing the experiment, they were made to believe that they were inflicting pain on the learners and deliberately put in a place where caused a lot of distress (holah.co.uk). Some teachers thought they had badly hurt or even killed the learner, where this had caused a lot of stress for the teachers. Deception has contributed to the strengthening of the code of ethical standards point where it is difficult to do any more of these studies. However, if Milgram had not broken these guidelines, the consequences would have been unquestionable (Kimmel