Obedience: Film Summary

From the film “Obedience: Research carried out at Yale University”, Volunteers were paid a small sum to participates that understood the experiment to be a study of memory and learning. In truth, Yale University’s psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to study the willingness of subjects to obey an authority figure while this authority figure made the subjects perform acts that were in conflict with their moral conscience. The question guiding this experiment was asking to figure out to what extent obedience, behavior and conformism is persistent while performing acts that were conflicting with personal conscience. Milgram study investigated on the effects of authority on obedience by designing a research that measured qualitative results
The variable in this study was more of an intervened variable which was not really dependent on another variable and it was not independent either as interaction was necessary in this study. The hypothesis, that is the proposition to be tested here expresses a cause-effect relationship, which was linked to the research question itself. The research involved two volunteers, one of which was givent he role of a teacher and the other a learner. These two participants were to be obedient to a white-coated experimenter who took up the role of an authority figure. The learner was told to memorize a lists of pairs and if he/she couldn’t recall them, an electric shock was given to the learner who was strapped down to a chair; the lab-coated experimenter would give the order to provide this shock which the teacher would supply in turn dependent on his/her obedience level towards the experimenter of authority. With every wrong answer, the voltage of the electric shock rose and the teacher was forced to withstand and watch the learner grunt in discomfort and even scream in agony. The teacher was not informed about one thing and that was that he/she was the only one being
With the responsibility to ensure that the research is conducted ethically, critical assessment was taken to evaluate the ethics of this experiment. Milgrams experiment caused strong questioning against research ethics of scientific experiments because of extreme emotional stress and inflicted insight endured by the participants. Many aspects of this experiment were deemed unethical. Ethics concerns itself over the dilemmas and conflicts that arise when asked how a research should be properly conducted (Kamlin, 2014, p. slide 3). It seeks a balance between the pursuits of knowledge with the rights of research participants (Kamlin, 2014, p. slide 3). “Ethics is important at every stage in the research process, (Kamlin, 2014, p. slide 5). It provides guidelines and principles to follow while conducting an experiment. There are four main areas of ethical concern: Informed consent, deception, harm to participants and invasion of