What Is The Milgram Experiment Unethical

Is it fair to deceive humans in an unethical psychological experiment in order to receive new information? This is a question that I believe needs to be asked when one thinks of the Milgram experiment, a psychological study set up in the U.S in 1965. American psychologist Stanley Milgram held an experiment in order to see how severely ordinary human beings could knowingly cause harm to another human. This idea came about when he studied the holocaust in Germany in WWII, and then in the Nuremberg war trials years later, and gained an understanding that many of the Germans soldiers who participated in the death of many innocent Jews said they only did so because they were ordered by an authority figure. They claimed that they only acted out of
feeling that it was their obligation to follow orders, believing they had no choice in the matter as the consequences of rebelling would be severe, at this time severe infliction of pain or death were common when a soldier broke the strict regime.
Milgram wanted to know whether this ruthless and entirely unethical behaviour was unique only to Nazi Germany during WWII, or whether ordinary American men would also be capable of knowingly causing lethal harm to another human being.

Milgram conducted an experiment to find an answer to his wonderings. He recruited 40 males from New Haven in the U.S to participate at the prestigious setting of Yale university, with the participants under the impression that they were helping with an experiment in “learning and punishment”. After the initial arrival, the participant meets the “Experimenter”, a confederate of Milgram’s, who introduces him to “Mr Wallace”, another confederate, who the participant believes is just another volunteer. The participant and Mr Wallace were told they would be assigned the roles of a teacher or learner through a simple way of drawing a piece of paper with a position on it from the Experimenter’s hand. Both
slips of paper said ‘teacher’, which insured that the participant would always be the teacher and Mr Wallace would then say he is the learner. The Experimenter then directed Mr Wallace to be seated in small room separate from where the teacher would sit, and strapped him up to a legitimate electric shock generator, “to avoid excessive movement” during the experiment. The experiment went as following: In separate rooms, the participant was given the task of reading a selection of memory recollection into a microphone which connected to the confederate in a separate room. The confederate would then have to read the same thing back, from memory. If he answered correctly, the participant could continue, however if the confederate answered incorrectly, the participant was instructed to inflict an electric shock to the confederate. With each wrong answer the voltage of the shock would increase by 15 volts, beginning at 15 volts and ending at 450, which is twice the power emitted from a household plug socket. While the participant truly believed they were sending legitimate electric shocks, they had infact been deceived, with the confederate actually sitting peacefully in the other room, waiting for the experiment to finish.

At many points throughout the experiment, all 40 participant made some sort of protest to the idea of giving the shock, yet the experimenter, still present in the room, would urge the participant to continue, using prods such as “Please continue” or “It is absolutely essential that you continue”, however prior to the experiment, the participants had been told they could leave at any point that they felt uncomfortable. The overall results revealed that over 60% of the participants inflicted the highest voltage shock of 450 volts and all participants sent shock of over 300 volts - results that proved to be groundbreaking in psychological research. Before Milgram began the experiment, he had conferred with many other psychologists, all of whom agreed that only 1% of the participants would go up to 300 volts, and if any did go further they would need to be evaluated afterwards for fear they could be dangerous to society.

This experiment proved to be psychologically damaging to the participants that took part, both throughout the experiment and afterwards. Signs of stress, worry and angst were apparent through all participants, who were shown to sweat, sigh and shake among many other visible signs of stress. These ordinary American men genuinely believed they were causing serious damage to the confederate in the other room, yet felt they had no choice in doing so due to the authority figure present at the time, showing that conflicting authority can severely paralyse one’s actions, linking back to Milgram's original wonderings on how the Nazi German soldiers could do such awful things - they felt they had no other option.

Shortly after Milgram released his results, new ethical guidelines were released in relation to the ethics of any further psychological experiments.
These guidelines made any further replications of the experiment impossible, which proves how damaging the experiment truly was. The emotional scarring this experiment had on the participants was severe, leaving them to wonder whether they were evil people themselves. Though the participants did not actually cause harm to anyone, the trauma with believing that they were at the time was significant, and even though at the end of the process it was revealed that no one was harmed, they learned that they were capable to hurting someone else if they were asked to. Can this emotional pain caused by the thought to be causing physical pain justify the overall experiment? How can one determine whether the questioning of someone's own opinions, beliefs and making them feel like they had no choice but to stay in the experiment was worth the results given from the
experiment?

We have to ask, is this psychologically damaging, unethical experiment based purely on deception (as believing they were helping towards research about learning and punishment) worth the pain for the information gained? While new information was revealed, entirely changing the beliefs of psychologists with dramatic changes being made in psychological discoveries, the trauma of going through this experiment permanently altered the lives of the participants. They now have to live with the constant wondering, are they really evil? Are they really harmful to others? These tormenting questions would have caused them to question their entire beings, whom they had thought themselves to be now changing due to their understanding that they were capable of knowingly harming another human being.

I firmly believe that the mental health of a human is worth multitudes more than any scientific research or experiment, but I am left wondering, are we all capable of causing this harm if we feel forced in doing so? What is there to say that we wouldn’t, or whether we would in the first place?