Why Is Stanley Milgram Wrong

Stanley Milgram conducted an examination, in the 60’s, based on the justification for the acts of genocide offered by those who were accused in the Nuremberg War Criminal Trials of WWII. Their defense, as they claimed was solely based on “obedience” and that they were in fact only following their superior’s orders. This eventually led to the study on the conflict between obedience toward authority and one’s personal conscious. His experiment was a model of simplicity. The idea was to take an ‘experimenter’ (E) who would issue commands to the ‘teacher’ (T), who then would instruct a learner [or in this case a ‘victim’ (V)] to perform memory tasks.
Stanley Milgram’s study of obedience is still controversial today and has raised many ethical …show more content…
One, the extreme tension induced in some individuals was unexpected. For example, Milgram explains that before conducting the experiment, procedures were discussed with many colleagues and none anticipated the reactions that later took place. He goes on to state that foreknowledge can never be the result of the invariable addition to the examinational investigation and understanding grows out of examining situations in which the end is unknown. Moreover, prior to the experiment there was every reason to believe that the subjects would indeed refuse to follow the experimenter’s instructions beyond the point where the victim protested. Again many colleagues and psychiatrists were questioned on this point, and they all virtually felt this would be the case as …show more content…
As tends do sometimes occur in psychology, a multitude of viewpoints on the structural and functional aspects of a phenomenon still exists today. This equivocation can be seen in the contending theories of cognitive dissonance and accessibility theory and the conceptual explanations for human social behavior. Milgram has thus argued that the benefits of his study far outweigh any risks or harm done (and he questioned whether any harm was truly done at all). Nonetheless, the Milgram experiment would not likely be done today for three primary reasons: it knowingly subjected human participants to emotional and psychological distress, it used deceptive practices in recruiting the participants and due the deception involved and peculiar nature of the experiment, informed consent was never truly given. Each of these is a fairly standard ethical "don't" within the modern rules, and taken together are basically unacceptable. The stance I would take after reading this article would be that Milgram did not intentionally harm the subjects and if there is a moral to be learned it is this: everyone must be responsible for their own