discussion part II

Yes, I believe Stanley Milgram’s Study of Disobedience is unethical. I believe it is unethical for a few reasons. One reason is that he clearly manipulated those who participated in the study. He did this by when he had those participating draws from the hat to determine the role. In which the participants did not know the roles were rigged up front. “…the participant was always the teacher and Mr. Wallace (the confederate) was always the learner (Gross, 2006)”. It was also mentioned to those participating while doing the study that withdraws was not possible. This was another form of manipulation used by Stanley. He also conducted the study at Yale which led participants to believe they were really involved in something prestigious.       In the Journal of Science and Engineering Ethics, written by Dan Macarthur, he starts out by saying if Milgram were to attempt to perform any of these studies he did back in the 1960’s they would not be approved by the ethics board (McArthur, 2009). “The reasons for this are well known among social scientists and applied ethicists (McArthur, 2009)”. “The research subjects were subjected to psychological harm without appreciating the risks from the beginning, deception was used without what today would count as acceptable debriefing and so on (McArthur, 2009)”. Regardless of whether, or not there was a high level of ethics set back then he knew what he was doing. Setting the situation for the study at Yale made the test subjects trust him which was completely wrong.