For most people, obedience is something that is learned during childhood. There are different levels of how obedient a person should be, and much of that has to do with authority. If one volunteers to participate in an experiment, their experimenter has authority over them, and therefore, the volunteer would feel that it is necessary to comply with the wishes of their instructor. In her article “Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience,” Diana Baumrind, a psychologist who has worked at the Institute of Human Development at the University of California at Berkeley, claims that Milgram’s experiment violated his subjects’ rights to expect not to be humiliated by being obedient. Though Baumrind analyzes and criticizes Milgram’s methods of experimentation, she fails to look at his experiment from more than one perspective.
Baumrind begins her article by questioning the validity of the environment in which the experiment took place, a laboratory. She then explains that some experiments on ethics can in fact be successful in a laboratory setting, but only if proper counseling is provided to subjects to prevent negative emotions after the experiment has been completed. Although subjects should be able to expect this, it does not always take place. After quoting a section from Milgram’s journal, Baumrind criticizes the amount of empathy he showed toward his subjects’ well-being. She acknowledges that Milgram did provide support to his subjects, but she is skeptical of the adequacy of that support, due to the level of emotional distress his experiment caused his subjects. To further censure Milgram’s method, Baumrind declares that his experiment was not vital to the world and had no direct benefit to mankind; therefore, the adverse effects on the psyche of the individuals who participated in his study serve as valid evidence as to why the experiment was unethical. Milgram compared his experiment to the Nazis in Germany, but Baumrind largely disagrees with his...