Ethics of Milgram’s obedience to authority
In my opinion, what Milgram did to acquire the result of his study is acceptable. He did what he had to do to get a precise reaction from human beings,and it is important to get a precise response from an experiment in order to learn about human behavior. In Milgram’s study, he tried to obtain data from his subjects by giving them false information to access a person’s reaction to authority. People act based on what they think. Many people want to be good people, so if they are asked how they would act if they received an electrically shock from an authority, they would answer that they would simply oppose the authority figure in question and ask not to be shocked anymore. This is the ideal way for people to show their good personality. However, what people though they would do and how they actually acted were different. Milgram succeeded to collect data about on this theory. Even though people thought that how they reacted was unbelievable, many of people followed the description of giving a strong shock, which was driven by an authority figure. It shows that people cannot predict what they actually would do under certain situations.
Some people may say that although he had a goal to get precise result from the experiment, the study has a problem of ethics. Certainly, Milgram manipulated subjects and gave stress. It is also obvious that the experimenter harmed their feelings. However, they did not harm participants physically, and 84% of the participants were happy about being involved in the experiment which changed their way of thinking towards authority figures.
Certainly, Milgram manipulated the participants and gave stress to them, but without this method, it was impossible to get a real reaction from people towards authorities. Besides, after the experiment, Milgram debriefed real purpose of this experiment, and the participants agreed to support the experiment. Finally, since most participants did not...