Did the famous milgram experiment meet the code of ethics by todays standards?

Are you talking about the “Nazi” “push-the-button-and-inflict-pain-I-think” experiment?

sure it does…the person wasn’t really being shocked, the test subject only thought they were shocking them. The only thing I would see was that the test subject really thought he was hurting someone, when he/she wasn’t actually hurting the person at all (he was just an actor).

here is a link I found of all sorts of bizarre experiments, the milgram being one of them.

The Milgram experiment, while arguably manipulative, most likely falls under today’s ethical guidelines as no real pain was inflicted upon any of the participants (mental anguish nonwithstanding). This one, however, is probably not up to par.

No. The test subjects did not know the purpose of the experiment, and some of them were not debriefed afterwards. Even if no pain was caused, it is still an experiment involving human test subjects. The test subjects were manipulated and were deceived.

not at all. you CANNOT cause psychological stress on your subjects these days. those people had to have help after this experiment. i am a psychology major and we have studied this experiment in most of my classes. thats just like the stanford prison experiment, that does not apply with the code of ethics in psychology today. i could go on and on about the different experiments similar to the milgram experiment where they caused psychological damage. DO NO HARM! and it clearly did harm to those individuals involved

lol, no, of course not. That is like, one of the main points of teaching about that experiment.

Haha. Yeah. Besides the amount of distress and possibility for enduring effects of trauma, there’s just too much deception in the experiment for it to be above bar. Some social psychologists today can get away with a little deception, but not of this magnitude.

No, it was one of the reasons that the ethical guidelines were set up. Trivia: An abnormal number of the participants in the experiment went on to become psychologists or study psychology.

That provides more evidence that it harmed the participants.

Or it provides evidence that the practice of drafting psych undergrads for research is not a new one :)

@Tonedef: Not in this case. IIRC, in later interviews they said that their participation in the experiment made them go towards psychology because basically they wanted to know how anyone could do what they did.

Ka-ching!

The testers can’t just out right tell the people what is happening before the test actually took place, it would ruin the entire test.

I’m sure if there were a test today that was seeking a particular result you would have no way of knowing, though this was extreme, they at least told them afterward the person was an actor and they weren’t really shocking them.

To get particular results in a test, you can’t always know every detail involved behind the scenes. I completely understand the need for deception. And no one was physically harmed.

@peyton good link, the one I gave talks about that one as well as many other bizarre experiments done by soviets and others.

Also, the test subjects could have walked out at any moment. The test was to see whether they would continue, and oddly, they did.

No. The today’s codes of ethics came into being BECAUSE of this experiment. Too much deception was used in the experiment and could cause psychological trauma to the subject.

i didn’t read the entire wiki article but i’ve learned a bit about it in the past 2 years. i don’t see why it would be judged as non-ethical – the person was not actually shocked, and the person ‘shocking’ them could have stopped. no harm was done to anyone, unless you count the person administering the shock realizing their vulnerability to authority figures.

@tiffyandthewall: Are you kidding me? It was unethical because it was emotionally scarring for the participants to realize they were capable of inflicting such harm upon another person. Yes, they could have stopped, but they didn’t.