Doctor Analyzes the Milgram Experiment (This Was Awful & Deeply Unethical)
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- Опубликовано: 20 апр 2024
- #doctorreacts #drelliott #milgram #psychiatrist #mentalhealth
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This is another Doctor REACTS video watching an old historical psychiatric video on the very famous Milgram Experiment. You asked for this video and I will do as I'm told, which is ironic for an experiment that was all about obedience, and the concept of "just following orders". However, it was deeply unethical and full of lies, because the participants were told that it was an experiment about learning. How did they get away with this? Also, even though it was unethical, does that mean it's not really interesting too? Let me know what you think and any other analysis or reaction videos you want me to check out.
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A-level psychology has burned this into my memory
IM NOT THE ONLY ONEEE
Same. I was that affected by it that I wrote a massive post on Facebook about how unethical it was.
i wish i’d have seen this before paper 1 psychology 😭😭😭
No same. 65% I'll never forget
@@ezrab7665 AHAHA omg how did it go?
I remember studying this at uni. It’s deeply unethical, but I’m morbidly interested in how it would go with the added variable of neurodivergence, since neurodivergent people tend to respond less to social pressure and cues.
I’ve never thought about that before, but it’s very interesting! My mom went back to school when I was about 11 and took a psych class and told me about this experiment and I always thought, “who would ever agree to that?”. I have no idea if being neurodivergent myself has anything to do with why I thought that, but I’m also extremely curious now!
Some research also shows that people with ADHD symptoms tend to have higher justice sensitivity. I think those subjects would have strong objections to continuing or might even have a meltdown by the last prompt to continue.
@@starparodier91 Not likely. It is not an unusual thought, and if you had asked people ahead of time, they likely would have said the same. Remember, this was basically asking how something like what happened in Germany could happen with such a large population.
As someone who is neurodivergent, I would absolutely not take part in harming others. I’m in a helping profession.
@@HeyLetsTalkAboutIt That's what they all say.
As unethical as this experiment was, it was also seriously important. Like how people assume they’re smarter than they are, they also assume they’re more independent than they are. Most people, when pressed by someone in authority, will ‘just go along’. If you don’t understand this, you’re more likely to fall victim to it when it counts.
It answered the question it was really asking too. How did the population of Germany go along with what happened before and during WWII.
@@sdigf3167a question that lacks self reflection & criticisms IMO. You could phrase the same questions for a time in any and every country / culture.
@@oki__ Sure because every single country in the world has had a holocaust on the scale that Germany did. 🙄
There's a great experiment on conformity where there's a subject in the room with two actors and they have to judge which piece of string out of a selection of three is the longest. They all start answering correctly, but after a while the two actors start giving the answer which is clearly wrong. After a few rounds of this the subject starts going along with the obviously wrong answer.
My psych teacher in school added that sometimes the subject actually started imagining the wrong line longer than it was. In a „u know what b) does seem kinda longer than c)“ kind of way.
The "You have no choice" prompt plummeted compliance dramatically. Very few people who reached the last prompt were persuaded by it. This may be because it immediately frames the discussion on the persons autonomy, whereas previous results abstract it to "The experiment requires you to continue" which places them as an agent of the researcher.
Compliance also drops to below 10% when a confederate teacher is placed in the room to also protest, and becomes practically non-existent if there is a confederate research official disagreeing with the experiment and demanding the experiment stop, even if that official is of "Lower rank" and gets overruled. This suggests that the presence of authority is binary rather than a hierarchical thing for these purposes.
If you "Have authority", it doesn't matter how much you have for the purposes of compliance, people will gravitate towards authority they perceive as aligning with their preference. Compliance jumps to over 90% if the teacher is placed in a room with multiple confederate "Sadist teachers" who never object and follow instructions without question too.
There's so many variations you can run.
Confederate sadist teachers, multiple researchers, chief researcher demands the experiment continue, but one researcher out of the team of a lower rank insisting it stop. What would the results be?
Would "You have no choice" still produce disobedience in a room with sadist confederate teachers?
So in college I had a psych prof for a class. He had done work on Milgram and Ash’s work as part of one of his PhDs (he was one of THOSE guys). I was lazy for Halloween that semester so I wore my lab coat ( chemistry major), a name tag that said “Milgram” and kept trying to get the prof to cancel class, tell other students to smack each other. Prof got a good laugh out of it and that’s where I thought the story ended.
A few weeks later he said he had emailed several of Milgram’s friends and colleagues and told them a student dressed like him for Halloween 😮. The week after that he said a bunch of them had replied and they all thought it was HILARIOUS. Again I thought that was the end of it.
Well the next week prof gets an email from one of them. He apparently had lunch that week with Milgram’s widow and told HER. Apparently she said “Stanley would have been honored and would have gotten a good laugh from it.” And this is why I will never dress up as a person for Halloween even 20 years later. You never know if it will get back to them.
I’d really love to hear how the “teachers” processed this experience afterwards. Once the pressure from the authority is removed, do you start to realize you had agency and should have stopped? Or do you continue to externalize the blame? I imagine it weighed on them regardless of how they were debriefed.
A lot of them said that they couldn't believe that they were capable of murder and they don't know why they didn't refuse.
The worst thing is, Yale University funded the experiment because they said only 1-3% of people would actually do it and go all the way.
As a psychology professor in the U.S. that teaches an introduction to psychology course every semester, I love seeing RUclips content like this! This is a fantastic resource for the classroom (especially for my online courses). My vote is for more videos like this one where you review classic psychological studies, please and thank you! 😁❤ The Standford Prison Experiemnt next perhaps? 🤔
it scares me how they just keep going even when they believe that they are doing real harm. makes me wonder what I would do if asked. standing up to authority is scary but clearly the better choice. I also wonder if the outcome would change when they got time to get to know each other, when its no longer an anonymous voice that is getting hurt ?
What I found so interesting was that this experiment took place just a couple of decades after WWII, where the "Nuremberg Defense" had been widely derided as morally bankrupt. And yet, a large percentage of people still administered the shocks.
I think the results kind of hinge on the demographic here. White males in the 1960s would likely have a strong trust in authority that others would not, since they exist in a system they largely benefit from.
Not saying we should ever do this experiment again, because it is hugely unethical, but I would be so curious to see what the result would look like today with a wider array of subjects.
I wonder if women would have participated or refused to do it?
that is true. But that people were made to be able to be that obedient to authority in that time period is still telling and useful. It does mean that people can be persuaded from doing what they know is right in the right situation, whether that is still present or not.
@@BatmanFanGirl I think women being present could have changed the outcome cause they would have had another out in having a reason not to go ahead. in that way keeping the demographic more simple does have a benefit for revealing what in high pressure situations people maybe can do.
I understand that a German woman who experienced Hitler's regime walked out very quickly.
I also thought not having women subjects (not that any woman should have to go through this, either) seriously limits what we can actually learn about "human" nature and psychology from this experiment.
There is a lot of coercion. Which sort of shows how if your under diress you will be willing to hurt others. Like kidnapping victims who take part in crimes with their captors.
Compared to hard scientific, or medical research, it is very hard to develop ethical research in psychiatry and psychology that explores the boundaries of the human mind and condition.
When I learned about the experiment in school I suggested the idea that for some of the participants it could be that they did want the shock another person but wouldn't normally because there are consequences and this experiment gave them the ability to do it without having to deal with those consequences.
This was on an episode of Law and Order:SVU, which is how I learned about the basics of this experiment, but this is interesting to watch the full experiment.
One of the best episodes of the entire series. Robin Williams was great in that role.
Possibly the greatest episode. Robin Williams was absolutely amazing.
You said they all responded to a newspaper advert, but in the video he says they also did direct mail solicitation.
They tell them at the beginning that they don't have to complete the experiment, but do they forget? Because if they are still aware that they themselves aren't required to continue, they also know that the "learner" isn't required to continue either, so it's a giveaway that the "teachers" have been lied to as soon as the experimenter doesn't allow the "learner" to quit.
That's the power of authority for ya. There's a lot of stress and pressure in that situation and it doesn't even occur to most of the participants that they could technically just get up and leave. We tend to do what we're told much more than we'd like to admit to ourselves. It's fascinating that the power of authority is so strong that even when the participants are told they could leave at any time, they just... don't.
In a much smaller, less horrifying version of study, community does a study called the Duncan principle you’d enjoy I think.
Would be super interested to see you react/talk about the Minnesota Starvation experiment :)
Where’d baby reindeer go??😢
Learning about this and the Stanford Prison experiment in the same class made me never want to volunteer for a study in my *LIFE*
Also: there was a special on I think the Discovery Channel with Eli Roth called How Evil Are You and they kind of restaged this experiment. I'd love to see Dr. Elliot react to that!
Most studies are not this unethical, in any field. I took part in a linguistics department study when I was an undergrad student. They can be quite fun and a good way to make a few bucks.
Definitely get as much information as you can going in. They obviously can't tell you exactly what they're studying, but you have the right to know about what you'll be asked to do. "Informed consent," as the doctor in this video says.
I wonder if the results would have differed if they had set up a bonding exercise with the pairs first. For example, if they had been told the first part of the experiment was cooperative learning where they worked together to solve a puzzle and allowed time for socializing before doing the teacher/learner part. I wonder if there would have been less compliance if the teacher had spent time getting to know the "learner."
One I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on is the Little Albert experiment. That one always rubbed me the wrong way.
Love your videos! Could you also investigate the Minnesota Starvation Experiment? That would be so interesting!
2019-2022 was a giant worldwide Milgram experiment.
Would be interested to see your reaction to the Gloria videos with Carl Rogers, Albert Ellis, and Fritz Perls!
Another "I was just following orders" situation that was extremely disturbing was not an experiment at all. In the US (I don't recall when this happened), a guy was calling fast food restaurants and I think other stores, pretending to be a cop/detective. He ordered the management of the facilities to strip search an employee there who would fit descriptions he gave (and were sometimes under age). At least one time, it led to a full cavity search for "stolen items." The guy was directing everything over the phone. The managers would say they thought the guy was a cop/detective and had to do what he said.
I don't think they'd get the same results if the attendents were women also the results and thinking about what could be the reason for this experiment is very upsetting.
im pretty sure this experiment was to study why the nazis followed orders
I wonder if any massive medical leaps and findings were achieved ethically. I don’t like lying and causing distress and all of this, but also how do exceed our limits if we don’t push them?
Glad none of that is up to me
I'd like to hear your thoughts on the Selective Attention Test, where people were asked to count how many times the people in white shirts passed the ball.
*pushes glasses up higher on nose* well, actually....in operant conditioning, negative reinforcement would work similarly to positive reinforcement to reinforce the behavior you want to see more of.
Positive and Negative aren't value judgments, they specify whether something has been added (positive) or removed (negative). Reinforcement is meant to increase behavior and punishment to decrease. So that visual of operant conditioning that you provided around the 6 minute mark is incorrect.
*Your verbal explanation of it was correct though
Finally. Someone who gets it right!
I feel like I'll be out of it the second I learn that the "student" is tied to the fucking chair. How are the subjects okay with that in any shape or form? It essentially becomes kidnapping and torturing the second consent is retired. But I guess those were different times...
The test subjects were aware that they were in a controlled test environment, and that does change how people act. It probably does say more about the trust people put in scientists than some overarching theory of human nature - that people trust them enough that they don’t actually believe that they would make them truly hurt someone. When the magician hands you a saw and ask you to cut the woman in half, you trust that they would stop the show if anyone actually starts getting sawed, even if the illusion might be disturbingly convincing.
The experiment shakes my faith in humanity, though honestly I wish I could have taken part. It’s likely attributable to my ADHD and/or autism, but I was always in trouble for defying teachers because their rules didn’t make sense. Same is currently true with law or code of conduct at work; if I don’t agree with the rule/law, I have absolutely no regard for it and view it as moral to violate such rules to an extent. Based on past experience, I have a tendency to view authority figures as incompetent and cruel.
The above considered, I don’t envision a world in which I last beyond the other person asking me to stop “shocking” them. The script wouldn’t work because I would demand a highly detailed explanation for why it’s so important the experiment continue and why it couldn’t be conducted more ethically. The instructor’s authority wouldn’t affect me because I’d have the preconceived notion that they’re probably an idiot.
I understand that the lack of willingness to conform and the disregard for authority are pathologized and that I am considered psychologically unwell because of it, but clearly this study would suggest there are some benefits to those attributes. It is very sad to know the average person is incapable of critical thinking or independent thinking when pressured by such flimsy factors.
I also don’t understand how anyone buys the researcher claiming they’ll accept responsibility. I don’t even believe in free will, but nothing I personally decide to do can be anyone else’s responsibility.
I wonder if any neurodivergent people were included in the study, because this looks absolutely pathetic at face value. I understand the value of listening to authority in certain situations, but everything in moderation.
I've seen this several times. I've never forgotten how willing people are to harm other people. It's why I always accepted the world of Mad Max, when friends questioned it.
The question "How do you feel?" wasn't very well operationalised. Clearly, the man in the film understood it as a question of whether he felt physically sick, when they were probably hoping to get a response about his mental / emotional state.
I wonder in this experiment whether a follow up was done with the "teachers" and if any of them suffered trauma having believed they potentially could have killed the patients on the basis of following orders.
I would love to see a video about the John Money experiments
Reminds me of that Law and Order episode with Robin Williams.
Why is there a still of RPDR in the background of all of your videos?
A modern non laboratory example of it in practice was the guy who called different fast food restaurants pretending to be a police officer then convinced the managers to strip and do other things to employees.
Am I wrong to say this experiment HAS to be done unethically? There’s realistically no way to test something as serious as the Nuremberg Defense without letting the subject commit to the idea that they’re causing physical harm or worse. The lack of an unethical procedure doesn’t bother me at all in this instance because at the end of the day, we need to understand how someone could rationalize “following orders” all the way til innocent death.
The lack of scientific ethics doesn’t equate to a lack of human morality. The whole point is that many people will commit systematic killings under no obligation, duress, or coercion. That to me is one of the greatest ethical contradictions we can ever possibly explore.
I am curious which professions the more compliant in shocks 'Teachers' had and what that may indicate about society.
I wanna know what would happen if it were women or mixed genders
They apparently had women in later studies. Only one I read about was German who refused to comply.
This and the Stanford prison experiment are super fascinating and incredibly unethical. Wasn't it Jeffrey Dahmer that was involved in an unethical trial at college?
I think it was the Unabomber. (Maybe Jeffrey Dahmer was too, I don't know).
No, it was the Unabomber.
It's also interesting to note that in Milgram's experiment they actually generated some scientifically usefull knowledge, whereas they didn't in Zimbardo's prison experiment. So the Stanford Prison Experiment was even more unethical, because Zimbardo messed as much with the data as he did
As I'm watching this I am wondering, would I keep on shocking somebody? I hope that I would stop.
Dr Elliott, please follow up with Zimbardo. The book "Humankind: A Hopeful History" has a well-researched breakdown of both of these experiments' flaws in chapters 7 and 8 respectively. I _am_ however slightly confused; don't plenty of ethical social psychology studies involve deception at the outset with revelation at the end and the opportunity to withdraw your data if you feel lied to???
It’s not the lying that scares me, it’s the lack of consent by participants (and often the lack of debriefing) and the similarity to conversion and ABA therapy
I feel a massive wave of anxiety watching this. Especially towards the end!
I would love for you to watch the Documentary “Thin” it is an HBO Documentary. It took place at the Renfrew center for ED in Florida. I was a pt there when it was filmed & in pt. several other times there as well. Would love to know your opinion. In the US treatment is very expensive as health insurance only covers so much we’re not at all. So you could end up spending upwards of 1900+ a day for treatment.
I think it's interesting to see how the people are responding. Even when the learner is yelling they want to stop, the teacher is deferring to the tester.
Odd that none seem to think about fairness... the learner is strapped in, but the teacher isn't. The learner cannot leave, but the teacher can...
Reminds me of the "age of pisces" where people defer to authority
Where now, in the "age of aquarius," people are more likely to think for themselves
2:02 Hey, I’m almost 33! We’re not that old! 😂
My mom went back to school to get her degree when I was around 11 and got a minor in psychology and told me all about these experiments, so by the time I went to school and had to take a psych class I was already prepared! This is the first one she told me about.
Being absolved of responsibility and consequences has a powerful psychological effect.
Look no further than people being absolved of sins. Or on places like the internet where people can act however they please without real social repercussions.
When I was a psychology student at The Open University, the Milgram experiment was taught early on. My thoughts are that, given the time period and what transpired during World War 2, this was largely a successful experiment.
It shed light on the credibility of the Nazi's "we were just following orders" defence. Also, nobody came to quite the amount of harm that the Stanford 'participants' came to. Thankfully, ethics have greatly evolved since the Milgram and Stanford experiments.
If I were in a position to repeat this experiment, I'd probably try to get a far more diverse cross-section of society. As well as giving participants more opportunity to give feedback to the researchers; how did they feel? Why did they stop (or continue)? What would they choose to do differently? It could throw a few confounding variables (CV's) but sometimes CV's can provide opportunity - with a more diverse base of participants, does culture have an impact on their decisions?
Those are my thoughts.
I know this is not quite the same but it reminded me of a time when at work a project was coming up and the team was being selected to work on said project. The project client had a reputation of being very dodgy and had a history of bending the law or finding loop holes to not do the right thing. I went to one of the directors and expressed my opinion of the client and said because of the clients history and general attitude and ethics under no circumstances would I work on this project and request my name be removed from the list of available staff.
The director thanked me for my honest opinion and moral stance and my name was removed for the list of staff available to work on this project. I know others on the team had a similar attitude to mine but felt it too awkward to do the same thing.
It's okay Elliot, I remember dial up too
i hate this experiment in part because i really really want to believe that i would never continue with the experiment, but i can also see myself getting confused/flustered/overwhelmed by the amount of pushback to me trying to stop the experiment. idk i would probably just have a breakdown halfway thru tbh
Informed consent is gone out the window. They asked to stop and they are forced to continued they wanted out. I’m not sure what the study is even looking for at this point. It would be like an abuser making the other person do the abuse, to the other person they don’t want to do it. But the fear is too high. Like they are told they can stop at anytime, but the student (the voice recording) can’t. The ‘teacher’ has the ‘scientists’ standing above them blocking the exits telling then they have to go on after being shocked themselves.
This gives me such anxiety! I think because I hate to believe that I would be capable of harming someone else just because someone told me to. But I'll never know unless I'm in that situation.
I feel so bad for the "teachers" as well, the one in this video seemed like he was probably a good person in general, but after this he had to grapple with the fact that he is capable of hurting someone when ordered to. Maybe knowing that nobody was harmed helped him? I hope so.
Taylor Swift's new video for 'Fortnight' contains many images of being insitutionalised and medicated - including the use of ECT. It might be interesting to look at?
I think there is another South Park episode worth reviewing. Put it Down, a hilarious but also pretty heartfelt episode.
I still find myself fascinated about what the Milgram Experiments taught us about our inherent obedience to authority, even if it goes against our personal ethical and moral compass. I was absolutely astonished that most people went as far as they did, and made me question my own ability to effectively stand up for what I believe if put under pressure to undermine it.
This along with the Stanford Prison Experiment which showed how horrible and barbaric we can act toward others when given authority over them made me realize we're not so good at following altruism as we would like to believe, and to not be as judgmental against anyone.
It's all about "us and them". If you see someone as an "us" you are more likely to be altruistic. If you see them as a "them" you are more likely to dehumanize them and all kinds of nasty things can happen. If these people had been told it was a family member, the outcome (with some exceptions) would have been different.
Very true, but one's sense of what constitutes "us" can be conditioned or manipulated to exclude even some of those that we hold closest.
Just taught this to my students last week 😮 We looked at it that people will bow to authority. The man in the room was wearing a white coat. So he kept going as the person of authority kept telling him to and that he would take the blame.
2:51 wasn’t there more than just one group of people that participated.
I felt absolutely sick in my stomach and quivered/ cringed with each sound of the shock. The destress voiced from the one gentleman bothered me. I do agree the experiment and the premise that people are ingrained to follow orders from people they perceive to be in charge is interesting and valuable. I still feel very conflicted about how it was carried out.
I think some of those not leaving might be due to being watched, applied pressure, not wanting to "fail"
But does the learner really get every question wrong?
Can you please look at the third wave experiment
Getting some A-level Psychology flashbacks! Completely unethical and not very robust but fascinating nonetheless.
The suggestion from Milgrim that his findings could be used to explain war crimes is utterly ridiculous of course.
It was important in bringing the discussion of ethics in psychological experiments to the mainstream.
Deceiving participants is still done if necessary for the research. You have to justify the need for it in front of the ethics committee, and you have to explain everything afterwards, but it‘s by no means uncommon.
Similarly, electric shocks are still used when researching pain responses, and also as punishment in some learning paradigms. Generally, participants are involved when setting the shocks up to adjust for the individual pain tolerance (and because participants then have some form of agency).
Ah, the evolution of medical and experimental ethics... should not have been as hard as it has been.
3:15 - This may be a naive question, and I should stress that I do think informed consent in studies is important, but is there not some kind of bias inherent in studies that tell the participants what they're trying to find if what they're studying is behaviours we don't normally think about? For example telling someone not to think about breathing usually makes them think about their own breathing. How can you avoid changing the outcome of a behavioural experiment by letting the participants know you're studying their behaviour?
Law and Order SVU made a great episode about this starring Robin Williams. Highly recommend it
Throwback to every teenager's psychology class
After the experiment, the teacher saying "I'm alright" was the upmost disturbing to me. Was it because he was absolved from responsibility that gave him a clear conscience to hurt others? He looked physically and mentally effected, and yet he answers "I'm alright." I want to be sick.
This is why children should be taught to trust their personal intuition, intelligence, and logic instead of blindly obeying authority figures. Programming children to blindly obey instead of questioning and discussing the importance of a rule can lead them to act against their better judgment even as adults. Children’s rules should be open for debate, discussion and compromise in regards to their age. The poor fellow in the video didn’t deviate from his programming to listen and obey those in charge even when he thought he was causing real harm. It was so painful to watch his struggle between his upbringing and his ethics.
Banana Queen in the background💛💛💛
I remember watching this in psychology class in college. Totally unethical and cruel to the “teachers”.
Not really
Anyone on a jury needs to keep this experiment in mind. If a law is obviously evil/immoral, you don't have to comply. Remember that.
Isnt this one was about perceived authority about how far they would go even if it meant possibly harming someone because the person wearing a white coat was in a perceived role of authority and was telling them to
Wonder what would a similarly valid but ethical experiment on this sort of research would look like? Cause anything I can think of would have severe bias that would invalidate any result. Does the ethical question take that into account?
If they were being told they must continue but not reminding them they could leave the experiment, isn't it a flawed experiment? The results were not 50% going on, but 50% under duress continuing.
Deception is necessary in many psychological studies, as long as it doesn't go this extreme it is still allowed, no?
I’m sure deception is part and parcel of providing valid responses and mitigating for bias towards trying to do “the right thing” or what the participant thinks the experimenter wants them to do? As long as they’re told after the experiment that there was deception and offered a debrief on what the study was trying to find out then it’s ok…? 🤷♀️
I remember learning about this in A Level psychology and I couldn't believe this actually happened.
This guy wanted to understand why Nazi soldiers killed Jews even though it was so inhumane. A lot of the Nazis said they did it just because they were told to so he wanted to see how far people would go to do something that they were told to do by a figure of authority
The whole thing was rigged.
A lot of them said that they couldn't believe that they were capable of murder and they don't know why they didn't refuse. That type of experiment wouldn't be allowed today because of how unethical it is. The guy got in huge trouble afterwards because of the psychological damage to the people sending the electric shocks. The worst thing is, Yale University funded the experiment because they said only 1-3% of people would actually do it and go all the way.
Just think. This could have not been an experiment. Some warped, disgusting, heartless person could have actually decided to do this to real people. It's terrifying. People could have, and probably would have, died.
All because people didn't say no to authority.
I have heard about this experiment/study, and for once I can say that I am glad that women were NOT apart of a medical study.
(Typically, women are just flat out excluded from participating in various medical studies, and is definitely problematic for us.)
consider this my psychology revision done 😍
I studied this at degree level with the OU . Fascinating study
Me (34 and remembering not being able to use internet and dial up at once): don't hurt me like this...
Also, if you tell the subjects too much, wouldn't that make the results not as accurate? Not just with this experiment but also in general
How would women respond?
So while I get why it’s unethical…. Wouldn’t telling them the truth instead of lying to them on what’s it about, affect the results? Because if they were told it was about how well they followed orders, that would make them much more likely to not follow them…
Exactly. In other words this approach isn't able to ethically and reliably answer the question on obedience
IRBs have come a long way.
What I find interesting is, while it may be unethical, I wouldn’t call it immoral or harmful. I feel the point being proven is worthwhile. So long as the participants are notified and shown that no actual harm was being done and the experiment explained, I think the ultimate outcome is positive.
This experiment is so interesting, but completely unethical (like some of his others). This triggered my memory of Derren Brown's programs. Some of the most messed up "experiments" I've ever seen. How Pushed to the Edge and The Sacrifice were allowed to happen in the modern day, I'll never know. I don't know how any of those people are okay. I certainly wouldn't be in their positions.
This wasn't just unethical, it had zero scientific merit or validity. Milgram I would say was half-way as heinous as Zimbardo, who should have gone to prison for his frivolous and anti-scientific torture campaign.
I learned about this in school.
This is evil I really can't think of any other way to say it this is just evil
Interesting that only males were involved though of course it’s the time period. However they really missed out science wise. Especially since in this period, women were still expected to be obedient, but looked at as feminine and motherly, with higher rates of compassion and empathy and emotion. So it would’ve been interesting to see what won out, the empathy or “obedience”
I wonder how it may have differed if they included women as well
Yes, the ethics are questionable. But you keep talking about "lies". How would any experiment with humans work if the experimenters had to tell everyone exactly what is being done? Testing how people react when told to do horrific acts while someone else takes full responsibility gave us valuable information about human behavior. If they had told the "teachers" that they were the ones being tested, the results would have been quite different, and likely far less enlightening.
Institutional Review Boards (IRB) we're created after the Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments which reviews the ethics of research studies. There's a requirement for informed consent of participants and these boards do review whether deceiving participants is necessary for an experiment and how to debrief participants afterwards. They examine not just whether the information gathered would be beneficial, but what the potential harms to participants would be.
The Milgram experiment likely wouldn't have passed the IRB approval process.
I might not pass review today, but in the 1960s? I’m not sure. That’s before my time. I can only say it’s wild to me to hear younger generations talk about this stuff. Maybe you all are more morally sensitive than previous generations, and that’s a good thing. But I learned about this experiment decades ago in college. I don’t remember anyone deeply questioning the ethics of it. Was I just not paying attention, or has the discussion drastically changed?
I always thought it was a great experiment. Like, of course we need to study the banality of evil. We need to challenge the idea of “it can’t happen here.” Because if we forget that lesson, we are doomed to repeat it. It can happen here. There’s good reason to fear that it *is* happening again. (It being a crackdown on individual rights, especially for anyone of the “wrong” gender identity, ethnic group, ability level, etc.)
Only recently have I noticed anyone saying the Milgram experiment was unethical. I’m having very mixed feelings about it, but I’m willing to listen. Idk, to me it’s a bit like immunizations. Maybe we need a tiny bit of the the disease to prevent widespread suffering and death. Like, we need to understand evil in a safer way, in order to prevent a moral pandemic, as it were.
I first saw this in psychology 101, and it is just as shocking (har har har) now as it was then. Although, I do find stuff like this fascinating.
I don't understand why it is considered unethical.
Imagine the psychological damage the teacher would have of thinking they had murdered someone or were hurting someone just because they were told to.
@@mackenziemaybarraclough1207 I can imagine they explained everything afterwards so the ethics problem was redressed
@@GeorgeProwse but there was still psychological damage caused to both parties. I studied it into psychology and there was a lot of mental damage and cause for ethical concerns.
@@GeorgeProwseyes it was debriefed afterwards, but imagine the impact on one's self perception when you're told the real intention of the experiment. Imagine realising you would be willing to potentially kill someone (real or not) because an authority figure told you to. For most people the idea of hurting someone else intentionally is ego-dystonic, so finding out you're not only capable but actually quite willing with a bit of pressure to hurt or even kill someone could trigger a crisis of identity & values.
Yeah the gravity of causing physical pain really amplifies the ethical dilemma of the experiment, but I'd actually go so far as to say systematic lies in any capacity (even seemingly harmless lies) can cause psychological trauma over a long enough period of time. Even if you explain it afterward, there's just no undoing the effect it can have on a person's trust.