MILGRAM’S OBEDIENCE EXPERIMENT

MILGRAM’S OBEDIENCE EXPERIMENT

MILGRAM’S OBEDIENCE EXPERIMENT

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

· Summarize Milgram’s obedience experiment.

· Discuss the three ethical principles outlined in the Belmont Report: beneficence, autonomy, and justice.

· Define deception and discuss the ethical issues surrounding its use in research.

· List the information contained in an informed consent form.

· Discuss potential problems in obtaining informed consent.

· Describe the purpose of debriefing research participants.

· Describe the function of an Institutional Review Board.

· Contrast the categories of risk involved in research activities: exempt, minimal risk, and greater than minimal risk.

· Summarize the ethical principles in the APA Ethics Code concerning research with human participants.

· Summarize the ethical issues concerning research with nonhuman animals.

· Discuss how potential risks and benefits of research are evaluated.

· Discuss the ethical issue surrounding misrepresentation of research findings.

· Define plagiarism and describe how to avoid plagiarism.

Page 44ETHICAL PRACTICE IS FUNDAMENTAL TO THE CONCEPTUALIZATION, PLANNING, EXECUTION, AND EVALUATION OF RESEARCH. Researchers who do not consider the ethical implications of their projects risk harming individuals, communities, and behavioral science. This chapter provides an historical overview of ethics in behavioral research, reviews core ethical principles for researchers, describes relevant institutional structures that protect research participants, and concludes with a discussion of what it means to be an ethical researcher.

ORDER NOW FOR AN ORIGINAL, PLAGIARISM-FREE, AND RESOURCEFUL PAPER

MILGRAM’S OBEDIENCE EXPERIMENT

Stanley Milgram conducted a series of studies (1963, 1964, 1965) to study obedience to authority. He placed an ad in the local newspaper in New Haven, Connecticut, offering a small stipend to men to participate in a “scientific study of memory and learning” being conducted at Yale University. The volunteers reported to Milgram’s laboratory at Yale, where they met a scientist dressed in a white lab coat and another volunteer in the study, a middle-aged man named “Mr. Wallace.” Mr. Wallace was actually a confederate (i.e., accomplice) of the experimenter, but the participants did not know this. The scientist explained that the study would examine the effects of punishment on learning. One person would be a “teacher” who would administer the punishment, and the other would be the “learner.” Mr. Wallace and the volunteer participant then drew slips of paper to determine who would be the teacher and who would be the learner. The drawing was rigged, however—Mr. Wallace was always the learner and the volunteer was always the teacher.

The scientist attached electrodes to Mr. Wallace and placed the teacher in front of an impressive-looking shock machine. The shock machine had a series of levers that, the individual was told, when pressed would deliver shocks to Mr. Wallace. The first lever was labeled 15 volts, the second 30 volts, the third 45 volts, and so on up to 450 volts. The levers were also labeled “Slight Shock,” “Moderate Shock,” and so on up to “Danger: Severe Shock,” followed by red X’s above 400 volts.

Mr. Wallace was instructed to learn a series of word pairs. Then he was given a test to see if he could identify which words went together. Every time Mr. Wallace made a mistake, the teacher was to deliver a shock as punishment. The first mistake was supposed to be answered by a 15-volt shock, the second by a 30-volt shock, and so on. Each time a mistake was made, the learner received a greater shock. The learner, Mr. Wallace, never actually received any shocks, but the participants in the study did not know that. In the experiment, Mr. Wallace made mistake after mistake. When the teacher “shocked” him with about 120 volts, Mr. Wallace began screaming in pain and eventually yelled that he wanted out. What if the teacher wanted to quit? This happened—the volunteer participants became visibly upset by the pain that Mr. Wallace seemed to be experiencing. The experimenter told the teacher that he could Page 45quit but urged him to continue, using a series of verbal prods that stressed the importance of continuing the experiment.

The study purportedly was to be an experiment on memory and learning, but Milgram really was interested in learning whether participants would continue to obey the experimenter by administering ever higher levels of shock to the learner. What happened? Approximately 65% of the participants continued to deliver shocks all the way to 450 volts.

Milgram went on to conduct several variations on this basic procedure with 856 subjects. The study received a great deal of publicity, and the results challenged many of our beliefs about our ability to resist authority. The Milgram study is important, and the results have implications for understanding obedience in real-life situations, such as the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and the Jonestown mass suicide (see Miller, 1986).

But the Milgram study is also an important example of ethics in behavioral research. How should we make decisions about whether the Milgram study or any other study is ethical? The Milgram study was one of many that played an important role in the development of ethical standards that guide our ethical decision making.

What do you think? Should the obedience study have been allowed? Were the potential risks to Milgram’s participants worth the knowledge gained by the outcomes? If you were a participant in the study, would you feel okay with having been deceived into thinking that you had harmed someone? What if it was a younger sibling? Or an elderly grandparent? Would that make a difference? Why or why not?

In this chapter, we work through some of these issues, and more. First, let us turn to an overview of the history of our current standards to help frame your understanding of ethics in research.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF CURRENT ETHICAL STANDARDS

Before we can delve into current ethical standards, it is useful to briefly talk about the origin of ethics codes related to behavioral research. Generally speaking, modern codes of ethics in behavioral and medical research have their origins in three important documents.

The Nuremberg Code and Declaration of Helsinki

Following World War II, the Nuremberg Trials were held to hear evidence against the Nazi doctors and scientists who had committed atrocities while forcing concentration camp inmates to be research subjects. The legal document that resulted from the trials contained what became known as the Nuremberg Code: a set of 10 rules of research conduct that would help prevent future research atrocities (see http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/archive/nurcode.html).

Page 46The Nuremberg Code was a set of principles without any enforcement structure or endorsement by professional organizations. Moreover, it was rooted in the context of the Nazi experience and not generally seen as applicable to general research settings. Consequently, the World Medical Association developed a code that is known as the Declaration of Helsinki. This 1964 document is a broader application of the Nuremberg that was produced by the medical community and included a requirement that journal editors ensure that published research conform to the principles of the Declaration. MILGRAM’S OBEDIENCE EXPERIMENT.

The Nuremberg Code and the Helsinki Declaration did not explicitly address behavioral research and were generally seen as applicable to medicine. In addition, by the early 1970s, news about numerous ethically questionable studies forced the scientific community to search for a better approach to protect human research subjects. Behavioral scientists were debating the ethics of the Milgram studies and the world was learning about the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which 399 African American men in Alabama were not treated for syphilis in order to track the long-term effects of this disease (Reverby, 2000). This study, supported by the U.S. Public Health Service, took place from 1932 to 1972, when the details of the study were made public by journalists investigating the study. The outrage over the fact that this study was done at all and that the subjects were African Americans spurred scientists to overhaul ethical regulations in both medical and behavioral research. The fact that the Tuskegee study was not an isolated incident was brought to light in 2010 when documentation of another syphilis study done from 1946 to 1948 in Guatemala was discovered (Reverby, 2011). Men and women in this study were infected with syphilis and then treated with penicillin. Reverby describes the study in detail and focuses on one doctor who was involved in both the Guatemala and Tuskegee studies.

As a result of new public demand for action, a committee was formed that eventually produced the  Belmont Report . Current ethical guidelines for both behavioral and medical researchers have their origins in The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research (National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, 1979). This report defined the principles and applications that have guided more detailed regulations developed by the American Psychological Association and other professional societies and U.S. federal regulations that apply to both medical and behavioral research investigations. MILGRAM’S OBEDIENCE EXPERIMENT.

The three basic ethical principles of the Belmont Report are:

· Beneficence—research should confer benefits and risks must be minimal. The associated application is the necessity to conduct a risk-benefit analysis.

· Respect for persons (autonomy)—participants are treated as autonomous; they are capable of making deliberate decisions about whether to participate in research. The associated application is informed Page 47consent—potential participants in a research project should be provided with all information that might influence their decision on whether to participate.

· Justice—there must be fairness in receiving the benefits of research as well as bearing the burdens of accepting risks. This principle is applied in the selection of subjects for research.

APA ETHICS CODE

The American Psychological Association (APA) has provided leadership in formulating ethical principles and standards. The Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct—known as the  APA Ethics Code —is amended periodically with the current version always available online at http://apa.org/ethics/code. The Ethics Code applies to psychologists in their many roles including teachers, researchers, and practitioners. We have included the sections relevant to research in Appendix B.

APA Ethics Code: Five Principles

The APA Ethics Code includes five general ethical principles: beneficence and nonmaleficence, fidelity and responsibility, integrity, justice, and respect for rights and responsibilities. Next, we will discuss the ways that these principles relate to research practice.

Principle A: Beneficence and Nonmaleficence As in the Belmont Report, the principle of Beneficence refers to the need for research to maximize benefits and minimize any possible harmful effects of participation. The Ethics Code specifically states: “Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm. In their professional actions, psychologists seek to safeguard the welfare and rights of those with whom they interact professionally and other affected persons and the welfare of animal subjects of research.”