Obedience, Ethics, and Stanley Milgram

Obedience, Ethics, And Stanley Milgram

Stanley Milgram's electroshock experiments are perhaps the most famous psychological examples ever performed upon human beings. After the infamous Nazi actions towards Jews and other political prisoners during World War II, Milgram conducted experiments where volunteers were asked to subject other volunteers to deadly voltages. The set-up was false, the volunteers felt nothing at all and were in collusion with Milgram and his researchers. However, the surprising (according to Milgram's instance) result of the experiments was that most of the volunteers complied, and some administered a lethal dose to the victim.

Milgram defined obedience as carrying out another person's wishes, to the point where the individual no longer regards him or herself as responsible for his actions -- or presumably, the consequences of those actions. He believed his experiments had social value because they showed that despite the fact that the experimenter had no real authority and no ability to punish the individual for disobedience, the experimenter's physical presence, in the absence of conflicting authority or rebellion by others created a kind of herd-like mentality on the part of the subjects.

Many people were outraged by the results of Milgram's experiments, and Diana Baumrind argued that the experiments were potentially traumatic to the unwitting volunteers, and did more harm to the volunteer's psyches than societal good. While some of Baumrind's objections are themselves problematic (such as her contention that a laboratory setting encourages obedience and thus the experiments were invalid -- Milgram always acknowledged that people were not sheep, and certain factors like an unfamiliar setting could influence levels of rebelliousness or compliance in the same subjects), she raises a challenge that Milgram felt compelled to answer. She wrote: "From the subject's point-of-view, procedures which involve loss of dignity, self-esteem, and trust in rational authority are probably most harmful in the long run and require the most thoughtfully planned reparations, if engaged at all" (Baumrind 1964). Milgram countered that 74% believed they learned something of personal importance, and that a medical exam a year afterwards of forty of the subjects revealed no problems. He also notes that the distress as well as the level of compliance was unexpected, and some unpredictability of any experiment must be expected by both researchers and volunteers (Milgram 1964).

This type of 'follow up,' while perhaps acceptable in the 1960s would likely be seen as inadequate by modern researchers. But recently, in an essay in Granta Magazine, Ian Parker has reevaluated the obedience experiments, noting that they cast doubt upon our sense of self. So much of morality is situational, he notes, perhaps the most profound revelation of the Milgram experiments. The experiments are thus a counterweight against the idea that people who commit genocide during a tyrannical regime are different than us -- rather they are 'us,' or could be us, if we do not resist the will to obey without thought.