STANLEY MILGRAM
A bit of background on Milgram's personal life: He is Jewish and his family was affected by the Holocaust, after the war, family members who survived concentration camps lived with him for a while.
Really gives insight about his personal motives for conducting research on obedience and drawing parallels between his study and the Holocaust.
Full-blown, uncontrollable seizures were ob-served for 3 subjects. On one occasion weobserved a seizure so violently convulsivethat it was necessary to call a halt to theexperiment.
It is alarming that the researchers did not intervene on the other two occasions. It really brings into question how researchers deal with risk management and safety issues. How are participants sure that researchers will have their best interest in mind? This can create a public distrust of research, which makes me wonder how the research community would go about establishing trust again.
The subjects were 40 males be
What about female participants? I wonder if gender affects obedience.
for many persons obedience may be adeeply ingrained behavior tendency, indeed,a prepotent impulse overriding training inethics, sympathy, and moral conduct. C.
It would've been interesting if Milgram also had an experimental group in which subjects received some kind of ethical/moral conduct presentation/task before participating in the learning experiment..to see whether it would affect obedience.
e subordi-nate officer was an agent in a great cause. He did notneed to feel guilt or conflict because within his frameof reference he was acting rightly
I definitely agree with the author's point. The situations are based on entirely different contexts, namely different frame of references. It would be interesting to study whether obedience would be higher (and less stressful) if the subject had to shock or punish an accomplice that was deemed an outsider (e.g. subject is LA Lakers fan, and the accomplice is a Celtics fan). Essentially exploiting differences (big or small) to see whether it has an effect on obedience.
regard the emotional disturbance described by Mil-gram as potentially harmful because it could easilyeffect an alteration in the subject's self-image or abil-ity to trust adult authorities in the future. It is
I'm wondering whether there was a follow-up on the participants, do they indeed demonstrate long-term effects?
hey disregard the special quality of trustand obedience with which the subject appropriatelyregards the experimenter
I know that there is an inherent power imbalance between the experimenter and participant, but I don't think it greatly differs from that of a physician and patient, or employer and employee. The power imbalance in the latter relationships may be the same or even greater. So, I understand Baumrind's claim that the laboratory is not the right place to study obedience, but in some ways it seems like the perfect place because it is similar to "real-world" situations.
ychological research re-quire the experimenter to balance his career andscientific interests against the interests of hisprospective subjects
The subject is also vulnerable to the experimenter's expectations and biases. I think it's probably very difficult, even for the well-intentioned researcher to prioritize the participant...and thus pushes boundaries that he/she otherwise wouldn't have. At the same time, it may be difficult for others (e.g. lab assistants, colleagues, etc.) to question or go against the experimenter when they feel something isn't right (which sort of alludes to the whole notion of obedience and authority). Therefore, it's important that such individuals are trained/reminded of their ability and need to raise any concerns. (This reminds me of the Stanford Prison Experiment).