Milgram AO3

• Debriefing - The participants were thoroughly and carefully debriefed on the real aims of the study, in an attempt to deal with the ethical breach of the guideline of protection from deception and the possibility to give informed consent. In a follow up study conducted a year later, 84% of participants were glad they were part of the study and 74% felt as if they learned something. This suggests that the study left little or no permanent or long-term psychological harm on participants.
• It can be argued that participants were not given the right to with withdraw. They had to ask 4 times before they were allowed to stop
• The participants were deceived as:

  • they believed that the experiment studied the effect of punishment on learning
  • believed that the electric shocks were real
• The experiment is highly replicable. Consistent and similar obedience levels have been found. In the French pseudonym of ‘The Game of Death’ researchers found that participants were willing to give lethal electric shocks to an unconscious man (confederate) while being cheered on by a presenter and a TV audience. Replication increases reliability of findings
• External validity has been established by supporting studies – Hofling et al (1966) observed the behaviour of doctors and nurses in a natural experiment (covert observation). The researchers

  found that 95% of nurses in a hospital obeyed a doctor (confederate) over the phone to increase the dosage of a patient’s medicine to double what is advised on the bottle. This suggests that ‘everyday’ individuals are still susceptible to obeying destructive authority figures.
• It raises a socially sensitive issue – Milgram’s findings suggest that those who are responsible for killing innocent people can be excused because it is not their personality that made them do this, but it is because of the situation that they were in and the fact that it is difficult to disobey – some may strongly disagree with this, and especially the judicial system, where (except in viable cases of diminished responsibility), individuals are expected to take moral responsibility for their actions.