THE MILGRAM EXPERIMENT:
The Milgram experiment falls under social psychology, and it was conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. It was meant to measure the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure that instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. What made the experiment unethical weren’t the hypothesis, but the means in which it was performed.
It consisted of a learner (victim), experimenter, and a teacher that is the only participant and is unaware of the experiment setup. The experimenter was placed in the same room as the teacher who had to ask a series of questions to the learner. The learner was a contracted actor who stood playing the role in another room. Through a communication device the teacher (participant) starts asking questions; if the learner can’t answer the question a button the participant has to press shocks him. As his incorrect responses increase, the force of the shock increases. The teacher listens to the actor pretending to be shocked scream in pain, but the experimenter asks the teacher to continue with the process. The teacher did not know the scream was a fake and that the real person in the other room was not being harmed.
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