ENsayo Milgram

Mariana Nácer Elizalde

The Milgram Experiment is a scandalous experiment with the purpose of determine how people react to obedience and authority. With this experiment Milgram was trying to understand the behavior of humans in terms of obedience. When this experiment was conducted, 20 years had passed of the horrible Holocaust and we (all humans, specially Milgram) still had no idea how so much atrocities could have occurred. Milgram believe that yes obedience is important but what he did not understand was to the extent to which ordinary person will obey authority when told to do something that is in violation of ethical standards. So, as said by Milgram, “The crux of the study is to vary systematically the factors believed to alter the degree of obedience to the experimental command and to learn under what conditions submission to authority is most probable and under what conditions defiance is brought to the fore” [26].

The experiment consists of an experimenter, a teacher and the learner. The learner and the experimenter know exactly of what the experiment consist of but the teacher is not aware of it. In the experiment the teacher worked through a series of questions/problems with a learner, if the learner made a mistake, the would have to shock them (the teacher did not know that the learner was not actually being shocked), with each succeeding mistake more electricity was put to the shock. Being that the purpose of this experiment was to observe if humans blindly follow rules/orders and continue the experiment because that what they were told to do, they were a sequence of prods, 4 prods to be exact. The experiment would use as many necessary to attempt to bring the teacher to line. If the subject refused to obey the experimenter after the 4th prod the experiment would be terminated.

I believe in the research that Milgram conducted. I believe that he had a good line of thought and I also believe that he did not harm anyone and he did follow most of the guidelines implemented by the IRBs. I understand that a lot of people criticized the fact that he did not put all the details of the experiment in the consent form, but he did put that they would be some kind of punishment and also said that no long term harm would be done which is also true. I understand that the persons that participated as the “teachers” may have suffered a psychological trauma, but it was no a long-lasting trauma because they were told at the end that no harm was done to the learners and in that way they cleaned their conscience. Even though this experiment may seem radical to some, sometimes it takes a radical person to discover something in order to make the world better. I’m not saying that Milgram did everything right or that I fully support his ideals, but I do believe his proposal and consent forms seem fair to me, because as the Belmont Report stated “Respect for persons requires that subjects, to the degree that they are capable, be given the opportunity to choose what shall or shall not happen to them.’ And in no way did Milgram violated the right for a person to make its own decision, the experiment pushed until a certain point, but the respect was always present and in no way violated, in my opinion.

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