The experiment was conducted as follows: The researcher recruited volunteers to participate in an experiment, supposedly about conditioned learning. The volunteers were told to assist with the experiment by increasing the levels of electric shock given to other volunteers when they got answers wrong. What they didn't know was that the shock apparatus was fake, the "subjects" were really actors, and they were the real subjects.

Milgram found that 65% of people obeyed the commands from the researcher to the point of delivering the highest level of "shock". That in itself was a disturbing discovery. But many consider the experiment unethical because it might psychologically harm the subjects without their informed consent. The question is, would it? The subjects were informed after the fact that they weren't really shocking people, and the vast majority were glad that they'd participated.

Difficult, but there is a line for these things that probably shouldn't be crossed. (Just don't ask me to define where that line should be--I deal with dead people, not living ones!)

But the film of the experiment is absolutely stunning, and the point it makes is a tremendously important one.

I saw it in about 1965; I still remember individual scenes and characters, and how they responded.

There is a large body of extremely interesting critical literature on Milgram. I can't remember where I've seen it all, but I do remember finding a Granta piece on it a few years ago quite interesting. Perhaps it was in the "Shrinks" issue.

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One of the participants in Milgram's experiment who refused to administer any shocks whatsoever later went on to be the American helicopter pilot who fired on US troops committing the My Lai massacre

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Is this really true? Did someone actually fire on them? And if so, was it someone from the experiment? I have my doubts because of the timing. Milgram was in 1960 or so, and My Lai was 1968.

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I wish they had done the follow-up experiment in Germany.

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Part of the original rationale for the experiment was to challenge the "it couldn't happen here" response to Nazi atrocities. It does seem to suggest the just following orders phenomena does exist elsewhere and is not a national characteristic.

As far as the ethics are concerned it is not just the deception that is a problem( although some argue that all forms of deception is unethical). The ethical concern is whether the ethical deception will result in harm either physical or emotional for the subject. The Milgram study is mentioned in ethics classes as being an example of one that would be seen as unethical due to the potential to psychological harm. You really need to read some of the literature around the experiment or see the movie that Jeff mentions to fully appreciate the full potential of harm.

The subjects essentially following orders that in their minds could result in the death of the person they were shocking. Imagine what do you do with that knowledge afterwards? It is quite a profound discovery.
You would need some pretty extensive debriefing to deal with the concerns this might raise for a person.

My only defence for the research would be that coming face to face with our own potential for brutality and our own willingness to submit to authority are important lessons we should all learn. Obviously though forcing people to confront these truths is ethically dubious far beyond the potential irony.

I agree with Jeff that the movie is fascinating, I saw it in an intro Sociology course. What you don't get in reading the experiment and something our prof brought to our attention was the class dynamics at work.

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Originally posted by N.R.KISSED:

The subjects essentially following orders that in their minds could result in the death of the person they were shocking. Imagine what do you do with that knowledge afterwards? It is quite a profound discovery.

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Just to devil's advocate for a moment.

It might do psychological *good* to have to think about that. That is, it would probably cause psychological *pain*, but then so does therapy (not that I particularly believe most therapy to be very useful). It might, however, put a person in the position of clarifying their ethical ideas, ending up more mature.

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Originally posted by jeff house:

Is this really true? Did someone actually fire on them? And if so, was it someone from the experiment? I have my doubts because of the timing. Milgram was in 1960 or so, and My Lai was 1968.

If it IS true, then I want the rights to make the movie.

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Sorry, he didn't fire on them... he put his helicopter between the soldiers and some villagers and ordered his crew to fire on the soldiers if they tried to harm the villagers.

Do you?

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Originally posted by rasmus raven:
I wish they had done the follow-up experiment in Germany.

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Apparently they did:

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In a repetition of the Milgram Experiment in Germany (Max Planck Institute, Munich) there were even 85 % “obedient” test subjects.

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The experiment has also been vehemently criticized, though, because Milgram had touched the sore point of ethics in psychological research, had severely violated the rules related to this: The test subjects were harmed by being forced to accept a piece of self-knowledge which could possibly cause a trauma. They were also deceived, as light-heartedly as you would fool lab rats in an experiment if it was necessary for the investigation.

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It might do psychological *good* to have to think about that. That is, it would probably cause psychological *pain*, but then so does therapy (not that I particularly believe most therapy to be very useful). It might, however, put a person in the position of clarifying their ethical ideas, ending up more mature.

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Not to be too self-congratulatory but I did actually bring up this point in my original post, concluding that forced psychological growth is a dangerous belief. As skdadl points out correctly it is the potential for psychological harm that needs to be considered. I do confess that i still find it a fascinating if disturbing piece of research though.

I do believe that we have a case study here.

In a culture so devoid of lines between right and wrong, and yet so quick to judge, who knows?
Maybe the Milgram experiment was a progenitor of today's entertainment. Maybe if that had been stopped, the logical sequelae couldn't have happened. Or maybe we should have yelled: "Hold it! It's wrong to disembowel live sheep, just to see how their kidneys work."
On the other hand, didn't Jersey Kosinski say, if people knew that the duck dances because it's standing on a hot metal plate, they'd enjoy the show just as much? When i read that, i thought he was a jerk. Turns out, he was just a little older than me.

No, after all, i don't think it's so terrible to trick people into facing the truth about themselves. I wouldn't do it, but i can't altogether condemn it. I see no gentle way of holding up that mirror.

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The experimenter shows the teacher the shock generator, which has 30 switches, with a voltage ranging from 15-450 volts, and are labeled from “slight shock” to “danger: severe shock,” and the last switch labeled “XXX.”

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In 1968, Army helicopter pilot Hugh C. Thompson Jr. set down his chopper and put a stop to one of the darkest episodes in U.S. military history: the massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai.

He was a 24-year-old pilot flying over the Vietnamese jungle on March 16, 1968. The crew's objective: draw Viet Cong fire from My Lai, so helicopter gunships could swoop in and take out the enemy gunners.

Thompson spotted gunfire but found no enemy fighters. He saw only American troops, who were forcing Vietnamese civilians into a ditch, then opening fire.

Thompson landed his helicopter to block the Americans, then instructed his gunner to open fire on the soldiers if they tried to harm any more villagers. Thompson and two other chopper pilots airlifted villagers to safety, and he reported the slaughter to superiors.

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Originally posted by skdadl:
And do you believe, Rufus, that it is up to you to enforce that sudden recognition (re-cognition) on the psyche of another?

Do you?

The psyche of an other, the state of whose psyche, the stability of whose psyche, you cannot possibly know?

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I don't. But I waffle when I see everyday Americans following their idiot leader like sheep, doing what they're told. Those who voted for Bush are directly, even if they're ignorant of the fact, responsible for death and destruction, and all because they're just believing what they're told and doing what they're told. Would I feel sorry for them if they had a little "shock therapy"? Yes. But sometimes I think that all of us in North America would be well off to become subjects in an experiment like this in order to kickstart our critical thinking skills.

You're right that it's not up to anyone to be the superior one and be responsible for the good of someone else's psyche. And I don't like the fact that it focused on just working class people and that the "carrot" was money they probably needed. Rich and upper middle-class people would (and do!) screw over others in order to do what they're told for their rewards too. After all, who buys SUVs and more clothes than they'll ever wear out, and buys larger suburban sprawl houses than they need, and consumes 80% of the world's resources, KNOWING that the rest of the world suffers for it, just because they're told that if they want to show the world they've arrived, they have to buy a big house, and a big car, and live in the right neighbourhood, and wear the right clothes (replacing them every season, because you wouldn't want to be humiliated on What Not To Wear!), and have just the right interior design (which also should change every other year at the very least so your home doesn't look "dated")...

Yeah...sometimes I think maybe we should all go through that experiment as a wake-up call. But if we said it was ethical based on that reasoning, then you know that no rich person would ever be selected for it. It's usually poor and working class people who get victimized by these type of experiments.

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Originally posted by Michelle:

It's usually poor and working class people who get victimized by these type of experiments.

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Fair concern, though I question whether this could be called "victimization", given that the vast majority of participants were very glad they had participated. I would like to know about the effects on the 1% or so who expressed regret about having participated. If they showed signs of significant psychological harm further down the line, then I'd have to say they were victimized and that the experiment should not be repeated, otherwise I'd say it's ok. I suspect, though, that if anyone had been seriously damaged by this experiment the critics would be pointing this out.

Someone should repeat the experiment, except that, this time, all participants draw lots for which side of the window they'll be.
Would the 'teachers' react the same way if they knew they might have been 'students'? Or only if they had to trade places for the next round?

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Originally posted by nonesuch:

Someone should repeat the experiment, except that, this time, all participants draw lots for which side of the window they'll be.
Would the 'teachers' react the same way if they knew they might have been 'students'? Or only if they had to trade places for the next round?

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One other complication enters the picture, though. Nowadays most volunteers for these kind of studies are recruited on university campuses, and there'd be a significant risk of recruiting volunteers who are familiar with the experiment. And if you screened for this, with a question like "have you heard of the Milgram Experiment", you might prompt people to look up the original study, which would invalidate your results.

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I'm half-way down the correct side of the fence, but only through my disapproval of all experimentation on live subjects. I'll condemn this, as soon as others who condemned it come out firmly against organ transplants on pigs and pain-studies on rhesus monkeys.

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I've never had much use for the behaviourists, either ( for ratomorphizing people, as Arthur Koestler put it). But....

I wonder if perhaps we have too much concern for our psyche and not enough for our soul. I wonder whether, in avoiding damage, we might not also be avoiding maturity. I wonder whether we give ourselves too little credit.
True, it's not up to Milgram - and certeinly not up to me! - to decide when and how someone should be forced to confront hir own nature. But it's likely to happen sometime. Maybe better in the benign, controlled environment of a laboratory than at the scene of a car accident?

Is the experiment ethical? I can see both sides, but I think it's OK as long as the subjects give informed consent in advance to a broad series of conditions about the test, i.e. you may be given inaccurate information, the subject of the experiment may be different than described, etc. The only issue with me around Milgram is the deception argument and I think the consent form described above would address that concern.

I don't think the argument that the subjects could suffer psychological harm is valid, you could make that argument about all kinds of tests, questionnaires, etc. For example, I believe there are tests where subjects are shown violent images or pornography and then asked whether certain types of behaviour are acceptable, to test the "desensitization theory" that exposure to images of this kind distorts our moral judgments about real-life violence or sexual abuse. Those kinds of tests could be just as disturbing to the subjects as the Milgram experiment.

The scary thing to me is that the Milgram experiment would likely turn out even worse today, especially among Americans. Michael Adams' recent book Fire and Ice , which is an excellent survey of public opinion trends in Canada and the US, has some very ominous results for Americans about the growing acceptance of violence as a normal fact of life and an acceptable way to get what you want. The US support for these views is much higher than in Canada, and all of the survey data in the book is pre 9/11, so it is not a pretty picture. Maybe we need another Milgram experiment to wake us up from this nightmare!

[ 04 December 2004: Message edited by: West Coast Lefty ]

[ 04 December 2004: Message edited by: West Coast Lefty ]

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You're right, of course: there's a world of difference between hapless victim and willing participant; between a dumb animal and a self-aware human; between grievous bodily harm and a psychological study.

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This brings up something that's disturbed me for a long time: A fair bit of the knowledge we have of human anatomy and physiology comes from experiments on unwilling human subjects. I refer to the "experiments" done on humans by doctors in Nazi Germany and on prisoners of war by Japanese doctors.

The disturbing part is this: We tend to obscure the origin of such knowledge. I remember being quite upset by this when my Biology 12 teacher mentioned that rather nasty factoid, as I had always been under the impression that such work had been done on volunteers in the 1950s.

The famous "electrical signal triggering a memory" experiment, in point of fact, had been done by a German doctor on a Jewish woman in his custody at an internment camp in the mid-1930s.

The stage play, which became a short movie, certainly played that angle. I remember seeing it, geesh, decades ago.

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For example, I believe there are tests where subjects are shown violent images or pornography and then asked whether certain types of behaviour are acceptable, to test the "desensitization theory" that exposure to images of this kind distorts our moral judgments about real-life violence or sexual abuse. Those kinds of tests could be just as disturbing to the subjects as the Milgram experiment.

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Originally posted by Agent 204:
Actually it's in the Milgram thread I linked to above.

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Under the heading of this thread I became interested in how circumstances could make good intentions go array? Here a public view about “doing the right thing” and fighting Communism in Vietnam, or, fighting in Iraq?

Many of our minds were astonished when pictures of a soldier yelling,” he’s got a gun he’s got a gun,” shooting a injured man.

It was remincient of some televised picture show, where the cop after plants the gun, to validate his story. In this case, the validation was stress from the previous days fighting? Loosing his buddy?

So I hear of this dramatic story of some helicopter interceding between the guilty and the innocent of a tragic story gone wrong.

Over and over in my head I kept say, ” Kelly, Kelly” as if to ring a bell of remembrance, so doing my research I punched in the My Lai incident and true to the calling for this memory, to bring "the name," to the proper light.

My Lai Massacre
The villages of central Vietnam known collectively as My Lai have been stamped by history as places of horrific acts of war. More than 500 people, many of them women and children , were slaughtered here by American G.I.s on March 16, 1968. On that fateful day the angry and frustrated men of Charlie Company, 11th Brigade, Americal Division entered the village of My Lai. "This is what you've been waiting for -- search and destroy -- and you've got it," said their superior officers. A short time later the killing began. When news of the atrocities surfaced, it sent shockwaves through the US political establishment, the military's chain of command, and an already divided American public.

And with this enlightenment, the name, “Lt. William Calley ”

So we see where justification would seek to bring the idea of a helicopter pilot saving the day, and “true honor” from that same war on communisms in, somehow manifesting itself in a bad situation?

There is no doubt, that giving the circumstances, for youth to engage itself in such a struggle for life and line to a free and democratic world, the distinctions of struggle to live will circumvent all the rights and realizations of goodness in America?

If you get your hands dirty, and place yourself in these situations, the moral line between justice, and an immoral distruction of that justice, seems to go hand in hand? Doing the right thing?

But in the end these wars, made moral youth into misfits who brought back very bad scenes of life? Trying to fit back into society, how should they vent what was immoralizing wrong with and the taking of life? Sadistically, and rightously?

Would we as a scoiety be any better, witnessing the insignificance of life. Whereby the suicide bomber used as the sign of a freedom struggle, is promised Allah in a heaven of it's own kind? How can, "SUCH MORTAL MEN KNOW?"

How much more irresponsible has the Americanization, been over top of these views of a Islamic world? That wants such a religion to rule under the guise of fighting a war for independance? Seek to kill it's own kind under the illusions of a war for rightousness?? The Islamic workld is being used as e American people have been.

So we see where such techniques used by opponents, to either side, lists the help of fueling public anger, to justification. Islamic rewarding, lead by poor journalism instigates killing people and rioting? Or some American view, of the Kurds being wiped out by Saddam Hussien? Shall we lead a war of rightousess, "kill and kill," so the right view is held?

So how do you step back from the whole thing, and not be lead by such dramatizations? Ones used by media to fuel the emotive force of illsuionment, to raise this into a force of anger and action?

Let us not be fooled by either side.

Where is this "reason" to see beyond the limitations, of our emotive world has for us? Is there a better intellectual developement, that would say, the brutal wars of our day have finished? We will not circumb to the Milosevics, and ethnic cleansing, in a modern world?

[ 20 May 2005: Message edited by: forum observer ]