In Hofling's experiment, nurses in a hospital were asked over the phone by a bogus doctor to administer an overdose of a drug without obtaining authorisation. The nurse participants did not have an opportunity to give informed consent. In my opinion, this form of deceit was worse than Milgrams as they weren’t even aware they were involved in the experiment, so they certainly ha d not given consent.
Milgrams participants were further deceived during his experiment. They were informed that the shocks and the victims were real; similarly, in the Hofling experiment, as well as being unaware of their part in the experiment, the participants were deceived with a placebo drug. Modern ethical standards assert that participants in any experiment must not be deceived, and that they must be made aware of any consequences. In the interest of fairness, follow up research, performed after the experiment, indicated that there were no long term psychological effects on the participants. However, the fact that these people thought that they had caused suffering to another human being, could have caused severe emotional distress.
In both Milgram and Hoflings study, the protection of the participant’s feelings was not taken into consideration during the study, (although they were debriefed afterwards).
Protection of participants from psychological harm is the act of doing the best to ensure that participants do not come to psychological harm during or after the study. Whether this be stress or long term, it is important that studies avoid this in every way possible. It is said that the participants in Milgrams study displayed symptoms similar to a nervous breakdown during the experiment, and the authority figure was confrontational, and the recorded messages being played extremely distressing. The nurses were very much put on the spot, with no one to consult. The nursing council in America struck off the 21 nurses after the experiment, which shows they weren’t protected at all.
Another issue with the Milgram study is the participant’s ability to withdraw from the study. Physically they would not have been stopped from walking out of the experiment, but they were put under a lot of pressure by an experimenter, using words such as ‘You have no alternative, you must go on’. In Hoflings, the nurses could have refused to administer the drug, and had recently been given a memo outlining responsibilities with regards to medication. The difference is the Hoflings nurses did not know they were involved in an experiment, in their role as nurses; it is the norm to accept orders from the higher authority of a doctor.
A further ethical concern with Milgrams study was that the participants were filmed, without consent, which breeches confidentiality. However, they were aware they were involved in an experiment, and therefore knew that they were being observed. They offered themselves for the experiment when they responded in an advert in the paper looking for participants. Hoflings nurse were unaware of any involvement in an experiment.
In conclusion, both experiments breeched ethics, and the experiments would not be acceptable today. The ethics breached were very similar, and to answer the question posed is Hoflings more or less ethical? I am of the opinion that Hoflings although more ecologically valid, was less ethical, on the grounds of there being no consent whatsoever to the study.
