Psychology - Milgram's study was carried out was the horrifying events of the Second World War.

Another strength of the experiment was the fact that there was no actual physical harm brought to the victim, who was a confederate and no psychological harm to the subjects. This is shown by the fact that the subjects were given various psychometric measures to check if they were alright, a follow up survey showed the majority were glad to have been in the experiment and an examination of the subjects by a psychiatrist a year later showed there were no signs of long term harm.

One of the weaknesses of the experiment was that the experiment did bring about stress to the subjects and caused tension at the time. An example of this is that in the course of the experiment some subjects were sweating, trembling, stuttering, biting lips, and digging nails into their flesh, which are common signs of nervousness. This was unethical and breaks the ‘protection of the subjects’ law. In relation to the context of the study, it is worth noting that the Nazi execution squads were given extra rations of alcohol probably to counter the stress of their terrible acts would have produced in themselves.

Another weakness of the experiment was that it was not very ecologically valid in relation to everyday life for the subjects. A situation like that in Germany is not familiar to Americans because shocking people doesn’t normally occur. Therefore subjects may not have been deceived and were only responding to the demands of the social psychology experiment. For example the fact that the victim is a volunteer most probably contributed to the obedience rate because people may not have believed the victim to be a real victim since he had volunteered. So unlike in the holocaust where the Nazis knew they were hurting real victims, the subjects may not have been convinced the students were real victims and so the idea of hurting somebody who had volunteered for it might seem more reasonable to them.    

One of the changes that could be made to the Milgram study is to make the experiment more ecologically valid to everyday life. For example measuring the level of obedience by asking people to give up their seats on a train with the aid of a train attendant as the authoritarian figure. The situation would be more realistic to the subjects, improving the validity of the results because the experiment is taking place in a naturalistic environment, not in a lab and the subjects are not aware it is an experiment hence they would not conform to demand characteristics.

This would mean that the subjects would not act differently and the results would be more reliable. It would also make the experiment more ethical because it would not bring stress to the subjects as the orders they are following are not bringing harm to anyone else and so they would not feel guilty. However this would limit conclusions in relation to the context of the experiment since it would not be assessing if the subjects were willing to bring harm in the course of being obedient as the Germans had done but this would be difficult to achieve without breaking ethics. Overall the change to the experiment   would make the experiment more valid and ethical.