"Some of the Procedures Used by Social Physiatrists Such as Asch, Zimbardo and Milgram are Ethically Questionable".

While Zimbardo’s experiment is a very extreme example of a fairly unethical experiment, there have been many other experiments in which nobody has come to any real harm. Asch, who recruited a number of participants to judge the length of lines, tried such an experiment on conformity. Within the participants were a number of stooges who were there to purposely give the incorrect answer. Asch wanted to see if people would conform to the wrong answer, and they did. After using varied numbers of stooges Asch found that the more stooges giving the wrong answer, the higher the conformity but if the participants couldn’t see each other, conformity dropped. The only thing that could be considered unethical is that the participants were no fully informed and didn’t know that there would be stooges in place but in giving them this information Asch would have defeated the point of the experiment. Asch’s simple but effective experiment showed that people generally preferred to conform rather than go against other people and in interviews people revealed that they were worried that there was something they hadn’t spotted or understood correctly and they were afraid of looking silly. Asch’s experiment had no ill effects, but still didn’t reveal anything that an educated guess couldn’t have.

However, an experiment performed by Milgram will always be a grey area as far as ethical issues are concerned. In his original experiment, Milgram took forty participants and labelled them “teachers” and “learners”. Milgram then told the participants that they were taking part in a learning exercise and that every time the learner got a question wrong or took too long to answer, the teacher was to shock them with the voltage rising each time to see if they would learn more quickly.

 
However, the participants labelled “learner” were really actors and Milgram’s real intention was too see how far people would continue shock when urged by authority figures. Milgram and many other psychiatrists agreed that people wouldn’t go very far and would stop very quickly. They were very, very wrong. Around 64% of participants went all the way to a fatal 450volt shock and all of them went to at least 300volts. Although many people verbally dissented, they still continued. Afterwards, many people had to go into counselling for a short time because they believed they had killed someone. However, no lasting damage was done to any of the participants and only 1.3% of all participants had negative feelings about it afterwards while nearly all others were glad they took part. Milgram’s experiments opened doors to the mind that had never been touched before and got the Germans (or more specifically, the Nazis) off the hook over the whole World War Two mass pogrom issues. These factors lean most people to see Milgram’s experiment as acceptable, but he wouldn’t have been allowed to do the same thing today and there were surely better ways to gain the same results, which make many people feel that Milgram should never have performed his experiments.

Many of the social experiments performed do have many ethical issues and many of them have crossed lines as far as morality is concerned. However, very few of these experiments taught us nothing about the mind and conformity. Still, one experiment that crosses the line is one too many and some procedures should be seriously considered before being deemed ethically acceptable.

Scott Sinfield