During and after an experiment the participant must have the right to withdraw. They should be able to leave the experiment at anytime and they can request to have their data removed from the experiment. Baumrind says that the participants could not exercise their right to withdraw due to the pressure the experimenter applied. Milgram used four ‘prompts’ to get the teacher to continue, ‘Please continue’, ‘The experiment requires that you continue’, ‘It is absolutely essential that you continue’ and ‘You have no other choice, you must go on’. Baumrind argues that this makes the participant think they do not have the right to withdraw themselves from the experiment. Milgram replied to this comment by saying that he thought people would resist the prompts given the extremity of what the experimenter was asking.
BPS guidelines say that researchers have a responsibility to protect the participant from any physical and psychological damage. The risk should be none greater than that of everyday life. Baumrind believes that there was clearly an unacceptable level of stress caused to the participant and that there was the potential for permanent psychological damage and that self esteem could be lowered. Milgram responds by saying that he did not intend stress or harm to be caused. However he is strongly criticised because he continued variations of the experiment even though it was clearly harming the participant.
All experimenters should always debrief their participants after an experiment so that they know that they didn’t do anything wrong. Participants should always leave in the same frame of mind with which they came. Baumrind accused Milgram of not debriefing his participants well enough. Milgram argues against this point by saying that he reunited the teacher and learner at the end of the experiment to show that the teacher had not inflicted any harm, this revealed the true intention of the experiment. Milgram also says that the majority of people were happy to have taken part in the experiment, only 1.3% said they were sorry to have taken part. Milgram also had psychiatrists talk to the participants after the experiment, and up to a year later to make sure there was no long term psychological damage.
Aronson believes that Milgram was so heavily criticised partly due to the fact that people were shocked by the results not what happened in the experiment. People did not expect to find such high obedience rates. However the experiment is still considered controversial.
The way in which Milgram conducted the experiment, the methodology, has also been criticised. The main critics of the methodological issues are Orne & Holland. They criticised Milgram on the grounds that the experiment had a lack of experimental realism, it had mundane realism, the participants showed demand characteristics and there were issues with generalisation.
Orne and Holland said that Milgram’s experiment had a lack of experimental realism. This means that people didn’t take the experiment seriously because they didn’t think it was real. However Sheridon & King performed a similar experiment using puppies instead of a human learner. The participants complained about the procedure and some people cried, this shows that the experiment had high experiment realism because people took it seriously. In this experiment 75% of participants continued to administer up to the maximum shock, even after the puppy had stopped responding to the shocks. This experiment was also highly criticised in a similar way to Milgram’s due to the same ethical issues
Another are of Milgram’s experiment that Orne & Holland criticised was mundane realism. They argued that the experiment lacked ecological validity and that it didn’t reflect a real environment. They said that if the study had ecological validity the obedience levels would have been lower. If the study uses an artificial task, participants may believe that their decisions don’t have major consequences. Therefore the behaviour shown in the experiment may not reflect how the participant would react in a realistic situation. However in Meeus & Raaijmaker’s interview experiment the obedience levels were still very high. This shows that even in an experiment that has high ecological validity, people will still obey under certain conditions.
Orne & Holland also believed that the participants of Milgram’s experiment showed demand characteristics. This is where the participants behave in the way in which they believe the experimenter wants them to. Milgram suggested that the participants acted the way they did because they were acting as an agent for the experimenter, removing responsibility. This meant that the participants believed they would not be responsible if the learner was harmed. In Hofling et al’s experiment nurses were given orders by an unknown doctor by telephone to administer a high dosage of medication to a patient, without the necessary paperwork. 21 out of 22 obeyed the doctor’s command. This was a field experiment and showed high ecological validity. The nurses were not aware that they were in an experiment and therefore could not have shown demand characteristics, and the obedience rate was still extremely high.
Milgram’s experiment is also criticised under grounds of generalisation. Orne and Holland argued that Milgram did not use a representative sample. At first this was true because Milgram only used male participants from the USA. However after the criticism he extended his experiment to include females as well and found that the obedience levels remained the same. If Milgram had only included males in his study then his results could not have been generalised to apply for all people. Similarly to the way in which people argue the artificial task cannot be applied to real life situations.
Culture can also play a large part in the way in which people act during psychological experiments. Larsen and Perrin & Spencer showed this by replicating Asch’s paradigm. Conformity rates had dropped when it was repeated 20 years later. They also significantly decreased when the study used British students. Smith & Bond carried out many other cross-cultural variations of Milgram’s study. In 1968 they carried out the study in Italy using students, they found a higher obedience rate of 85%, however the maximum voltage was 330V, less than the voltage in Milgram’s original study. In 1971 they demonstrated the study in Germany, which again found an obedience rate of 85% from 101 males. In Australia in 1974 there was found to be only 40% obedience for males and 16% for females. Foster believes the reasons for the lower obedience rates are due to the fact that the victim was a student with long hair, the experimenter had a different status to that in Milgram’s experiment and the female participants were asked to shock a female victim. Other studies in the USA in 1974, Spain in 1981, Austria in 1985 and Holland in 1986 showed high obedience rates of 85%, 90%, 80% and 92% respectively. Smith & Bond’s results showed that cross-cultural variations of the experiment can alter the rate of obedience. This shows that Milgram’s results cannot be generalised across the population.
In conclusion, Milgram was criticised by Baumrind under the ethical grounds of not obtaining informed consent, deceiving his participants, not giving the right to withdraw, not protecting his participants against harm and not fully debriefing. Orne & Holland criticised the experiment’s methodology saying there was a lack of experimental realism, it lacked ecological validity and the participants displayed demand characteristics. Milgram was further criticised because his sample was not representative of the population and he didn’t demonstrate his experiment in other cultures.