Deception In Stanley Milgrim's Article 'Perils Of Obedience'

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December 13, 2011 Eng. 21A Essay 4 Deception Deception by definition is causing someone to believe something that is not true, typically in order to gain personal advantage over someone. That is what Stanley Milgrim did to his test subjects; he deceived them in order to get results for his studies which directly caused many of them to suffer from mental issues afterwards. In Stanley Milgrims article “Perils of Obedience,” the author demonstrates the morals of science and if it is ethical to run deceptive tests on naive subjects (aka human beings). I believe that what Milgrim did in his experiments were unethical to his naive subjects because he lied to them to get what he wanted, it caused them to have mental break downs when they left the test room, and because he abused the trust people have with scientists. What Milgrim did in his experiments was he would take random people from the town of New Haven and basically say to them that he…show more content…
Society tends to trust scientists because they are the ones who usually want to better mankind, but if scientists conducted their experiments the way Milgrim did, people would not trust them, they would not want to be a part of them and it would break the general belief when testing on an actual person to not be treated as a subject but as a human being. We want scientists to actually care about our safety and wellbeing during their experiments. Clearly Milgrim did not, “The laughter seemed entirely out of place, even bizarre. Full blown uncontrollable seizures were observed for 3 subjects. On one occasion we observed a seizure so violently convulsive that it was necessary to call a halt to the experiment…” (375) It seems like a scientist who cared about the well-being of these people would actually call a stop before they started violently having a seizure, but to Milgrim it was as if he was testing his experiment on

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