The experiment caused some of the participants to sweat, tremble, and stutter and in some cases seizures. Some people argue that this has ethical problems because they were not told this could have happened to them, and they felt as though that had to carry on because they were being pressured into carrying on by a scientist who had authority, even though they could have stopped. Therefore Milgram's study highlighted that 65% would administer shocks of 450 volts, as they were willing to obey orders to inflict
An example of where participants were misled was in Milgram’s experiment. Milgram lied to the participants by saying that the purpose of the research was to assist them on learning. However in reality it was an experiment to test people’s willingness to obey orders to inflict pain. Therefore it is unethical to cause psychological or physical harm. The lab experiment can also be said to be unrepresentative because it is mostly a study on small scale.
The lab experiment is proven to have a use in establishing cause and effect relationships, which is why positivist sociologists favor them more as they prefer the more scientific method. Although they favor then, positivist sociologists also acknowledge the shortcomings of a lab experiment as it is often unethical to control the experiment and the results can often not be accurate or representative to a wider population. Interpritivist on the other hand reject the laboratory experiments as they fail to achieve the main goal of validity and they say it us an artificial environment producing unnatural behavior. Although there are many advantages to lab experiments there are various practical problems with them. For example it would be almost impossible to control the variables that may influence a situation and although being able to control the environment/variables may seem like a good thing all its creating is an artificial environment.
The results showed that those who saw the violent version were less accurate in recalling information about the crime. This links back o Yerkes Dodson Law as it says that the more anxious you are, the less you are able to recall. The disadvantages of Loftus and Loftus and Burns are that they aren’t methodologically valid as it was a lab experiment and not a real life situation; also it wasn’t ethically valid as they were making people upset and deceiving people. Although there is research evidence to back up the Yerkes Dodson Law, there is also research evidence going against it. Yuille and Cutshall wanted to investigate eyewitness testimony in a real life setting.
The independent variable is controlled and manipulated by the researcher, in hope to affect the dependent variable and prove their hypothesis right or wrong. c) Suggest two criticisms of field experiments. (4 marks) Field experiments make it hard to verify that the causes that are identified are the real cause of the outcome. This is because the sociologist cannot control all of the variables in a scenario so it is hard to identify the correct causes.Field experiments do not usually gain the informed consent of the participants because it is thought that the participants will then act differently, due to it being an experiment and if they knew, it would 'give the game away'. d) Examine the reasons why some sociologists choose not to use experiments when conducting research.
“The Perils of Obedience” Obedience is defined as dutiful or submissive behavior with respect to another person or group of people. It is usually referred to as a positive aspect, but in the case of “The Perils of Obedience” by Stanley Milgram, in which obedience to authority causes other people harm, it can easily be argued as an extremely negative factor. In defense of her personal opinion about Milgram’s experiment, Diana Baumrind wrote “Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience” to demonstrate that obedience is not always the right action to partake in. Although the sources have extremely different views of obedience, they both have several of the same subtopics, including validity, sympathy, and conformity. In “The Perils of Obedience”, Milgram was trying to prove a point that shows how far someone will go to be obedient to the authority.
In doing so, those folks may be described as being civilly disobedient. Civil Disobedience is the refusal to obey a law or follow a policy believed to be unjust. (1) and is typically done in a non-violent way. Many have successfully practiced civil disobedience. Henry David Thoreau, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr., all took a stand for what they felt were unjust laws.
They speak only words, but no emotions and there is an absence of sympathy. Humanity is a problematic question in this situation, because doctors were trying to help their patients, and Vivian was among them, but she was not like a person with her own world, but only an experimental sample for tests, a piece of white paper for taking notes and studying her interesting disease.This system ironically sacrifices the well-being of individual patients, not necessarily with their full consent, for the research and professional interests of the physicians who appear to control it. They abuse the patients right for themselves so self-indulged in the increasing knowledge that is being retained and with no worry at no cost to them but at a considerable
Most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner. The result of the experiment is hard to believe many people would obey the order from the authority even though it is against the social moral or ethic. 2> There were a lot of things unethical about this experiment. The main one is that the participants were lied to
Second, the participants were deceived. According to ethical code of researches, participants should be completely informed what would take place during the experiment in the inform consent form before the experiment, but the researchers did not properly address all the situations to the participants. The violence was completely not expectable by the participants. From the perspective of ethical issue, it was wrong to conduct this experiment, but from the perspective of research, it is right to conduct this experiment. Therefore, I would say that it is worthy to conduct this experiment because the outcomes of experiment are very useful for the discovery of human behaviors.