PSYC 255 Week 8 DB Forum 5 Example

Discussion Board Forum 5: Thread and Two Replies

PSYC 255 Introduction to Research, Discussion Board Forum 5 (thread and two replies)

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt and the classmates' posts are composites standing in for the course's own forum; the textbooks, Scripture and published synthesis are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for PSYC 255.

Thread

In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram told volunteers they were taking part in a study of learning and had them deliver what they believed were increasingly severe electric shocks to another person whenever he answered incorrectly. The learner was an actor who received no shocks, but many participants showed intense stress, sweating, trembling and nervous laughter, while an experimenter calmly told them to continue. Could such a study be approved today?

Applying the principles in our reading, Crawford (2019) emphasizes informed consent, protection from harm, the right to withdraw and honest debriefing. Milgram's procedure strained each one. Participants were deceived about the study's purpose, many experienced severe distress, and the experimenter's scripted prods pressured them to stay when they wanted to stop. Debriefing did reveal the deception, but it could not undo hours of distress, and some participants later reported that they had not fully understood the explanation.

The studies did produce important knowledge. Haslam et al. (2014) synthesized 21 of Milgram's conditions with 740 participants and found that 43.6% continued to the maximum shock overall, but that obedience depended heavily on context: the experimenter's directiveness, legitimacy and consistency, group pressure to disobey, and how close and personal the relation to the learner was. What the synthesis shows is that obedience rose and fell with the arrangement of the room and the people in it, which means the situation, more than character, drove the result.

My judgment is that the original procedure would not be approved today, and should not be. Respect for persons made in God's image means a researcher's curiosity cannot outweigh a participant's well-being (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Genesis 9:6). The knowledge was valuable, but much of it could be pursued with safer designs, as later researchers have shown, and an ethics board today would rightly insist on them before approving the study.

Classmates: what safeguard do you think would have made the biggest difference?

Reply to Gabriel

Gabriel, you argued that Milgram's findings are too important to lose and that we should keep teaching them even if the studies were unethical. I agree, and I think the field has found a middle path. Burger (2009), for example, halted his version at 150 volts, because in Milgram's data people who pressed past that switch nearly always went on to the end, screened out people likely to be harmed, told participants repeatedly that they could leave and debriefed them immediately, and obedience rates were only slightly lower than Milgram's. Haslam et al. (2014) show that many situational factors shaped obedience, which means safer studies can still test those factors one at a time. Do you think such modified studies capture the same phenomenon, or does lowering the stakes change what is being measured? I lean toward thinking they capture the decision to begin obeying, which may be the most important moment.

Reply to Hailey

Hailey, you wrote that deception is never acceptable in research, because it treats participants as objects. I respect that conviction, and Scripture's call to speak truthfully to one another (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Ephesians 4:25) gives it weight. Still, I wonder whether all deception is equal. The APA Ethics Code permits deception only when a study's value justifies it and no honest alternative will work, never about anything that would affect a person's decision to take part, and with the truth explained to participants promptly afterward (American Psychological Association, 2017). A memory study that does not reveal its hypothesis in advance seems very different from Milgram's, where deception was paired with severe distress. Would you accept mild deception if participants learned the full truth within minutes and could withdraw their data?

References

American Psychological Association. (2017). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct (2002, amended effective June 1, 2010, and January 1, 2017). https://www.apa.org/ethics/code

Burger, J. M. (2009). Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? American Psychologist, 64(1), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0010932

Crawford, R. (2019). Introduction to research: Less fright, more insight. Kendall Hunt.

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Haslam, N., Loughnan, S., & Perry, G. (2014). Meta-Milgram: An empirical synthesis of the obedience experiments. PLOS ONE, 9(4), Article e93927. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0093927