Do the ends justify the means as Milgram claimed following the critisim of his obedience authority experiment?

Psychology





Do the ends justify the means as Milgram claimed following the criticism of his obedience to authority experiments ?


Gillian Codling 21 October 2003







Following the horrors of Nazi Germany, it was a widely held belief that the German people were different in the fact that they would obey authority regardless of the actions they were asked to carry out.
Stanley Milgram, a Psychologist, conducted a study at Yale from 1961 – 1962 to test this theory to show that society on a whole is obedient to authority. Milgram made people believe they were entering a study investigating memory and learning when in fact it was a study in obedience.
There were to be two participants in this study, a teacher and a student under constant observation by an experiment official dressed in a white lab coat. The student was strapped to a chair and the teacher would read a list of pairs and then read them back. If the student got one wro...