🍃 Branches (key topics): Milgram Experiment, Media Studies, Communication Research (Rutgers MCM)
🍂 Roots (Status): #seed
🌰 Source: Baumrind, D. (1964). Some thoughts on ethics of research: After reading Milgram's" Behavioral study of obedience.". American Psychologist, 19(6), 421.

Field Notes

• "the experimenter seldom perceivse in more positive terms an indebtedness to the subject for his services, perhaps because the detachment which his functions require prevents application of the subject as an individual" (Baumrind, 1964: 421)
• "Where the experimental conditions expose the subject to loss of dignity, or offer him nothing of value, then the experimenter is obliged to consider the reasons why the subject volunteered and to reward him accordingly" (Baumrind, 1964: 421)
• "The laboratory is an unfamiliar setting and the rules of behavior ambiguous compared to a clinician's office" (Baumrind, 1964: 421)
• "Because of the anxiety and passivity generated by the setting, the subject is more prone to behave in an obedient, suggestible manner in the laboratory than elsewhere. Therefore, the laboratory is not the place to study degree of obedience or suggestibility, as a function of a particular experimental condition, since the base line for these phenomena as found in the laboratory is probably much higher than in most other settings" (Baumrind, 1964: 421)
• "Thus experiments in which the relationship to the experimenter as an authority is used as an independent condition are imperfectly designed for the same reason that they are prone to injure the subjects involved. They disregard the special quality of trust and obedience with which the subject appropriately regards the experimenter" (Baumrind, 1964: 421)
• "it is potentially harmful to a subject to commit, in the course of an experiment, acts which he himself considers unworthy, particularly when he has been entrapped into committing such acts by an individual he has reason to trust" (Baumrind, 1964: 423)
• "the subject's personal responsibility for his actions is not erased because the experimenter reveals to him the means which he used to stimulate these actions. The subject realizes that he would have hurt the victim if the current were on. The realization that he also made a fool of himself by accepting the experimental set results in additional loss of self-esteem. Moreover, the subject fidns it difficult to express his anger outwardly after the experimenter in a self-acceptant but friendly manner reveals the hoax (Baumrind, 1964: 423)