Milgram Vs. Zimbardo

Milgram Versus Zimbardo

Unethical behavior can be defined in many ways. In the psychology experiments of Stanley Milgram and Phillip Zimbardo, the above word takes meaning as a sick and twisted representation of "learning" in society. Psychology and the world of science must experiment to learn, but what measure will they take to get there?

I believe Stanley Milgram's "obey at any cost" experiment is more unethical that the experiment of Phillip Zimbardo. Although the experiment only lasted for the "victims" an hour, it had countless negative effects that were much more unexpected than that of Zimbardo. Milgram thought that humans have a tendency to obey other authority figures over themselves. For his experiment men came in and one became the "teacher" who knew nothing behind the scenes, where the other became the "learner" and was really in on the whole test. The teacher would read a series of questions and the learner would answer; when they answered wrong the teacher gave them an electric shock (as they were hooked up on the other side of a wall) and started hearing more viscous screams the stronger the voltage became. Without force, but instead simple commands to continue on, 65% of people delivered the highest shock. Although the learner received no actual pain, if the teacher continued on to the highest voltage he would think the learner was dead. At the end of the experiment people were told the whole story, however, the bad effects this had been mostly hidden inside the heart of experiment subjects.

Milgram's subjects would now spend the rest of their lives questioning things they would have never thought twice about before. Who am I? Would I actually kill someone just because I was told to? How much power do other individuals hold over me? Will I ever be sane again? Questions of the soul could continue on like this though their death. A person works their entire life to create their own spirit and what makes them whole, and to have this all destroyed in an hour without any knowing is the definition of unethical. Zimbardo's subjects also suffered psychological disturbance, remembering their numbers and treatment from the fake prison of their own experiment, however, they were educated beforehand on the circumstances. All subjects in Zimbardo's experiment were told that their American rights may be infringed, yet they agreed to continue on. It is also a known fact that men are more aggressive, so giving them harsh roles that they stereotype as violent and crude is the same as giving them permission to let testosterone rule and act savagely. The Zimbardo experiment ended after six days due to it getting out of control, and although they didn't know the situation would escalate to the point the subjects experienced physical abuse, using a little common sense about the male species could