Evaluate the extent to which you think that risk to human participants has been necessary for advances in our understanding of Power and Obedience. Power and Obedience are topics of great interest for social psychologists as they shape the way many aspects of society function. Destructive obedience, in particular, has been a topic of interest for researchers. Many obedience studies have been conducted to explore the phenomenon of obedience to authority, often violating many ethical principles and basic human rights in the process. Today there are ethical guidelines that researchers are meant to abide by to get their study approved as an 'ethical study' (APA, 2010). Through an analysis of two famous but controversial studies that were considered highly unethical, Milgram's (1963) obedience study and Zimbardo's (1969) Stanford Prison Experiment, we can weigh up the risks to human participants against the contribution to social psychology research, our understanding of historical events, and the positive impact on society today Obedience experiments by Milgram (1963) and Zimbardo (1969) have been criticized for being unethical by causing risk to human participants. Many of the ethical principles psychologists are required to abide by today (APA, 2010) were violated by these researchers. The Principle of Beneficence and Non-Maleficence is violated throughout both experiments, with a considerable amount of emotional and psychological stress to participants. In Zimbardo's prison simulation, there was extreme psychological and physical violence against prisoners. This was evident in the signs of distress, "uncontrollable bursts of screaming, crying and anger" displayed by participants (Zimbardo, 1969). Similarly, Milgram's shock administering task involved distress for people unwilling to harm another person. He argued, however, that he did not expect people to obey and experience pain as a result (Milgram, 1964). Moreover, Zimbardo failed to respect the rights and dignity of participants as he did not allow them to withdraw or refuse any task they were asked to do. He argued that this was important to get significant results from the experiment. Another ethical principle violated in these obedience studies was their lack of integrity. Zimbardo's prisoners lost trust in the experimenters when the contract was repeatedly violated and they did not intervene (when there was physical harm done). Zimbardo also failed to reduce risk of harm as there was no debriefing immediately after the experiment, which may have had negatively affected the participants' well-being. However, despite the violation of ethical principles, debriefing sessions and post-experimental questionnaires from a few weeks, months and years later suggested that the experiment had no long-term negative impacts on participants. A major critic of Milgram's study, Baumrind (1964) argued that valid informed consent was not taken by participants before the study. He also used a considera...
