Читать книгу Evaluation in Today’s World - Veronica G. Thomas - Страница 59

Biomedical researchers were not alone in engaging in unethical practices. There, too, are historical examples of horrific ethical violations occurring in social and behavioral science research. Such violations often resulted in psychological or social harm to participants including feelings of shame, embarrassment, loss of self-confidence, and depression. One of the most infamous such studies was conducted in 1961 by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. Participants were led to believe they were administering real pain through electric shocks to another participant as part of a learning experiment, which was designed to see if ordinary Americans would obey immoral orders as many Germans had done during the Nazi period. Baumrind (1964) noted that participants became distressed and nervous when they thought they were administering severe shocks, but when participants asked for the experiment to be stopped, the researcher in charge insisted that they continue. In the Milgram study, participants sustained no physical harm; however, they suffered shame and embarrassment for having behaved inhumanely toward their fellow human beings. Please reflect upon and discuss the questions presented in the textbox.