SOC 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 27: Stanley Milgram, Nazi Crime, Syphilis

• School: Irvine Valley College
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC 1
• Professor: brown

Document Summary

There is no shortage of egregious examples of unethical research; they range from injecting cancer cells into people without informing them of it to not treating poor. African-american men in tuskegee, alabama, for syphilis so that researchers could learn about the natural progression of the disease in the human body. However, ethical issues do not just arise in the form of unethical research the ethics of research can be debated from many vantage points. Stanley milgram, a social psychologist at yale university, was interested in the effects of authority on obedience. He was intrigued by the war crime trials, during which nazi soldiers had denied responsibility for their actions on the basis that they were simply following orders. In 1961, milgram devised an experiment in which he could witness whether people were willing to harm others simply because a researcher told them to do so.