What Is The Milgram Experiment Unethical

Is it fair to deceive humans in an unethical psychological experiment in order to receive new information? This is a question that I believe needs to be asked when one thinks of the Milgram experiment, a psychological study set up in the U.S in 1965. American psychologist Stanley Milgram held an experiment in order to see how severely ordinary human beings could knowingly cause harm to another human. This idea came about when he studied the holocaust in Germany in WWII, and then in the Nuremberg war trials years later, and gained an understanding that many of the Germans soldiers who participated in the death of many innocent Jews said they only did so because they were ordered by an authority figure. They claimed that they only acted out of
Milgram wanted to know whether this ruthless and entirely unethical behaviour was unique only to Nazi Germany during WWII, or whether ordinary American men would also be capable of knowingly causing lethal harm to another human being.

Milgram conducted an experiment to find an answer to his wonderings. He recruited 40 males from New Haven in the U.S to participate at the prestigious setting of Yale university, with the participants under the impression that they were helping with an experiment in “learning and punishment”. After the initial arrival, the participant meets the “Experimenter”, a confederate of Milgram’s, who introduces him to “Mr Wallace”, another confederate, who the participant believes is just another volunteer. The participant and Mr Wallace were told they would be assigned the roles of a teacher or learner through a simple way of drawing a piece of paper with a position on it from the Experimenter’s hand. Both
These guidelines made any further replications of the experiment impossible, which proves how damaging the experiment truly was. The emotional scarring this experiment had on the participants was severe, leaving them to wonder whether they were evil people themselves. Though the participants did not actually cause harm to anyone, the trauma with believing that they were at the time was significant, and even though at the end of the process it was revealed that no one was harmed, they learned that they were capable to hurting someone else if they were asked to. Can this emotional pain caused by the thought to be causing physical pain justify the overall experiment? How can one determine whether the questioning of someone's own opinions, beliefs and making them feel like they had no choice but to stay in the experiment was worth the results given from the