Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
As a college student, I was a “blind” subject in a psychology replication
study of Milgram's experiment on obedience and disobedience to authority.
The experiment was simple and ingenious. The researcher told us that the
experiment's purpose was to study the effects of punishment on memory. The
subjects supposedly played the parts of teacher and student. The “teacher” had
to teach the “student” a list of word pairs. The teacher was supposed to shock
the student every time the student erred in a response. The first deception,
therefore, consisted of misleading the participants about both the purpose of
the study and the complicity of the student—who was a supposed blind subject
but actually a member of the experiment team.
As the teacher, I sat in a booth facing the student, who was strapped in a
chair. The experimenter told me that I had the authority to shock the student
every time he produced an unsatisfactory response on a predesigned test. The
individual running the experiment said that he took complete responsibility for
anything that happened and that I had to participate in the experiment to receive
my credits. At that point, I walked out of the experiment. The experimenter and
the subject chased me down the hall, yelling, “Stop, wait a minute.” They apol-
ogized and offered to explain what was really going on in the experiment.
They explained that typically approximately 65% of the teachers simply
kept on shocking the individual—even after being told that the voltage
increased for every error and that the student had a heart condition—as long
as they were told that someone else took responsibility. They also told me that
no shock was actually delivered (a second deception). The experiment was
simply a test to see how far people would go if they were relieved of any
responsibility for their actions. (They also told me that I would receive the two
credits for the experiment even though my response was aberrant.)
The results of this experiment provided some insight into the behavior of
Nazis and others during the Holocaust. The method, however, left a bad taste
in my mouth and made me more cautious about taking part in any other psy-
chology experiments. The experiment also shaped my behavior in the other
experiments in which I did participate. I found myself routinely trying to
figure out what reaction they were looking for—and then giving the opposite
response. The researchers feared contaminating their study by sharing its pur-
pose with me. As a result, I and probably many other students with similar
responses deliberately contaminated several studies.
Ethnographers recognize this problem. They depend on the assistance of par-
ticipants throughout their study. Such highly controlled, deceptive tactics are
useful only for brief encounters. They are not useful in the long-term relation-
ships that fieldwork requires. In addition, ethnographers are interested in how
people think and behave in natural situations. Like any other researcher, anthro-
pologists worry that participants are trying to tell them what they want to hear
