Is Milgram’s Deceptive Research Ethically Acceptable?

Most people concur with most ethicists that lying is intrinsically wrong. Thus, to be ethically acceptable a lie must be justified by appeal to a higher good. Milgram defends, and his supporters condone, the use of deceptive experimentation on the grounds that the knowledge gained is a higher good that could not be gained by any alternative methodology. In several essays I criticized Milgram’s obedience studies as violating the human rights of participants in psychological research to be treated honestly and kindly. This essay reaffirms my ethical objections to Milgram’s paradigm and to deceptive experimentation in general. It relates Milgram’s study of obedience to my own research of effects on children of parents’ assertion of beneficial and detrimental kinds of power. It criticizes current professional codes of ethics and institutional review boards that offer investigators loopholes to obtaining informed consent by requiring only that (they claim) alternative procedures are “not feasible” and their study is “significant,” hurdles too easily circumvented by investigators who choose to employ research paradigms that, like Milgram’s, lie to subjects when obtaining “informed” consent. When in the scientific endeavor methodological rigor conflicts with the protection of the fundamental human rights of the subjects, the compromise should be made by the researcher in the rigor of the methods he or she chooses to use rather than by the use of lies and deception to control confounds.