Abstract

While Baumrind’s critiques of Milgram have contributed immensely to our reflection on experiments in social psychology that are premised on the use of a deceptive cover story, her account is problematic in two ways. On the one hand, blind assignment to treatment is widely accepted in clinical studies because it minimizes the artifact of placebo effect when subjects know which treatment they are being exposed to. Without deception, subject reaction in psychological experiments would be confounded by expectation effects. On the other hand, Milgram’s fear of subject contamination led him to fail to provide meaningful debriefings after subjects undertook what were, in some cases, very traumatic experiences. Archival re-analysis of his protocols suggests that this was an even more serious source of unethical treatment of subjects.

pdf