ETHICAL GUIDELINES: Milgram's study has received criticism for violating ethical guidelines on several counts. For one, he misled participants by leading them to believe the study concerned the effect of punishment on learning rather than on obedience. The rigged role allocation was also deceptive. Due to the task's nature, Milgram failed to protect his participants from psychological harm, as evidenced by the significant distress that many experienced during the experiment, which may have persisted even after the study's conclusion, leading to feelings of guilt. Some of Milgram's critics argued that these breaches could tarnish psychology's reputation and jeopardise future research.

EXAM HINT: It should be noted that Milgram did provide participants with the right to withdraw at any time, as they were informed prior to the study. Therefore, questioning this ethical issue may not be appropriate. However, it is worth considering that the experimenter's verbal prods may have made participants feel obligated to continue, potentially undermining their right to withdraw.

ECOLOGICAL VALIDITY: Milgram's study has also been criticised for lacking ecological validity. The laboratory setting he used is markedly different from real-life situations involving obedience. In everyday situations, we are more likely to obey relatively harmless instructions rather than administer electric shocks. Thus, we cannot generalise Milgram's findings to obedience in everyday settings or assume that individuals would follow less severe orders to the same degree. Milgram has countered this argument, however, by claiming that the laboratory can represent broader authority relationships that occur in real-life situations. For instance, Hofling et al. (1966) discovered that nurses in a hospital context were surprisingly obedient to unfounded orders from a doctor.

POPULATION VALIDITY: Milgram's study has also been criticised for lacking population validity. This is because he used a sample of 40 male American volunteers from a broadly individualistic culture. As a result, we cannot generalise the results to other populations or use them to explain female behaviour in relation to obedience. Therefore, we cannot conclude that individuals from different cultural backgrounds, or female participants, would respond similarly to what Milgram originally observed.

CONTROLLED CONDITIONS: One strength of Milgram’s study is the high level of control achieved in the laboratory setting. Each participant experienced the same standardised procedure, including identical instructions and scripted prompts from the experimenter. This high level of control allowed Milgram to conduct systematic variations of the original experiment, helping him identify how factors such as proximity, location, and uniform influence obedience.