Human Rights at Home and Abroad: Past, Present, and Future

harmed someone was high and even though it was temporary. There had always been the chance that the
effects could have been long term.
In researching Stanley Milgram I came across another of his lesser known experiments. In this
experiment he had a group of first year graduate students conduct an experiment. The experiment
consisted of the students going on the subway and asking a passenger for their seat. Dr. Stanley Milgram
was trying to explore the set of rules that we as human beings set but do not write down or verbalize. Our
sets of unwritten rules, like walking on the right side of the hallway, that are usually taught by
observation from generation to generation. The Milgram‘s students did not want to participate in the
experiment until one student named Ira Goodman volunteered to participate with a partner (Luo, 2004).
The students performing the experiment thirty years later say that they can still feel the anxiety
from the experiment. A couple of weeks before the article was published a pair of reporters replicated the
experiment. A surprising 13 out of 15 gave up their seats and one of the answers they got was, ―a
construction worker sneered to a male reporter, ―If you were a women, then…‖ he got up anyway‖ (Luo,
2004). This experiment was unethical because of the strain put on the students one student remembers the
feeling of wanting to vomit. While other students remember feeling faint but all the students that
participated and the reporters felt the sense that what they were doing was wrong. Dr. Milgram did not
even get useful information from this experiment in no way can we use what he learned to better our
world. Though I do know what it feels like to go against these unwritten rules. Even just walking down
the wrong side of the hall and making the people move over makes me feel anxious and upset (Luo,
2004).
Though some experiments are not always morally right we can take away positive information in
what we learned. We can put these findings into good use by being able to prevent guards at prisons from
exerting unnecessary humiliation on inmates. We also use the knowledge from Asch‘s experiment to help
children when their peers are pressuring them into doing drugs. We also have the knowledge and
understanding of obedience in which Milgram focused on in his electric shock obedience experiment.
Even with the good things we learn from these immoral experiments it leaves the question. Is it ok for
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