Time to Reflect

Well, the time has finally come to write my final blog post for the term; it is hard to believe that it has already been nine weeks since I started this blog!  I have to say that this journey has been really insightful for me.  I have enjoyed it, and I appreciate the feedback that I have received along the way from my readers.  I think that in the future I will continue to blog after graduate school slows down or maybe after I graduate!  

For my final post, I would like to start off by discussing one of my favorite controversial experiments that I have had the opportunity to study this term: Stanley Milgram's shock experiment.  I watched a video this week that discussed the conception of experiment, as well as the results from the experiment, which were quite surprising at the time.

If you would like to watch the video, here it is:

I like to think that if I had been a participant in this experiment, I would have listened to my heart and not gone through with the shocking the other "participant" because it is wrong to hurt someone in order for a researcher to obtain data.  The participants in the study had no idea that they were not really hurting the "learners."  The "teachers" were under the impression that the shocks were gradually increasing in severity with each wrong answer that the "learner" provided.  What I found to be most interesting about this experiment was the four prods that the "experimenter" used to encourage the "teacher" to keep moving forward with the study.  I think that this is where the ethical line was crossed in this study because the participants were made to feel that they had to comply with the experiment, as opposed to being told that they could leave the experiment at any time.

The four prods that the experimenter gave the participants were as follows:  
"Please continue.  The experiment requires you to continue.  It is absolutely essential that you continue.  You have no other choice but to continue"  (McLeod, 2007).  

To me, the "experimenter" sounds like he would have been pretty convincing that the experiment had to continue, especially if he got all the way to the fourth prod.  This might have made it difficult for people to stand up and walk out of the room; however, there was a number of participants who did exactly that.  What do you think you would have done if you had been a participant in this study?  Would you have followed the "experimenter's" directions, or would you have rebelled and walked out of the experiment?  

On another note, this week we were asked what kind of advice we would give to a new or aspiring public servant, and this question elicited some thought-provoking responses from my classmates.  The main piece of advice that I would give an aspiring public servant would be to live and work by the Golden Rule, which means to treat others how one would want to be treated.  This kind of aligns with the duty-based approach of the ethics triad, which asks if you would want other people to make the same decision that you did.  An interesting piece of advice that one of my classmates posted was about failure and learning to move past it when it inevitably happens.  While not everyone will fail on a grand scale, I think his advice was solid because people are bound to encounter setbacks at one point or another during their public administration journey.  Instead of being discouraged by the setbacks, though, one should use the experience as a learning point and work on improvements for the next time.  I think it is unrealistic to think that we will never have any hardships in our careers because some aspects are simply out of our control.  When failures occur, we need to make the best out of them and learn from our bad experiences to be able to turn them into something positive for future endeavors.

I would like to wrap up this blog by sharing one of the most important aspects I have learned during this term.  In order to make decisions effectively, a person needs to look at the issue through multiple schools of thought in order to think about different approaches to the issue at hand.  The ethics triad, which considers three schools of thought (results-based, duty-based, and virtue ethics) is a comprehensive decision making tool that allows a person to make a well-rounded decision after they have contemplated all three schools of thought.  With that said, I know that I will be using this triad in the future to help me figure out the best way to handle tough decisions, and I hope that if you are unsure of how to handle a situation, you will use it, too.

Thank you very much for reading my blog.  I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

References:
McLeod, S. A. (2007). The Milgram Experiment. Retrieved from http://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html