ABSTRACT
In the 1960s, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram was interested in the issue of obedience to authority figures. In the early 1970s, Philip Zimbardo, a faculty member in the psychology department at Stanford University, was interested in prison psychology. In this 2007 study, several economists investigated bureaucratic corruption in India. The ethical problem is that if the volunteers were successful in getting their driver’s licenses more quickly, this would have had the definitely undesirable effect of potentially putting unsafe drivers on the road. A key ethical notion in research is that participation in a study must be completely voluntary. One of the things that made the Nazi cold temperature experiments so ethically heinous is that the subjects of the experiments were given no choice but to participate.
