...Everyday, people conform to social norms in order to be accepted into a certain group or society. Although everyone conforms to social standards, not everyone realizes that they do. However, one might register this social conformity if they simply ask themselves the question, “why do I act the way I do?”. For example, when teenagers are surrounded by their peers, they might find it acceptable to drink alcohol and use profanity. On the other hand, when in a school setting, teenagers would not find this behavior acceptable because they are surrounded by authority figures. Therefore, behavior that is acceptable in one setting is not tolerable in another. Consequently, the tolerability of certain behaviors differs upon the setting and can be influenced...
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...Outline and evaluate one or more explanations of why people obey. One of the main reasons that people obey is the feeling of relinquishing personal responsibility. During the course of Milgram’s experiment, many participants enquired about responsibility; who would be to blame if any harm came to the learner? In many cases, informing the participant that the experimenter was completely responsible was reassurance enough to encourage the participants to continue with the deadly electric shocks. In many cases, where harm has come to someone as a result of obedience, the perpetrators have justified their actions by the lack of responsibility. The participants most likely to obey are those who feel they have relinquished personal responsibility to an authoritative figure, and obedience levels are often diminished when the rate of personal responsibility has increased. It has also been suggested that obedience levels drop radically when participants are informed that they must accept full responsibility for their actions. One way that we can prove that this is the case, is by looking at variations of Milgram’s experiment. In the initial experiment, the ‘teacher’ could not see the pain that they were supposedly inflicting on the ‘learner,’ only hear them. They felt responsible when they heard the cries of anguish, but as the experimenter had accepted responsibility, many people continued administering the shocks. However, in a similar experiment where the ‘learner’ was in the room...
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...habitual to conform to the orders of authority in order to promote obedience as a social virtue. This often leads man to equate disobedience with sin, which traces as far back as the biblical account of Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. However, neither disobedience nor obedience could exist without the power of an authority figure to dictate the rules and restraints of submission. In his article “The Perils of Obedience,” Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram asserts that authority as a whole is an essential component of social living and that obedience to this authority is a social behavior unknowingly entrenched in a majority of the population. Milgram’s scientific review explores this claim as he shares data from his experiment in which subjects blindly obey someone they believe to be an expert, simply due to his prompting. Supported with reactions...
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...associated with this area of psychology • Knowledge and understanding of ethical issues associated with this area of psychology. |Content outline | |Social influence |Conformity (majority influence) and explanations of why people conform, including informational | | |social influence and normative social influence | | | | | |Types of conformity, including internalisation and compliance | | | | | |Obedience to authority, including Milgram’s work and explanations of why people obey | |Social...
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...Borough of Manhattan Community College City University of New York Department of English Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem by Erich Fromm For centuries kings, priests, feudal lords, industrial bosses and parents have insisted that obedience is a virtue and that disobedience is a vice. In order to introduce another point of view, let us set against this position the following statement: human history began with an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be, terminated by an act of obedience. Human history was ushered in by an act of disobedience according to the Hebrew and Greek myths. Adam and Eve, living in the Garden of Eden, were part of nature; they were in harmony with it, yet did not transcend it. They were in nature as the fetus is in the womb of the mother. They were human, and at the same time not yet human. All this changed when they disobeyed an order. By breaking the ties with earth and mother, by cutting...
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...Obedience is a form of social influence that occurs when a person yields to explicit instructions on orders from an authority figure. Obedience is compliance with commands given by an authority figure. In the 1960s, the social psychologist Stanley Milgram did a famous research study called the obedience study. It showed that people have a strong tendency to comply with authority figures. Milgram’s Obedience Study Milgram told his forty male volunteer research subjects that they were participating in a study about the effects of punishment on learning. He assigned each of the subjects to the role of teacher. Each subject was told that his task was to help another subject like himself learn a list of word pairs. Each time the learner made a mistake, the teacher was to give the learner an electric shock by flipping a switch. The teacher was told to increase the shock level each time the learner made a mistake, until a dangerous shock level was reached. Throughout the course of the experiment, the experimenter firmly commanded the teachers to follow the instructions they had been given. In reality, the learner was not an experiment subject but Milgram’s accomplice, and he never actually received an electric shock. However, he pretended to be in pain when shocks were administered. Prior to the study, forty psychiatrists that Milgram consulted told him that fewer than 1 percent of subjects would administer what they thought were dangerous shocks to the learner...
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...interactions on behavior. In his experiment, he wanted to test the limits of the participant's compliance and obedience, under conditions of extreme distress. Milgram wanted to have a better understanding of how far people would go to obey orders given by someone in an authority role; even if that meant that, the orders contradicted their personal beliefs. The subjects of the study believed they had to obey what the authority figure's guidance that was conveyed to them. The guidelines were to shock other participants ultimately if they answered incorrectly; even silence was an incorrect answer. The experiment, to this day, is one that is studied, because it showed how many people, no matter gender, economic stance, or race, would inflict pain, and even death, to obey someone who has more authority than they do. The subjects were given a set of rules to abide by. The study was to see how the subjects responded to the effects of punishment on memory. The Milgram Experiment There were two main pieces of this study; there was the "learner" and the "experimenter". There was a list of teachers, the teachers were told to give shocks to the learners, the shocks were not real, and however, the participants did not know this. The participants thought the students were being shocked with high amounts of volts, with that knowledge, some obeyed what Milgram or the authority figure, told them. “Two rooms in the Yale Interaction Laboratory were used - one for the learner (with an...
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...One reason people obey is because legitimate social power is held by authority figures whose role is defined by power held by society or the situation, for example police officers. This usually gives them the right to exert control over the behaviour of others, and others usually accept it. We feel obliged to obey these people because we respect their credentials and assume they are correct in what they are doing. A strength of legitimate authority being an explanation for obedience is that there is supporting evidence from Milgram’s study. When he carried out his experiment in a run-down office block with the experimenter wearing a suit rather than a lab coat, obedience levels dropped to only 48% of participants giving the 450v shock, compared to the original 65% when in the prestigious Yale University setting. This is a strength as it suggests that participants no longer believed in legitimate authority of the experimenter and so were less prepared to obey his orders. A limitation of using Milner’s results is that his research may be culturally or historically biased. Some critics say that the results show more about the historical and cultural climate of the USA at the time -when McCarthyism was at large and people feared being accused of being communist spies- than fundamental psychological principles. The study was conducted when obedience was seen as a good thing and this may be why many of the participants went along with what the experimenter told them to do. This is...
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...Obedience to Authority, written by Stanley Milgram, is a book about a highly controversial experiment. The experiment has 3 people in it; with two of them being a part of the experiment. The subject will be told to give the victim shocks up to a dangerously high voltage. The experiment is set up to see if ordinary people will be obedient or defy an authority figure to harm the victim. The experiment is first set up at Yale University to see how the students who are very intelligent would act to authority. Milgram, who made the experiment, set this experiment up because he was curious to as if humans will do cruel and out of their usual behavior things just because an authority figure says so. First, to completely understand the experiment...
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...reasons that I gained an interest in psychology many years ago. After studying his experiments and reading “Obedience to Authority” about six years ago, I truly began to admire his Avant-garde ways of approaching the science. I am an avid student of social issues and studying this “rock star” of social psychology has heightened my senses and allowed me to look beyond what the masses consider socially unacceptable in the name of discovery. The following is a reply to a video entitled “Into the Mind: Mind Control” which focuses on famous experiments conducted to discover the “whys” behind certain behaviors. While the video highlights a number of psychological experiments, this short work will focus on Stanley Milgram and answer the following: what are the ethical inferences and did his results justify the manner in which the experiment was conducted? According to Milgram (1984), “The case touched on a fundamental issue of the human condition, our primordial nightmare. If we need help, will those around us stand around and let us be destroyed or will they come to our aid? Are those other creatures there to help us sustain our life and values or are we individual flecks of dust just floating around in a vacuum” (Memorable quotes). The Experiment: Why this Approach? At a rudimentary level, human behavior and all of the questions that revolve around it is why psychology exists. Man studies the differences between the minds of individuals to discover what makes person...
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...Running Head: POWER OF SITUATION AND OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY The Power of the Situation in Milgram's Obedience Experiments Ahsan Chishty Ohlone College POWER OF SITUATION AND OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY The Power of the Situation in Milgram's Obedience Experiments Stanley Milgram is a name universally known for the Yale professor who shocked the world with his experiments on obedience. In 1961, Milgram along with many other colleagues devised an experiment after receiving a grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct an experiment in response to the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Milgram wanted to know if Germans under the rule of authority figures did exactly what they were instructed to do by those of higher power than them due to the fact that many of the explanations for the Nazi atrocities was simply that Nazi soldiers were following orders. After placing an ad in the New Haven Register for a learning experiment on the study of memory. According to Thomas Blass (2009), offering participants $4.50 and a paid bus fare for an hour of their time seemed to be the biggest factor that attracted people to the ad but several of the participants also agreed to be a part of the study to learn something about themselves, expand their curiosity about psychology, or because they were fascinated by memory and hoped to understand it better through an experiment like Milgram's. The subjects were introduced to a man in a lab coat who...
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...Response to Authority The phrase ‘don’t tell me what to do’ is one of the first negative responses that we learn as kids. For example, when a person’s brother or sister tries forcing a task out of him or her, the response is usually similar to that. However, what if that reaction is not learned, but merely a natural response to authority? In the podcast ‘The Bad Show’, they explore that very question with experiments and found that humans do not take to authority unless their mind trusts and respects where the authority comes from. Humans will obey authority only if they can justify the commands given. In the 1960’s, Stanley Milgram was interested in human response to authority. His interest was piqued when war criminal Adolf Eichmann stated on trial that he was simply “following orders” when he ordered the death of millions of Jews. The idea made Milgram wonder if humans were obedient to major authority or if people used authority to justify doing bad things. He conducted an experiment where he collected 40 participants ranging from every end of the social spectrum. He put each individual in a room where they were asked to shock another person whom they called the ‘student’, every time that he or she got an answer wrong. One of the things they found in the experiment was that the participants continuously shocked the students, simply because they were told to do so (Cherry, “The Milgram Obedience Experiment”). The question posed from this experiment is: why do humans respond...
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...Personal conscience; the complex cycle of which a human uses to evaluate a potential execution of specific behaviours and a psychological ability to understand why something is right or wrong regarding a prearranged concept or belief. For instance, John sees a nice phone at the mobile store, but he does not have enough money...should he steal the phone? What are some components that could influence him to steal, or vice versa? Personal conscience is not John fears to be caught stealing, but John takes account of his individual ethics he holds himself against as an adequate member of society. But the real question is; would John have stolen the phone under the instruction of an authority figure? Would he still have gone through the same thinking...
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...Conformity and Obedience in the 20th Century The desire to be accepted and belong to a group is an undeniable human need. But how does this need affect an individual? Social psychologists have conducted numerous experiments and concluded that, through various forms of social influence, groups can change their members' thoughts, feelings, and behavior. In her essay "Group Minds," Doris Lessing discusses our paradoxical ability to call ourselves individuals and our inability to realize that groups define and influence us. We, as humans, hold individualism in the highest regard yet fail to realize that groups diminish our individuality. Lessing writes, "when we're in a group, we tend to think as that group does... but we also find our thinking changing because we belong to a group" (p. 334). Groups have the tendency to generate norms, or standards for behavior in certain situations. Not following these norms can make you stand out and, therefore, groups have the ability to influence our thoughts and actions in ways that are consistent with the groups'. Lessing's essay helps set the context to understand the experiments that social psychologists Solomon Asch, Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo conducted to explain conformity and obedience. Solomon Asch's experiment in "Opinions and Social Pressure" studied a subject's ability to yield to social pressure when placed within a group of strangers. His research helped illustrate how groups encourage...
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...Milgram Experiment Why do people follow orders to carry out immoral acts even when they know it is wrong? Under what circumstances are normal everyday people obedient to authority? Research Aim: To find out if people would obey an unjust order to inflict pain on someone else. Research Hypothesis: That people would not be willing to inflict pain on one another simply because they were told to do so. Variables: IV, DV, Extraneous: Independent Variable Dependent Variable Extraneous Variable Proximity of the learner Amount of shock administered Closeness of the authority Duration of the shock Prestige of the setting Speed of the response Presence of rebellious peers Research Method: Forty male participants were selected after replying to a newspaper ad for an obedience experiment. At the beginning of the experiment they met a man called Mr Wallis, a mild-mannered man in his fifties; who was then hooked up to a charge generator. He was in fact a confederate. The participant sat in another room and tested 'Mr Wallis' on word pairs, when he got one wrong, the participant was to give him an electric shock. These increased as more incorrect answers were given from 15 to 450 volts. Each time a shock was given a pre-recorded sound played indicating Mr Wallis in varying degrees of pain, until after 315 volts there was an eerie silence. Each time they tried to stop Milgram himself encouraged the participant to continue (this was the authority figure). Subject Selection...
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