...Obedience to Authority Making a significant contribution to social psychology, Stanley Milgram focused his studies on authority, specifically on how individuals react to it and are obedient to it. His groundbreaking and famous experiment surprised the world of social psychology, as well as society as a whole (Blass, 2002). Throughout this paper, the reasoning behind Milgram’s study of obedience to authority will be discussed. Additionally, the experiment will be explained, beginning with the formulation and ending with the results. Lastly, the influence of the experiment on social psychology, as well as current research on this topic will be covered. Historical Perspective To gain a better understanding of Milgram’s substantial contributions to social psychology, an examination of the historical period in which he started his career is necessary. According to Mastroianni (2002), World War II had just begun and everyone was still traumatized by the alarming reality of what was happening during the war in Europe. As the Nazi concentration camps were being discovered, the world began to find out about Hitler’s plan to purify the “supreme race” (Mastroianni, 2002). The most shocking part of the holocaust was the plans that Hitler had were being implemented (Mastroianni, 2002). Due to the unfolding events happening during World War II, Blass (2002) pointed out that there were many unanswered questions at the time. As a society, people just could not understand how one person...
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...Malicious ideologies have enabled groups of people to inflict inhumane violence on other members of society through compliance to authority. Such historical events of massive genocides include the Holocaust; where Nazi soldiers killed six million innocent Jewish people based on their political and ethical reasoning. Troubled by situations of this nature, Stanley Milgram held a collection of experiments that his book “Obedience to Authority” outlines. Milgram tells us that “the aim of the study was to find when and how people defy authority in the face of clear moral imperatives” ( 4). Milgram found that there are social forces which allow populations to commit morally conflicting acts against other populations. The fundamental variable for this influence is ideology; which is defined in Webster’s dictionary as “a systematic body of concepts, especially about human life or culture”(“ideology”). Ideologies accompanied by social contagions, admit ordinary individuals to transgress in inhumane conformed evils. The obedient subjects of Milgram’s studies and the Nazi soldiers alike are not all necessarily sadistic psychopaths. Rather, they’re a result of ideological social conformity. It has been a commonly accepted idea that those who participated in the holocaust were all individually psychopaths, but conformity to a corrupt authority’s dogma influences ordinary people to behave malevolently. Between 1941- 1945, fifty-five thousand Nazi soldiers worked at death and work camps...
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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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...Obedience, Authority and Moral Conflict Thomas E. Colley ENGL 213, P11: Writing in the Social and Natural Sciences Dr. Joan O’Leary January 28, 2010 Obedience, Authority and Moral Conflict In the 1963 report, “The Perils of Obedience,” psychologist Stanley Milgram detailed the results of experiments on the obedient response of individuals to the commands of an authority figure while experiencing moral conflict. Milgram conducted his experiments with diverse subjects in many countries. The trials consisted of three participants: the learner, the teacher and the experimenter. Witnessed by the teacher, the experimenter strapped the learner to an apparatus that appeared to be “a miniature electric chair.” The teacher tested the learner on his ability to remember the second word of a pair when prompted by reading the first word. Seated in front of an instrument panel in a separate room, the teacher administered an electric shock of increasing intensity to the learner for any memory errors. Milgram provided a detailed description that left little doubt that the shock and intensity administered was the result of the teacher’s manipulation of this device. Unbeknownst to the teacher, the learner was part of the trial and responded to the shocks in an increasingly agonizing display. Milgram’s findings, which directly contradicted his predictions, demonstrated full compliance in 60-85% of the participants. Obedience in the face of moral conflict was directly...
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...Conformity, Obedience and Authority Discipline within the Uniformed Public Services is very important; they have responsibilities to the public concerning their safety and well-being within society. Discipline is used in all sectors of the Public Services; this means that they are more likely to do what is required of them even if they disagree with what they’ve been asked to do. However, it can always be written in the report afterwards so it is made clear to those in the higher ranks who may read it. Discipline ensures that all Uniformed Public Services and the public are not put in unnecessary danger. The need and role of discipline within the Police In the police the role of discipline is essential. This is because should Members of the police wish to abuse his or her power, they can’t do so as easily as there are consequences that have been put into place to reduce it happening. For example, if a police offer pulled someone to the side and requested to search them, the individual has the right to request a reason for the search. The officer would need to have a good reason. Good reasons may be the individual looks like a suspect pending investigation or they have a strong reason to believe that the individual is carrying illegal substances on their person. This is a very good thing because the police used to be able to stop anyone without giving reasons. During 2010 and 2011 in England the number of stop and searches that then lead to arrests was over 60020 individuals...
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...A person’s reasoning for performing actions and obeying orders is not usually based on one factor but many. Obedience has been a subject of experimentation and question for much of history and modern times, is no different. A person’s seemingly inherent willingness to obey orders even when they go against the person’s own ethics is affected by the person’s own inherent tendencies, the environment in which they act, and their relationship with the superior. A person starts obeying orders the day they are born. A person, right away, is told what to do by their parents who they trust. Obedience is instantly instilled in a person, whether it is between them and their parent, their teacher, etc. “For a significant part of an individual’s life,...
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...Psychologists aim to break through previous understandings of the human mind, but there is always a question as to whether or not the tests go too far. Milgram intended to break down the understanding of why people allowed the Holocaust to happen, but many people question the necessity of his experiment. In the article Some Conditions of Obedience and Disobedience to Authority, we learn that Milgram set up an experiment to see if the subjects would shock someone to the point of physical harm in order to obey the authority of a scientist. The fact of the matter is, in order to understand things they must be tested. Whether or not this experiment seemed like a necessity, it would have eventually been carried out in some fashion in order to understand an event such as the Holocaust. Milgram examined the obedience...
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...Comparative Critique Obedience and Disobedience has been a part of key moments in history. Many have studied forms of obedience to learn how it affects people and situations. For example, Stanley Milgram conducted a well-known experiment in which the subject, named the “teacher” must shock the “learner” every time he doesn’t remember a word pair from a memory test. The focus of this study is on the teacher, and whether they will administer killing shocks when told to by an authority figure. Another well-known experiment is the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo. A group of college boys were separated into two groups, prison guards and prisoners, and were put into a mock prison to test how obedience plays out in a prison setting. Many others have studied obedience and discussed key aspects of them. In Erich Fromm’s “Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem”, Fromm discusses varieties of obedience and disobedience. He argues that Similarly Theodore Dalrymple examines blind disobedience to authority in his article “Just Do What the Pilot Tells You”. Dalrymple argues that there needs to be a balance between obedience and disobedience. Fromm begins his article by pointing out that for centuries people believed that disobedience is a vice and obedience is a virtue. He goes on by stating that in actuality obedience and disobedience can be either a vice or virtue depending on certain situations. He defines the different varieties of obedience and studies how...
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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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...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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...Obedience to Authorit Obedience to Authority Obedience is a term that can take place in many forms and with diverse individuals, especially with those who are authoritative figures. With many forms of destruction and life-threatening violence taking place during the middle part of the 20th century, many psychologists and scientists took interest in how ordinary individuals reacted to individuals in authority. One psychology in particular, Stanley Milgram, conducted a series of experiments investigating individuals’ obedient behavior to authoritative figures, whether positive deeds or acts of violence. This paper will summarize Milgram’s famous research as well as analyze the most current research of conforming to authority. Additionally, this paper will examine the current research on Milgram's findings from the early part of the 1960s. Summary of Milgram's Research Stanley Milgram (1963) was a social psychologist who set out to investigate human obedience, especially following the Second World War and in particular, the Holocaust (Milgram, 1963). Milgram’s interest was to conduct a study to answer the research question, are Germans different? However, as Milgram began to develop a tool used for studying obedience, he soon discovered that all individuals are remarkably obedient to people in authority. Milgram chose a naive subject to administer a dangerous electric shock to a victim, which releases voltage ranges from 15 to 450 (Milgram, 1963). Throughout the experiment...
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...Running Head: Psychological and Motivational Factors Involved with Obedience Psychological and Motivational Factors Involved with Obedience Crimes The dynamics of obedience have been researched for decades in an attempt to explain what causes humans to commit atrocious acts such as the Holocaust and why crimes of obedience are so prevalent in society. Are all people capable of committing crimes of obedience given the right situation? Is there a certain disposition or combination of personality traits that leads to crimes of obedience? Situations are unique and dispositions vary; attempting to distinguish what causes these occurrences is a complex task that has been the subject of numerous studies, yet no concrete answers are found. Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments ignited the flame of a subject that, instead of diminishing over time and becoming obsolete as a result of improved methods and new ideologies, has remained at the forefront of social and behavioral psychology. Modern research faces the critical challenge of attempting to study obedience under much more restrictive guidelines than previous studies; the results that are produced can only hope to shed light on one component of obedience and use other studies to synthesize a more complete explanation. The predecessor to all of this modern research was the Milgram obedience experiment and all of its variations. It has remained a fixture of social psychology for so long for several reasons: the...
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...Authority and obedience in the workplace May 3, 15 Authority and obedience in the workplace Obedience represents the order in human nature; it reflects the positive outcomes of our life. No organization can function without some measure of obedience to authority. A degree of power in certain individuals or groups is desirable for the proper functioning of society. Authority and obedience are two terms that often come associated to each other. The Oxford Dictionary defines authority as “the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience” or “the power to influence others, especially because of one’s commanding manner or one’s recognized knowledge about something”. While obedience, is defined as, “compliance with an order, request, or law or submission to another’s authority”. The following is from a website that easily shows how authority, obedience, and respect get confused in the workplace, “In the workplace, power over others is often mistaken for authority. (Bier, D 2001). Often times those in an authority position in the workplace confuse their position with control and power, which is not the case. When this happens those who work within the organization tend to feel some type of resentment for that individual in the leadership position. To respect someone is to show them consideration because of their position or place in your life. The Bible tells children to respect their parents, church members to respect their pastors, citizens to respect...
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...Discipline Assignment 3 Conformity, Obedience and authority 27th November 2015 In this assignment I will outline the terms conformity and obedience using references to the public services. I will then explain why they are important and relate them to Asch, Milgram and Zimbardo’s studies. Finally I will describe authority and its relation to the public services. 3.1 Conformity Conformity is when someone acts or behaves in accordance with another/ prevailing social standards, attitudes or practices. Following social norms (the unwritten rules of society) is a type of conformity. Social Norms are a common practise which everyone takes part in, even if it is unintentional. An example of a social norm is going to the back of a que, instead of walking past everyone to the front as we know it would not be accepted by others to do so. Most people conform to fit in or be liked by everyone. It is most common for people with low self-esteem to conform as there is a need for social approval, people who do not integrate tend to stand out and feel lonely in today’s society so they believe they need to conform to become a part of a group. Conformity takes place in every discipline environments, especially the uniformed public services. The Army, for example, issue their soldiers all with the same uniform and administer them with a daily routine. This type of conformity is so every soldier is treated equally and gain similar skill sets and knowledge. The routine the soldiers are given...
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...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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