...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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...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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...Abu Ghraib During the war in Iraq that began in March 2003, personnel of the United States Army and the Central Intelligence Agency committed a series of human rights violations against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. These violations included physical and sexual abuse, torture, rape, sodomy, and murder. The abuses came to light with reports published in late 2003 by Amnesty International and the Associated Press. The incidents received widespread condemnation both within the United States and abroad, although the soldiers received support from some conservative media within the US. The administration of George W. Bush attempted to portray the abuses as isolated incidents, not indicative of general US policy. This was contradicted by humanitarian organizations such as the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, stated after multiple investigations that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were not isolated but were part of a wider pattern of torture and brutal treatment at American overseas detention centers, including those in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay. There was evidence that authorization for the torture had come from high up in the military hierarchy, with allegations being made that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had authorized some of the actions. The United States Department of Defense removed seventeen soldiers and officers from duty, and eleven soldiers were charged with dereliction of duty, maltreatment, aggravated assault...
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...Lewis Eng. 122 May 8,2013 Blind obedience Society often view obedience as a good quality or trait to have; employers want obedient employees and parents often wish for obedient children. Being obedient means that an individual shows respect for an authority figure and will carry out the instructions they are given; when someone is obedient they are widely accepted by society, because they do whatever it is that society asks of them. But obedience carried too far can have disastrous consequences to both the individual and society; this is referred to as blind obedience. Blind obedience is when a person follows authority without even thinking about the consequences that the order to which they are obeying carries. It’s as if the authority figures are puppeteers and the people blindly obeying them the puppets. Puppeteers and their puppets best illustrate the relationship between the authority figure and the people doing horrendous actions, because being obedient is the right thing to do. So many events in history have proven how inhumane human beings can be when following authority. Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted one of the most controversial experiments in history, in attempt to demonstrate how individuals can lose themselves to an authority figure. Milgram’s experiment was called “Obedience to Authority.” Theodore Dalrymple wrote an article titled, “Just do What the Pilot Tells...
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...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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...Conformity and Obedience Conformity: Conformity is a type of social influence or compliance in belief or behaviour in order to fit in or it could be known as behaviour in accordance with socially accepted conventions (also known as social norms) which could be standards or regulations within the public services such as dress regulations within the armed forces or the police. Compliance means the act of conforming or obeying an order or request and compliance with common practices is conforming to a common or reoccurring act, an example of this is when a recruit within the armed forces sees other soldiers saluting officers or standing in attention and this act keeps occurring the recruit would soon comply with those common practices. Social norms are what seem normal in a group or society, this could be acts or beliefs. Most people comply with social norms so that they do not feel an outcast within their group and to not seem abnormal within the group. An example of this could be that a group of friends seem to think it is normal to bully people, one of the members may see this as a terrible act but to not feel an outcast like the bully victim, the person complies with the social norm and starts to bully with the rest of the group. Self-esteem is how an individual may see their own worth and how much self-respect and confidence that person has towards themselves, a person’s background or upbringing may have an effect on their self-esteem. Someone who has a low self-esteem...
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...Psychology Obedience Behavior For doing a similar like the one like Milgram did there many different tactics you can use to enforce obedience behavior instead of pain like; you could use fear especially someone has an extreme phobic of something or fear something could happen if they don’t do their job. The power of fear conqueror many things especially if someone doesn’t have a strong will power to conqueror there fear or it doesn’t has to do with you could have fear through the power of having love for something the will enforce fear. Since you enforce the fear in the person even if you have subject doing the job you told him to do, one of a few things could happen they will question you about what they’re doing is wrong or even unmoral hearing you tell them to keep doing that may be humiliating them hearing you the authority figure saying to continue will be reassuring since they are getting paid for the job and hearing they will not get in trouble make the person more convincing to keep doing his job and not listen to the other subject when he says he want to stop that’s when you have the other subject use the power of fear on that person to make him comply. Which for this to work on the person, he has to be in a believable environment. Another angle the experiment could happen if the first subject is with a group of people seeing everyone is doing the same job with without anyone refusing they’re more willing to be obedience to comply to the unmoral deeds...
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...Bible 105 November 16, 2014 Covenant Obedience The first three kings of Israel were Saul, David, and Solomon and each had their own strengths and weaknesses. Each king obeyed and disobeyed God, receiving blessings and punishments as a result. At the end of Solomon’s reign, due to his disobedience, Israel was a divided nation. The rise and fall of each king depended on their covenant obedience. During the early years of Israel, the nation was looked after by judges. The Israelites were very disobedient and would continually turn their backs on God until they needed him. God used several judges to bring the Israelites from underneath the oppression imposed on them by various groups such as the Moabites, the Ammonites, and the Philistines. Each judge had a specific quality that would have made them less than worthy for a great position in the eyes of the people. For instance, Ehud was left-handed, Gideon was a coward, and Samson was an adulterer but God deliberately choose the least likely candidates to prove that anything is possible when you trust in Him. According to Judges 21:25 (HCSB), “in those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did whatever he wanted. This cycle of disobedience to God, and God raising up a judge, eventually led the way to kingship. Because a judge could only partially and imperfectly administer Torah (legislative function), executive justice (executive function), and condemn lawbreakers (judicial function), a king was needed who could...
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...Existential Obedience I would like to present obedience in a very elemental way, largely from the heart, without reference to the usual distinctions made in defining it: the dissection of it into its component parts, the noting of its specific differences from other virtues, and its relationships to other virtues in the theological scheme of things. I want to regard obedience as it relates to living our life in union with and after the example of Christ, seeing obedience as a dynamic of our existence as creatures and children of God. The common denominator of anything said about obedience is this fact of Christian reality: obedience was the leitmotiv, the basic, underlying theme of Jesus as Son of God. "Here I am to do your will, O God." The Word was made flesh in obedience to God's plan, and Jesus as the incarnate word lived his life in obedience to the unfolding of that plan as revealed by the Spirit of God. Obedience provided the very sustenance of Jesus' life. He declared that the Father's Will was his very food and drink. He also described obedience to the Father as the criteria by which he qualified our love for Him: if you love me, keep my commandments. From the example of Jesus during his existence on earth we can discern this: obedience is always an individual's response to God's Will. To be obedient as Jesus, I must choose to conform or be uniform with what God desires of me. Another more basic way of saying the same thing is that obedience is my...
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...The Perils of Obedience by Stanley Milgram Stanley Milgram’s “ The Perils of Obedience” shows that some people can obey authority even when it requires committing terrible actions within their society. Milgram begins his essay by describing what obedience is and how deeply ingrained of a behavior tendency that it is. He then sets up an experiment at Yale University that will push the limits of human obedience. He has a “teacher” give out a series of simple word pairs for the “learner”. If the learner gets a word pair wrong then the teacher gives out a series of shock ranging from 15 to 450 volts. The teacher who is the real subject in the experiment does not know that the learner is a paid actor who does not receive any actual shocks. The motivation behind this experiment for Milgram was to test just how far people would go to obey the command of an authority figure. Milgram’s theory is that the subject will have total control of what they are doing and will disobey the authority figure when inflicting pain onto a hopeless human being. One of his subjects, Gretchen Brandt, is participating with the experiment when the learner got the word pair wrong she showed the self control to stop shocking to not continue. Milgram thought that this is how the majority of subjects would react, “Her behavior is the very embodiment of what I envisioned would be true for almost all subject”(Milgram, 44). Brandt simply wasn’t worried about rejecting the authority if it meant that she no longer...
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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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...The perils of obedience "Be quiet! Write this down." How often have you heard this, or something like it? We hear or come across commands, instructions, directions and orders every day. What is it that makes us obey (or disobey) them? Millions of people were killed in Nazi Germany in concentration camps but Hitler couldn't have killed them all, nor could a handful of people. What made all those people follow the orders they were given? Were they afraid, or was there something in their personality that made them like that? In order to obey authority, the obeying person has to accept that it is legitimate (i.e. rightful, legal) for the command to be made of them. Obedience is a form of social influence where an individual acts in response to a direct order from another individual, who is usually an authority figure. It is assumed that without such an order the person would not have acted in this way. Obedience occurs when you are told to do something (authority), whereas conformity happens through social pressure (the norms of the majority). Obedience involves a hierarchy of power / status. Therefore, the person giving the order has a higher status than the person receiving the order. Adolf Eichmann was executed in 1962 for his part in organizing the Holocaust, in which six million Jewish people, as well as gypsies, communists and trade unionists were transported to death camps and murdered in Nazi Germany and surrounding countries under Nazi control. Eichmann was...
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...Emanuel Coleman Professor Smicialas English 161 9 September 2014 The Perils Of Obedience “Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to.” (Milgram 631). In Stanley Milgram’s 1963 study Perils of Obedience, he finds that human beings, when ordered by an authority, will commit atrocious acts against another human being. He proves this through an extensive scientific study. In this study, he pulls from a multitude of different social classes and cultures. Asking, the subjects to bring bodily harm to another person in the form of increasingly stronger electric shocks, ranging from 15 to 450 volts. The role assigned to the test subjects is that of "teacher" and "learner."The learner is put in a room and strapped to an electric chair, the teacher is in another room where they can see the learner. The teacher is seated next to a huge machine that administers the shocks. The scientist starts commanding from near by. He begins by calmly demanding that the teacher shock the student if the student does not accurately repeat a set of words that progressively advance in difficulty. The results of his 1963 study were shocking, even the people he sought to predict the outcome, which includes a variety of people from psychiatrists to college students and middle class adults. Interestingly enough, Milgram states that, “with remarkable similarity they predicted that virtually all subjects would refuse to obey the experimenter” (Milgram 634)...
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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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...Introduction – Being disciplined in the UPS in the UK is vital in order to achieve Operational effectiveness throughout the country. Without discipline the country would be in a state of both social disorder and anarchy. Operational effectiveness is also important so that the UPS can prevent the country running into either social disorder or a state of anarchy. It keeps our country civilised. Outline – In this assignment I am going to cover the rank structure of 2 public services, including pictures of the rank slides by introducing and explaining the responsibilities of each rank, I am going to define discipline and talk about the rules and regulations needed for operation effectiveness, I am going to discuss social order, disorder and anarchy, I am going to answer a question of “why do orders need to be followed?”, I will discuss how maintaining discipline with rewards and punishments is effective, team spirit, and the rules, procedures, policies and legislations in the UPS in which encourage discipline. P1 Task 1 In my assignment I have done two separate rank structures in which I have attached to the back of this assignment in the form of two separate documents. P1 Task 2 1. Definitions of discipline 2. The necessity for rules and regulations (set standards and clear instructions =operational effectiveness) 3. Why orders need to be followed (control in dangerous situations =operational effectiveness) 4. Maintaining order with rewards and punishment...
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