The definition of obedient is, “complying or willing to comply with orders or requests; submissive to another's will.” Whose “will” must people be submissive to? Is it ever okay to not comply with a request? In many situations, people are forced to comply with others request, making them obedient. From childhood to adulthood obeying authority is a trait every person is taught to have. They are being forced to respect every other person and their requests. Such as in the film, A Few Good Men, individuals unconsciously perform obedience to higher ranked personnel, although it’s already enforced. Bringing into the light, no one is born obedient. Being obedient is learned. Who must we be obedient to, how can you tell, what makes it okay to obey? …show more content…
On a more modern aspect of things police brutality shows a big role in taking advantage of the authority they’re given. As we know the police are given a title where they define safety, law, and justice, but who is showing them? We only see what they allow us to see, but what is going on behind the closed door? As an experiment takes place in a jail it is shown that when authority is given to the wrong people things can get chaotic. Guard A of the jail expresses, “ I harass ‘Sarge’ who continues to stubbornly over respond to all commands. I have singled him out for the special abuse both because he begs for it and I simply don't like him (Zimbardo, 115).” Since the guard is unsatisfied with the prisoner, in general, he takes advantage of his ability to boss around the prisoner and punish him. This situation tends to happen quite often. Disliking a person influences the way they are treated because they cause disguise and hate. Now imagine hating someone, but having authority over them. Maybe you give them extra work to do, give them the dirty work, cause them to get in trouble, or even get them hurt. But when the tables are turned and you're in charge of a rebellious prisoner, what then? A prisoner in an experiment shows us what would happen, refusing to watch his efforts become destroyed, by taking action upon authority, “ He grabbed me, …show more content…
Could it be the title, the uniform, the way they look? Maybe it’s even the name tag. As we look into Stanley Milgram’s experiment it becomes easy to acknowledge what causes the public to listen. After the experiment concludes Milgram notes, “ The essence of obedience is that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes, and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions (Milgram, 87).” Each person obeys an authority because they feel like it is okay to do so with no pressure on themselves. What takes away this pressure? As each experimentee is told to inflict pain upon another human being they consider what makes it okay to do so. For instance, as a child if someone tells you to perform an act and you get in trouble for what you were told to do, a child would say, “They told me to do it.” Here it is the same instance. The experimentees are able to put full responsibility onto the shoulders of the experimental scientists because they were told to commit the action. This made them believe they won't get in trouble for their actions. As the experiment took place Milgram knew what might cause each individual to consider it okay. This way Milgram had one of the experimental scientists express to the experimentee, “The responsibility is mine. Correct. Please go on (Milgram, 83).” Reinforcing that all responsibility will
Milgram’s generation needed conclusive answers about the “final solution”. Standard ethics in modern day psychology state that participants in any experiment must not be deceived, and that they must be made aware of any consequences. In fairness, research performed after the experiment, indicated that there were no long term psychological effects on the participants. However, the fact that these “teachers” thought that they had caused suffering to another human being, could have caused severe emotional
Throughout experiment 12-13, Milgram wondered if the person who gives the orders would change; would the amount of obedience increase? His results indicated that yes, the amount of obedience increased. In experiment 12, the learner demands to continue with the experiment. However, the experimenter told the subject to stop at 150 volts. 100% of the subjects obeyed the experimenter while discarding the learners plead to continue.
For most people moral reasoning is based on rewards and punishments. In the first stage of moral reasoning individuals have an obedience orientation. According to Kohlberg, “An obedience orientation means believing that authority figures know what is right and wrong. Consequently, stage one individuals do what authorities say is right to avoid being punished.” (Kail & Cavanaugh, 2016, p. 292).
When watching the film A Class Divided, a film over how people react to being separated by their eye color and though down on, and reading the article “Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problems” by Fromm, an article over why a person is obedient and how someone can be disobedient, a people learns a little bit about how quickly one's attitude and character can change rapidly and why someone might change or even conform to an authoritarian figure. People listen to their self-conscience but tend to conform a person in charge. A person, who is listening to an authority figure, has a hard time walking in a different direction than most people, but it is an act of courage to truly stand up. A person wants to please their own self-conscience,
When group is left opinions and behaviour change back to normal Point one – Prisoners were treated like such and publicly embrassed in front of family and neighbours. This was to dehumanized them.
On day six Zimbardo and Milgram decided to conclude the experiment. Zimbardo originally intended to explore how prisoners adapt to powerlessness, but he has contended that the experiment demonstrates how swiftly arbitrary assignment of power can lead to abuse. (Maher, The anatomy of obedience. P. 408) Once the experiment was completed Zimbardo and Milgram concluded that generally people will conform to the roles they are told to play.
Why do people follow orders or directions given by authority figures? People tend to obey orders from people they recognize as a higher authority pose a threat to their safety. This can occur in many places and situations like families, work, and even school. This was put to test when Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment in 1963. The author notes, “Milgram was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person,” (Mcleod 1).
We have been trained to be obedient to authority. This quality is deep-rooted in us all from the manner in which we were brought up. It is natural for people to obey orders from those whom they recognized as their authority. This is the natural response to legitimate authority and can be learnt in a variety of situations. In a summary written in the article “The Perils of Obedience” (Milgram 1974), states: “The legal aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations.”
GETTING LOST IN THE GREY “…A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good,” said Thomas Watson Jr. (As cited in Mancuso, 160). Conformity is a type of social influence and we can define it as acting like one ’s equals whereas the other type of social influence, obedience, can be defined as the compliance to the orders given by an authority figure.
Bruno Bettelheim once said, “Punishment may make us obey the orders we are given, but at best it will only teach an obedience to authority, not a self-control which enhances our self-respect.” More often than not, those surrounded by rules feel pressured to adhere to them due to the fear of repercussions. Even so, it is not guaranteed people will comply. Sometimes, being bound by rules can only make one feel rebellious.
It is worthwhile to have an attitude of loyalty and belonging to a just community, but you do not have a general obligation to do so. If the general obligation to obey does exist, it was chosen voluntarily by an
Obedience is mean compliance with a specified order, instruction, or law observance of the rules. Normally we obey to the law, our parents or adults in the family, the teachers in the school or someone that we respect. People obey things with many reason general is based on respect because we obey our parents at home or other adults when we were child, also we don’t want to be impolite. The motivation to obey is to get things right and we don’t query for it because we don't want to get in trouble, like soldiers they obey everything as a mission because that is their job to obey to the superior and the teachers in the school, they all way tell you come to class and do the homework, honestly we don’t want to follow it but we don’t have choice,
Take the army for example if you are a private, you take orders from a commanding officer, those orders given are not be disobeyed or second guessed. After the war Adolf Eichmann was executed in 1962 and in his jail diary the found this quote, “The order were, for me, the highest thing in my life and I had to obey them without question.” A reason people follow orders to circumstances such as harming another human being might be because of punishment, like death or torture. In Conclusion our society is based on obedience and following regulations and laws.
However, this is not the case in many places around the world. many different governments use their authority to get people involve in ruthless politics in the name of law and greater good. Sometimes people get to do horrible stuff in the name of the law and they could be willing to hurt and kill others assuming it is something out of their hands and they are only doing what they are told to do like the case of Adolf Eichmann. Obedience really is a double-edged sword. i believe that obedience is crucial to make people’s life better, however, i also believe that there should be limits that we cannot come across even if authorities told us so
According to Feldman (2013), obedience is the change in conduct as ordered by others. A standout amongst the most celebrated obedience study was done by Stanley Milgram in 1963. He was a psychologist at Yale University. He carried out an experiment concentrating on the altercation personal conscience and obedience towards authority (Milgram, 1963)