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The Perils Of Obedience Analysis

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“The Perils of Obedience”, written by Stanley Milgram in 1973, explores how her experiment demonstrated people’s affinity to obey orders even if it means someone will get hurt. Milgram is a leading social psychologist who disproved previously considered notions about obedience and authority. Her work demonstrates how obedience trumps morality and gives support for this phenomena with examples from history. By using different participants’ reactions, the author is able to analyze the meaning behind the experiment. The author begins by describing obedience in relation to social life and how it is often framed in history and literature. For example, Plato is thought to have grappled with the age old question of whether one should obey even if it does not comply with your conscience. This line of thinking is precisely what Milgram was observing in her experiments. Milgram conducted an experiment in which she tested the limits of how much pain an ordinary person can inflict on another person after being ordered to by an …show more content…

The author describes how language can be used to characterize this type of morality as loyalty, duty, and discipline. The use of language and its complexity is similarly described in “The Death of the Author” and how Barthes argues that the writer and his creation should be as separate as possible. Language or the use of words like “duty” and “loyalty” allow the author to understand the justification behind the teachers’ behavior. The way Barthes disassociates the author from his work, the teachers try to disassociate their emotions from their behavior. Furthermore, this experiment proved that ordinary people can easily become agents to committing terrible acts using the justification that they simply followed orders. This article not only revealed an aspect of human nature, but it also described a possible methodology of a scientific

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