A Few Good Men Analysis

Comparative Analysis of A Few Good Men All throughout time everyday people have chosen to completely neglect their values and morals when given orders to do a certain task. People have been placed in the difficult situation to either obey inhumane orders of a person in authority or disobey and receive punishment.One such example of this can be seen in the Holocaust when millions of Jews were murdered because of military orders. Were the people who carried out the slaughter of the Jews ruthless in nature or were they responding normally like any other human being when given an order by an authority figure? A movie titled A Few Good Men sheds light on this question with the help of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo's research on obedience
He tested the theories of obedience but focused more on conformity. He fulfilled this through an experiment called the Stanford Prison Experiment. The experiment was a prison simulation in the basement of a building on Stanford's campus, where students from the college played different roles. Half of them were " guards" and the other half were "prisoners." Philip Zimbardo's article titled "The Stanford Prison Experiment" gives insight on conformity, and how the prison guards and convicts would tend to slip into predefined roles. Resulting them to behave the way that they thought was required, rather than using their own judgment and
He supported their reason of thinking and obeying their commanding officer, based on conformity. A reason to why maybe we conform and obey certain orders is from previously learning what is seen as unacceptable behavior, or acceptable behavior, based on the actions we carried out. Like Dawson's previous behavior in the movie. At one point in A Few Good Men, Dawson had disobeyed military order and gave a fellow marine, who had been put in the barracks, food because he felt that his was mistreated. This is contradicting to the fact that Dawson had performed such a awful punishment on Pfc. Santiago, resulting in Santiago's death. Why would Dawson sympathize for a fellow marine being starved, and disobeying military order to protect him, and not beating a Private to death? Zimbardo sheds light on Dawson's actions based on the guards and prisoners actions in his experiment. When the prisoners were acting out of command that the guards gave them, they were punished. So throughout the experiment the prisoners would no longer disobey command based on the punishment they faced previously. Zimbardo then states that conformity to authority's commands is to gain respect and no punishment. "The most apparent thing that I noticed was how most of the people in this study derive their sense of identity and well-being from their immediate surroundings rather than from within