Jon By George Saunders Analysis

The Lamb and The Wolf

The majority, if not the entire human race finds comfort in visualizing themselves as original, special beings with immense power, and potential to be magnificent, accomplished beings. However, since the dawn of time we have been feeble, pusillanimous lambs. Afraid to leave the group’s established rules of survival and confront the ferocious wolf that in reality is not found outside this comfort zone, but within the group itself if one even dares to oppose to the customary. In the short story, “Jon”, George Saunders reveals the fear that this eternally influential herd that we call society imposes to convince individuals to stay satisfied with their lives, and the coping strategies used to stay sane while facing all the
The negative production of this type of Group Think can be confirmed through the Milgram Obedience study. This test was a series of social psychology experiments organized by psychologist Stanley Milgram that measured the willingness of participants to obey an authority figure that directed them to execute acts conflicting with their conscience. In the study, the experimenter orders the teacher (the subject of the experiment) to give painful electric shocks to a learner, who is actually an actor/tape. The teacher believes that for every wrong answer, the learner was undergoing painful electric shocks, although there were no real punishments. After a number of voltage shocks, the actor starts to pretend to be in extreme pain as he bangs on the wall that separates him from the teacher/subject. After some time of banging on the wall numerous times, complaining about his heart condition, all responses by the learner would eventually cease. When the actor began to complain, many people had the desire to stop the experiment and give the learner the proper aid. The majority of the teachers/subjects continued after the experimenter assured them that they would not be held responsible if anything were to happen to the learner. Very few subjects paused, and completely ceased to
The Asch conformity experiments were a series of laboratory experiments directed by Solomon Asch that demonstrated the magnitude to which an individual's own opinions is influenced by those of a majority group. In Asch's experiments, students were told that they were participating in a “vision test.” The other participants in the experiment were all confederates, or assistants of the experimenter. At first, the confederates answered the questions correctly, but later began delivering obvious incorrect answers. The results revealed that participants did conform to the majority group thirty seven percent of the time, and also for particular reactions. Some participants reacted with a, "distortion of perception", where they conformed on most trials, and actually believed that the confederates' answers were true. Other participants that lacked self-confidence exhibited a "distortion of judgment" (most belonged to this category) where they comprehended that they must be wrong and that the majority had to be right. Another group of participants displayed a "distortion of action", indicating that they knew the correct answer, but conformed with the majority group because they did not want to create conflict, or be looked down upon. When comparing this experiment to the short story, “Jon”, Jon represented