Obedience To Authority Analysis

Obedience to Authority: its Meaning, Uses, and Side Effects Obedience to authority is an aspect present in all societies throughout known history. For the entirety of this paper, obedience to authority will refer to any act a member of society performs that he or she was told to do by a position of higher authority. This paper will focus on the idea that members of society will follow commands that may go against their moral beliefs on the sole account that the commands come from a place of higher authority. This statement has been tested multiple times beginning with Stanley Milgram’s experiment in 1963, in which he set up a scenario that convinced people they were harming an individual they had met only minutes before through electrical
This was not the case though, as stated in Harry Perlstadt’s “Milgram’s Obedience to Authority: Its Origins, Controversies, and Replications” there was significant harm to many of the participants in control of the electric shock. “Subjects could have suffered harm during the actual conduct of the experiment and/or experienced short- or long- term harm as a result of their participation.” (Perlstadt 62) The damage that Perstadt is referring to is not physical, he explains that many researchers who have looked over Milgram’s experiment believe that the participants could be harmed “if not through the stress of the experiment itself, then through the “infl icted insight” into their own personalities.” (Perlstadt 62) This idea is understandable to say the least. A large percentage of the world likes to believe that they are good people. At the end of this experiment the participants find out that although they did not actually harm anyone, put into the situation, they would have just because a figure of authority commanded them to do
Understanding these concepts is essential to humankind based on the fact that if we could control these factors we could make decisions based solely on what is right and wrong, and not who tells a subject what to do. Obedience to authority has a vast variety of pros and cons. Whether it be from the psychological stress that the people being ordered are put under, or a structured society that runs smooth because of the people willing to follow any commands. Obedience to authority has been a part of every society since the beginning of time, whether it continues in our future depends on each individual and how they view the