This means that if one doesn’t obey the authority he will get punished. So moral decisions are made to avoid punishment.…
Every human has a unique and complex thought processing system in which it is nearly impossible to determine how each person will react in a given situation. At an early age, people are taught to be obedient and oftentimes are forced to make a decision between being obedient or following their own morals. Usually, obedience wins because of the emphasis society has placed on it. Most of human’s actions are a result of a previous action in which they felt necessary to do. Both authors, Stanley Milgram of “The Perils of Obedience” and Ian Parker of “Obedience” agree that, humans, as a whole, will not respond the same in every similar situation because their actions are usually a result of obedience or of their current situation, rather than their personality.…
You should always do what your conscience tells you to do. People always try and make decisions based on other people. In George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” essay Orwell did not want to shoot the elephant and knew it was not right, but did it just because of other people. If he would have trusted his conscience and had not shot the elephant he would never felt shameful.…
It has been found by Milgram that people obey for four main reasons these are; legitimate authority, the momentum of compliance, the agentic shift and passivity.…
Psychological research into obedience over the years has enabled us to understand more about the human mind than ever before. When experiments are conducted, the aim is to demonstrate cause and effect relationships between the independent and dependant variables, usually in order to make generalising statements about people.…
Visible Status - seeing authority (cops in uniforms or teachers having a larger desk in grade school or professors speaking on a stage like set up)…
Also the study was said to have lacked ethics and there is a case for prosecution. These were aspects such as the lack of respect for participants as they may suffer from long term problems such as depression as they might not have thought they were evil. Also they study was advertised as being a memory test but participants did not conform to the actual study they were doing to see if people conformed in certain situations.…
Another explanation to why people obey being this idea of Gradual commitment, which has a snowball effect of starting of small and therefore making it easier to progress to something more extreme. If we look back at Milgram’s experiment, all participants were started at the same, relatively harmless, 15 volt shock. The shock levels gradually increased in increments of 15 volts and did not become painful or dangerous until several shocks had been administered. However, had participants been asked to deliver one large shock initially, it is less likely that they would have done so, but the method of gradually increasing bit by bit made the previously unthinkable seem like just another step. The idea of gradual commitment could perhaps be applied to the actions carried out my Nazi soldiers, they began small: name calling, minor violent attacks, more serious attacks, then it grew more serious: murder and mass extermination. However Milgram’s study lacks ecological validity and can therefore not be used definitively as explanations for real life situations.…
A key study that has looked into research is one carried out by Milgrams in 1963. The aim of the experiment was investigate whether ordinary people will obey a legitimate authority figure even when required to injure an innocent person. Milgrams recruited 40 male participants by advertising for volunteers to take part in his study. Each participant would be paid $4.50. The experiment consisted of one ‘real’ participant and two confederates – the experimenter, who would be the authority figure, and the learner. The ‘real’ participant was asked to administer increasingly strong electric shocks to the learner each time he got a question wrong. The learner was sat in another room and gave all the wrong answer in silence until he reached 300V, he then began to pound on the walls and then gave no response to the next question. If the participant asked to stop, the experimenter would say “it's absolutely necessary that you continue” or “you have no other choice, you must go on”. Milgrams found that 65% of the participants continued to 450V, the maximum voltage. All the participants went to 300V and only 12.5% of them stopped at that point. Milgrams concluded that ordinary people are obedient to authority figures even when asked to behave in an inhuman way.…
Referencing historical and biblical accounts, Fromm claims that mankind was not human until the point of the first disobedient act, at which point the transformation from “prehuman harmony” began (¶2). He states that mankind endures as a result of continued disobedience. Fromm uses several comparison examples to make his argument on disobedience versus obedience. He notes the extremes to his argument, such as a slave versus a rebel and the various degrees of obedience in between, including “autonomous obedience”: the act of obeying because one believes it is right based on one’s own moral convictions (¶8). Fromm also compares two types of conscience: “authoritarian conscience” and “humanistic conscience.” He equates authoritarian conscience to Freud’s “Super-Ego” or the fear of authority where people follow authority out of fear even though they believe they are acting on their own decision (¶10). He states that humanistic conscience is inherent in the human conscience and acts as our moral compass to our basic human existence. Fromm further compares ‘rational authority” or universal reasoning (i.e. parent to child) to “irrational authority” or force (i.e. supervisor to subordinate, where subordinate is used for supervisor’s personal gain).…
Exist as a human being with free will, the freedom to disobey no choice but to be recognized as a part of. Outside the authority of 'freedom of obedience', but if allowed, it is already the practice of human freedom as autonomous from the inside out is because there is no way to build a place name. The extinction of the human race hatred and greed, destructive behavior arises as a result of the submission of the individual and, through the exercise of will to disobey don’t prevent the destruction…
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…
Erich Fromm’s essay “Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem” suggests that humankind’s evolution has, and continues to rely on man’s capability to exercise disobedience. While discussing the positions of disobedience being considered a vice, and obedience being a virtue, Fromm reflects upon the history of Adam and Eve believing that “eating the forbidden fruit” was man’s first act of disobedience. This is the point that broke the bond between man and nature requiring man to be dependant upon his own powers, while rewarding him with his “complete” humanity, freedom, and independence. Another example Fromm discusses is the Greek myth of Prometheus’ defiance of the gods. Prometheus proclaimed that he “would rather be chained to this rock than be the obedient servant of the gods.” These are just a couple acts of defiance throughout the course history that have contributed to man’s evolution. Through acts of disobedience, man has continued to evolve spiritually, as well as intellectually.…
Authority - It means the power to tell people what to do and enforce obedience…
According to the article “Opinions and Social Pressure”, Solomon Asch writes about how the affects of group pressure can alter a person’s decision. During the investigation, Asch describes how everyone in the group agrees with the answer that they have chosen except for one in which the author calls him the “dissenter (Asch 656)”. Solomon Asch stated that the person who disagreed to the answer quickly became “more and more worried and hesitant as the disagreement continues in succeeding trials (Asch 656).” The dissenter is placed a position where he has to choose the correct answer as a minority of one and this eventually clouded his judgment, which caused him to choose many answers incorrectly. The assumption of that the author has made is that when a person is standing alone without succumbing to the majority tends to have their minds alter due to the social pressure.…