Zimbardo Obedience To Authority

Obedience to Authority
To what extent can humans’ morality be corrupted by environment, or are all humans cruel by nature? If an authority figure told another person to jump off a bridge, our response would be to reject his command and tell him to jump, but what would happen if an authority told somebody to execute a worthless criminal for his wrongdoings by pushing him off a bridge? According to research conducted by psychologists like Solomon Asch, and Philip G. Zimbardo, under the right variation of circumstances one may be compelled to push the criminal even if he/she originally felt that the act was immoral (Asch 306-313) (Zimbardo 344-355). Taking a close look at these experiments and real world examples such as Abu Ghrab prison along with
an interview with a psychologist will expose how we humans can be brainwashed by our environment and authority in certain stressful situations.
Before we go into these stressful situations and/or when our human minds error us, lets look at what harmful factors are not present in everyday instances when we make correct moral decisions. In everyday life we as a people pride ourselves on the decisions we make, and our personal and moral beliefs. These characteristics are what make us who we are, and for us to change our mental perspective would involve a total environment change. In fact, some of the basic principals we were taught after our birth is to have morals and to stand for what we believe in. In most cases we stick within these principals, but in some cases the human mind can be tricked into alternating its beliefs and can result in us acting opposite of our original beliefs.
Solomon Asch is a social psychologist at Rutgers University in the 1950’s set up an experiment to test the influence of social pressures on humans. His test was set up as so, he took a group of seven to nine men of college age into a classroom and asked them to match the size of one line on a single card to the same size line on another card which had three options of different size lines available to choose. The only twist is that there is truly one subject in the group of college men, because the rest of the group was told to unanimously select a clearly wrong answer randomly to isolate and pressure the one subject into second guessing his own opinion. In this situation humans feel pressure that they cannot avoid. The percentage that a human will make a mistake less is than 1% without distractions, but in the experiment subjects wrong choices increased to 36.8%. Plus, if a subject was hesitant in expressing his own opinion when the group chooses wrong, then that subject would rarely choose against the group multiple times in future occasions even thought the answer was clearly wrong (Asch 309). These pressures are dangerous for they can alter our thoughts just by us abiding, and in a larger scale who knows how dangerous things may become.
This larger scale experiment that is very well known in physiology was conducted at Stanford University in 1973 by Philip G.
Zimbardo. This groundbreaking experiment changed modern thinking at the time. Zimbardo selected 21 out of 75 college men who were willing to participate in a study of prison life. Zimbardo then separated them into 10 guards and 11 prisoners in which the subjects would play the role of each. This extended experiment was set up to “understand more about the process by which people called ‘prisoners’ lose their liberty, civil rights, independence, and privacy, while those called guards gain social power by accepting the responsibility for controlling and managing the lives of their dependent charges” (Zimbardo). In result of this mock prison that mirrored the realism of an actual prison, the guards and prisoners fell immediately into the mental mind set of an actual guard or prisoner. The guards developed into cruel authoritarians and would tell good prisoners to cuss and sewer at a bad prisoner even if the good prisoner was unwilling. The subjects dramatically changed due to their environment. In fact, the experiment was cut short because of the uncontrollable reality that was created in
it.
In “uncontrollable reality,” under circumstances like Zambardo’s experiment results adds up to a situation like Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (2004). Several pictures show up everywhere with naked Iraqi prisoners laying on each other, a U.S. officer holding a leach with a naked Iraqi man tied to it. According to my close friend, and relative, who has a doctrine in psychology and also teaches psychology, Sue Lowell, “These results are almost impossible to avoid for the reason that these prisoners are a part of a group of people that are killing the U.S. guards’ friends and family. A person who can avoid this need for revenge through the unmoral dehumanization of the prisoners under these particular circumstances is as rare as Gandhi.”
All of these cases involved decent, moral, caring, and loving people at the start, but due to the pressures that the subjects felt due to their environment, they changed from anything to an egotistical and aggressive tyrant to the meek mouse of the jailhouse.