Just Do What The Pilot Tells You By Theodore Dalrymple And The Genocidal Killer In The Mirror

Obedience to people in authority is a deep-rooted trait that we all possess by virtue of our upbringing, and as Milgram put it, “it is only the person dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, with defiance or submission, to the commands of others” (Milgram 1974). This trait is exhibited every day in family circles, workplace and school. People are most likely to obey instructions from people they perceive their authority to be legal or moral. We see people obeying their pastors, leaders in various societies and other people they see as higher to them; and they obey anything they are being told even if it involves killing another human being. They justify their actions, however wrong, on obedience to authority.

The author also uses things like examples and past experiences to get his central idea about obey and disobey across. He uses the example of a social worker from a hospital. In this example, he goes about it by asking the women if she is against all authority. She replies stating that she is strongly against any type of authority, but she later realized that she was not completely against it because she was allowing the pilot to fly the plane. During this section of the story, the author once again brings up Milgram’s experiment. Dalrymple states that according to Milgram, people are only doing what they are told. He also examines the fact that during the experiment why people chose to keep going with it even though they did not agree. According to the writer, this type of obedience would be blind because the person is not thinking for themselves but instead just following orders. This applies

“The Perils of Obedience” was written by Stanley Milgram in 1974. In the essay he describes his experiments on obedience to authority. I feel as though this is a great psychology essay and will be used in psychology 101 classes for generations to come. The essay describes how people are willing to do almost anything that they are told no matter how immoral the action is or how much pain it may cause.

In Stanley Milgram’s ‘The Perils of Obedience’, Milgram reports from his studies of how far an individual can go in obedience to instructions and he pointed out that individuals can go as far as causing serious harm to the other people. Basically, the experiments are meant to test the choice that an individual would make when faced with the conflict of choosing between obedience to authority and obedience to one’s conscience. From the tests, it was found out that a number of people would go against their own conscience of choosing between what is wrong and what is right so as to please the individual in authority (Milgram 317). However, the experiments conducted by Milgram caused a wide range of controversy for instance; according to Diana Baumrind, the experiments were immoral. Baumrind notes in ‘Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience’ that Milgram did not only entrap his subjects, but he also potentially caused harm to his subjects (Baumrind 329). Based on the arguments that have been presented by the two authors, it is apparent that the two authors are concerned with real life situations, authority and ethics but the difference is that they both view these perspectives from different points of view as indicated by their writings. By and large, they also tend to show the importance or the insignificance of the experiments.

The Milgram experiment was conducted in 1963 by Stanley Milgram in order to focus on the conflict between obedience to authority and to personal conscience. The experiment consisted of 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, and who’s jobs ranged from unskilled to professional. The roles of this experiment included a learner, teacher, and researcher. The participant was deemed the teacher and was in the same room as the researcher. The learner, who was also a paid actor, was put into the next room and strapped into an electric chair. The teacher administered a test to the learner, and for each question that was incorrect, the learner was to receive an electric shock by the teacher, increasing the level of shock each time. The shock generator ranged from

In contrast, “Just Do What the Pilot Tells You” primarily focuses on the danger contained in blind obedience. Dalrymple looks at Milgram’s experiment

Following orders is of the utmost importance in the military. Obedience is what enables the military to operate in an organized and effective manner which is clearly very important during challenging military situations. While an individual can question the notion of obedience in daily life, this luxury is often not available in the military where the grand goals and aims require smooth internal functioning and hierarchical coordination. Indeed, many of the standards that would be frowned upon outside the military are essential to the work's success within. For example, punishment is not deemed to be a positive occurrence in an average person’s life, whereas the military guide maintains that punishment

Dalrymple mentions that while his orders to prolong the lives of dying patients went against his morals, he felt obligated to follow the commands of his physician due to her greater amount of experience; however, Dalrymple also states that it is oftentimes necessary for a subordinate to determine when they should disobey an authority. Not only can blind obedience lead to negative consequences in a society, but blind disobedience can have similar adverse effects. Some of the negatives of blind disobedience include individuals who cannot listen to other individuals and properly perform their jobs. Additionally, people who cannot obey authority in their lives find it very difficult to have human interactions as they live their whole lives only listening to themselves. These individuals live life as though it is a power struggle. Though the Milgram experiment pins obedience as being a negative attribute for an individual to express, Dalrymple states that neither total obedience nor total disobedience are beneficial to society.

Milgram proved his belief be a series of 20 experiments with 1000 participants. He studied how people would respond to outright commands given by someone of authority to give punishment on a learning. So, if the learner gives the wrong answer the teacher(participant) would admit a bolt of electric shock delivered by a switch. Would the participants be obedient to the social constraints of authority or disobey the authority(experimenter), hence, delivering a bolt of shock or not delivering a bolt of shock? Also, at what level will the participant disobey and refuse to give punishment to the learner? Personally, I feel my best choice if I was a participant in the study is the choice from the beginning of the experiment to not continue to participate. Still, I think it is very possible to get wrapped up in wanting to please the authorities persuasion and submit to their direction, then, the outcome is giving punishment to the learner long after my moral sense tells me to stop. Ultimately, if the study was conducted today many people believe our culture in America has not changed enough to get a different outcome in a study like Milgram’s

In society, obedience to authority is ingrained in humanity from an early age, causing some individuals to blindly obey orders without contemplating the credibility of the source. In psychoanalyst Erich Fromm’s article “Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem,” he explains that throughout human history obedience has been associated with virtue and disobedience with sin (Fromm 127). Fromm suggests that our conscience is an internalized voice of authority (126). Fromm claims individuals need to distinguish the difference between rational and irrational authority because obedience is effective when individuals want to obey, instead of fearing to disobey (127). Two other authors who examine obedience are Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee

Today our society raises us to believe that obedience is good and disobedience is bad. We are taught that we should all do what we’re told and that the people that are disobedient are almost always bad people. Society tells us this, but it is not true. Most people will even be obedient to the point of causing harm to others, because to be disobedient requires the courage to be alone against authority. In Stanley Milgram’s "Perils of Obedience" experiment, his studies showed that sixty percent of ordinary people would agree to obey an authority figure even to the point of severely hurting another human being. (Milgram 347).

Obedience and Disobedience has been a part of key moments in history. Many have studied forms of obedience to learn how it affects people and situations. For example, Stanley Milgram conducted a well-known experiment in which the subject, named the “teacher” must shock the “learner” every time he doesn’t remember a word pair from a memory test. The focus of this study is on the teacher, and whether they will administer killing shocks when told to by an authority figure. Another well-known experiment is the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo. A group of college boys were separated into two groups, prison guards and prisoners, and were put

Stanley MIlgram is a Yale University social psychologist who wrote “Behavioral Study of Obedience”, an article which granted him many awards and is now considered a landmark. In this piece, he evaluates the extent to which a participant is willing to conform to an authority figure who commands him to execute acts that conflict with his moral beliefs. Milgram discovers that the majority of participants do obey to authority. In this research, the subjects are misled because they are part of a learning experience that is not about what they are told. This experiment was appropriate despite this. Throughout the process, subjects are exposed to various signs that show them

The following essay will be about understanding what is meant by and distinguishing the differences between the terms conformity and obedience. It will show the evaluation of two key psychological studies which seek to explain why people do and do not conform, also with explanations of minority influence. Whilst seeking to understand the reasons why people obey authority, it will show an evaluation of Milgram’s study of obedience, discussing the ethical issues raised from the research and

set the human race on the path to thinking on their own, but obedience to authority in the