Essay on Obedience

“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.

Stanley Milgram's "The Perils of Obedience" and Philip G. Zimbardo's "The Stanford Prison Experiment" both effectively use experiments to discuss factors that effect one's obedience to authority. Milgram's experiment involves a test subject, also called the teacher, who is asked by an authority figure, or the "experimenter" to give out question to a learner. If the learner answers incorrectly, the teacher is asked to deliver shocks to the student that increase in voltage each time. Conflict arises when the learner begins to cry out in pain, and the teacher must decide to stop and listen to the learner's pleas, or obey the experimenter. Both the experimenter and the learner are actors, while the teacher remains oblivious to the experiment. The results show twenty-five out of forty learners obeying the authority to the end, administrating 450 volts (Milgram 80). Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment consists of twenty-one college aged males, ten of which are assigned as prisoners, and eleven of which are assigned as guards. The subjects are placed in a mock prison, where they acted in ways they did not know was possible, even though they are aware of being in an experiment: the guards frequently harass and torment the prisoners in various manners due to being deindividualized. Though Milgram explains the power of the situation causing obedience more fairly, Zimbardo more effectively explains the impact of wanting to please others. Though Milgram and Zimbardo both logical

In the experiment, people were picked randomly and one as a teacher and one as the student. They were told to take a quiz and give electric shocks of increasing intensity as punishment if the student can’t answer. During the experiment, many people were concerned as someone can be heard shouting but only a few people who decided to stop and stick to their morals. But the others kept on going because they were just following orders from a superior (Milgram 77). "The Stanford Prison Experiment” by Philip Zimbardo, is about an experiment that was made to understand the roles people play in prison situations. For the experiment, Zimbardo converted a basement of the Stanford University psychology building into a mock prison. The participants were told to act as prisoners and guards. It was planned to be a two-week experiment but was forced to shut down in 6 days, all because of people quickly getting into their roles and started acting like the real prisoners and guards (Zimbardo 104). To compare both experiments, although they differed vastly in design and methodology, the point of both experiments was to observe how far an individual would go in inflicting increasing pain on a victim. Also how people obey under authoritative circumstances, when given power or different roles, however the writers differ in the seriousness of the fight for individuality and the use of reality.

A classic experiment on the natural obedience of individuals was designed and tested by a Yale psychologist, Stanley Milgram. The test forced participants to either go against their morals or violate authority. For the experiment, two people would come into the lab after being told they were testing memory loss, though only one of them was actually being tested. The unaware individual, called the “teacher” would sit in a separate room, administering memory related questions. If the individual in the other room, the “learner,” gave a wrong answer, the teacher would administer a shock in a series of increasingly painful shocks correlating with the more answers given incorrectly. Milgram set up a recorder

A principle discourse between the two arguments occurs here, should a person with such an upbringing be placed in a dilemma like described by Sartwell. According to Dalrymple, such people view obedience as extinguishments of their “... existence as an autonomous being”, which sharply contrasts with Sartwell’s emphasis on the influence of the herd (Dalrymple 5). He states that humans “ … seek to associate themselves with a consensus of their acquaintances“, a claim which Dalrymple later discards in his explanation of disobedience but inadvertently accents with an anecdote early in his article (Sartwell 2). In said anecdote, Dalrymple recounts a conversation he had on a plane with a woman who expressed her seemingly firm anti-authority sentiments

Research Into Obedience There has been two main studies into obedience the first of these in 1963 by Milgram who advertised in the local paper for men of various ages and from all walks of life. He told the volunteers that they would take part in a test of memory and learning and would get paid $4.50 for the hour they were in the experiment. When they arrived at Yale University they were introduced to two people one of which was ‘Jack Williams’ who was wearing a grey laboratory coat and was to be the experimenter, the other person was a mild man in his fifties called Mr Wallace who was meant to be another volunteer but in fact were both actors. Then the volunteer was lead into a room where

In Shirley Jackson’s short story entitled “The Lottery”, obedience is expressed as members of this fictional society participate in an annual stoning. Villagers assemble on a beautiful summer’s day, caring out conversation as they await the annual lottery. Once the drawing concludes, the true nature of the lottery is revealed and a randomly selected member is then stoned to death. American psychologist, Stanley Milgram, conducted controversial social psychology experiments on obedience during his professorship at Yale University. The Milgram experiment measured the willingness of study participants, a socially diverse range of male applicants, to obey morally conflicting acts instructed by an authoritative figure. Participants were under the impression they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they administer electric shock to a “learner” as a form of corrective action. Fake electric shocks progressively increased to fatal levels of electricity if actually administered. Unexpectedly, the experiment found that a majority of participants would reluctantly obey the instructions of fatal harm. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and Stanley Milgram’s behavioral study of obedience suggest societal influences drive individuals to conformity, findings of the Milgram experiments reflect Jackson’s characters’ behaviors.

Overall, I believe that Fromm did achieve his goal of accurately persuading the audience to believe in his opinion. The examples that he included really brought together his claim and accurately showed what his overall main point and take away was. Fromm states, “But not only is the capacity for disobedience the condition for freedom; but freedom is the condition for disobedience” (577). With that, he was able to provide details and examples of how he believes that disobedience is a good thing rather than bad and how it can really help someone succeed if they learn that you do notalways have to be obedient. Fromm says, “Obedience to a person, institution, or power (Heteronomous obedience) is submission” (576). Meaning that if you only obey someone or something then you are falling into the trap of them being able to control you.

It is through disobedience that progress has been made – disobedience and rebellion.” Erich Fromm expands matter further when he states that, “Human history was ushered in by an act of disobedience….” (638) Adam and Eve first introduced disobedience in the Garden of Eden. But the world cannot have obedience without disobedience and vice versa, simply because of the dialectical relationship they share. Fromm expounds upon this relationship when he states that, “Whenever the principles which are obeyed and those which are disobeyed irreconcilable, an act of obedience to its principle is necessarily an act of disobedience to its counterpart and vice versa.” (640) The legalization of gay marriage has become a major societal issue in America today. Rowan County Clerk, Kim Davis, Refuses to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. Her only reason was that it is against her religion. In a recent interview she expresses her feelings by saying, “But at the end of the day, we have to stand before God, which is higher than Supreme Court.” Her obedience to her religion and upbringing was an act of disobedience to the law of the land, the Supreme

Though it may seem like this, Fromm sets another position that is against the one he introduces. This position is that an act of disobedience is what started human history and that human history may be dissolved by the acts of obedience (Fromm 683). To support this position, Fromm uses the Greek myth of Prometheus where Prometheus is able to set “the foundation for the evolution of man” by stealing the fire from the gods (Fromm 684). For his act of disobedience, he is punished, but he does not have any regrets for his actions. Fromm also states that one can be obedient to oneself, like one’s humanistic conscience.

He then talks about how the human race all began with an act of disobedience committed by Adam and Eve. However, Fromm then begins to detail how humans obey almost anything. This is because Fromm says that they are afraid. Fromm says that people need to contradict the human history of obeying and begin to disobey in order to flourish. He states that disobeying will provide humans with freedom and a purpose.

The experimenters at Yale university took 40 males and constructed an experiment to reveal how obedient one could be to authority figures. The concluding results were shocking. The subjects who participated were more likely to hurt another individual to the full capacity because a person of authority directed them to. A whopping 26 out 40 subjects continued to the maximum punishment while only 14 were disobedient. This study took a range of male individuals from different age groups and education levels. The 40 subjects were informed that it was a study to find out how much one should be punished for them to learn. The subjects were as they perceived randomly assigned to be the teacher and the accomplish

In this essay I am going to write on how obedience can affect individuals on how they would normally behave and integrate in society. The meaning of Obedience is a form of social influence where an individual acts in response to a direct order from another individual, who is usually an authority figure. It is assumed that without such an order the person would not have acted in this way. (McLeod, 2007)

Stanley Milgram wanted to do a study on the obedience to an authority figure, and the obedience is a situationist experiment that evidences what happened the real life (Badhwar, 2009). Milgram’s idea was the Holocaust situation and the Nazis who had the authority over European Jews, during World War II, when the Nazi killed thousands of people because they had power, as well as how lived Nazis enemies in the death camps. The point of the research was people behavior in the obedience situation, and Holocaust situation was more compliance behavior of the Jews. Milgram’s experiment had to use three participants’ one experimenter, teacher, and learner. Milgram wanted to make observations about if the obedience was a factor of the life or it was to the Nazis behavior and attitude. Milgram decided to post the experiment information in the newspaper, and he paid four dollars for one hour in the experiment. The teacher had to give some words to learn if the participant responded wrong he received electroshocks. To be specific, the researcher used a transmitter with 30 interrupted buttons with 15 volts to 450 volts. In other words, the research has to examine the capacity of the response of the participant and how is the resistance of an individual. The researcher wanted to analyze the memory of the participant to recall the words and response time.

The use of deception in research has been an ongoing controversial debate in the study of Psychology. The method looks to extract and analyze data with the help of human subjects/participants; however, the subject is given false information about the task or objective that the study wishes to discover. Although the word deception may sound malicious and immoral, the purpose of a deceptive method when conducting researches attempts to make significant contributions to the scientific field being studied. One of the articles that will be discussed in this paper is an experiment that was conducted by a man named Stanley Milgram in 1963 that studied the human quality of obedience and its ability to become destructive. The other article that this paper also looks at is a research that determines the psychological impacts of deception in a psychological research. The latter further looks upon ethical components that is associated with the research. With deceptive research still capable of creating risks, is it time to allow researchers to utilize Milgram’s research method in order to further increase our understanding of obedience? This paper looks to prove that the use of deception in research studies should be utilised, since the results of the experiment can be extremely useful. Even though risks may rise from the experiment, they can be greatly alleviated.