Psychological Processes that May Be Involved in Obedience to Authority

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.

Individuals often yield to conformity when they are forced to discard their individual freedom in order to benefit the larger group. Despite the fact that it is important to obey the authority, obeying the authority can sometimes be hazardous especially when morals and autonomous thought are suppressed to an extent that the other person is harmed. Obedience usually involves doing what a rule or a person tells you to but negative consequences can result from displaying obedience to authority for example; the people who obeyed the orders of Adolph Hitler ended up killing innocent people during the Holocaust. In the same way, Stanley Milgram noted in his article ‘Perils of Obedience’ of how individuals obeyed authority and

Conformity and obedience are some of the factors that usually influence the various processes that determine the manner in which an individual behaves in a social set up. They also have an impact on how people follow and adhere to social norms (both written and unwritten) as well as fashions and their immoral actions (Milgram, 2010). Several aspects come to play when one is asked by another individual to do a particular thing. First, they will need to consider whether whatever they are being asked to do is morally right or wrong. Second, based on the circumstances, they can either obey or comply and better still, they can decline to do it. The term obedience refers to the act of an individual doing something that they have been asked to do. On the other hand, conformity regards to how others influence people. They do things that they were not requested to do. The influence is usually through the behaviors and thoughts of others. This paper will compare and contrast the factors involved in conformity and obedience.

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The film A Few Good Men, directed by Rob Reiner, accurately portrayed exactly how much of obedience they must show when becoming Marines, and also how authority works in the navy. It’s an everyday dilemma for people whether to stick to their morals or be submissive to their supervisors. Sometimes, people obey orders because they want to get rewards, and because they want to avoid the negative consequences of disobeying, but they also have the mind of not wanting to bad things and staying principled, all because they are human. But when it comes to Marines, they don’t seems to have options such as obedience or resistance. Inevitably, they are to follow orders from above, with unquestioning commitment. But a question that people are not answered most of the time-- how obedience should a marine be? The articles written by Doris Ann, Steve Banner, Stanley Milgram, and Philip Zimbardo question and present possible explanations on how obedient a man becomes when they are given orders by an authority figure and to what extent they would stay obedient. In the film, Lance Cpl. Harold W. Dawson and Pfc. Louden Downey followed the orders exactly how it was instructed to them although it certainly went against their morals, all because they were given the order.

In the chapter "The Dilemma of Obedience" of the book Obedience to Authority : An Experimental View, Stanley Milgram explores the concept of obedience to authority, and why people cannot defy authority even the situation is totally conflicting with morality. He introduces his ideas by giving the definition of obedience, and mentions Nazi extermination as an instance of obedience, which contradicts with moral values. According to Milgram, obedience idiosyncratically binds humankind to systems of authority, and links the individual action to political purpose. In terms of observations, obedience accepted as an inveterate behavior inclination, and obeying a system of authority has been comprehended as

In Stanley Milgram’s article “The Perils of Obedience,” several people volunteer to participate in Milgram’s experiment. It consists of a learner and a teacher. When the learner fails to memorize a word pair, the teacher applies a shock to the learner. The shocks increase in severity with each wrong answer, attaining a maximum voltage of 450 volts. Milgram states many psychiatrists he interviewed before the experiment predicted most subjects would not go past 150 volts, or the point at which the learner starts to ask to leave (Milgram 80). In his first experiment, twenty-five out of forty subjects continued the experiment until the end (Milgram 80). After several more experiments at different locations, Milgram obtained the same results. Milgram

Mr. Summers called out everyone's name separately when it was their turn to drawl a piece of paper from the box. The papers had to remain closed until everyone had taken their turn. Mr. Summers announced that it was now time for everyone to open their pieces of paper that they had drawn from the box to see who had received the black dot.

There is a fundamental human need to belong to social groups especially if people were to live and work together, it is likely that they need to agree on common beliefs, values, attitudes and behaviours in order to get along and fit-in. Thus, we learnt to conform to rules of other people, the more people see others behaving in a particular way or making particular decisions, the more likely people will feel obliged to follow the suit. This is called conformity and can be defined in different ways, Aronson, Wilson & Akert (2014) stated it is the changing of one’s behavior due to the real or imagined influence of other people. According to Deutsch and Gerard (1955), social influence should be distinguished into two types, the informational social influence and normative social influence. The occurrence of social influence has implied to many real life events, which has drawn many researchers to attention. This has lead many researchers to design distinct experiments to try and understand the cause of the conformity, whether conformity is situation dependent, and whether we are able to resist social influences.

A moral dilemma that I had faced in my life that continue to cloud my judgement even until this is day is obedience to and how far we will let it reflect on how we let it decide how we live our life. In today 's day and age with the everyone having so many choices on how they can live our lives conflicts with our moral reasons with what is right or wrong and having to outweigh the values of our conflicts. Its makes I question authority and test on how far our obedience from authority and supervisors lays thought us. When we were little most of us were taught that by my parents what was right or wrong and how by simply having these few characteristics a person can have such as stronger, more powerful, and intelligent or just have more experience than you that they are always right.

Understanding God's requirements of compliance, obedience, and submission, helped me to recognise several lies I have accepted and believed were true. Explaining motives. Offering hope. Unlocking feminisms powerful influence over my mind. Leading to re-examine many decisions made.

In this paper we will talk about two types of power motivation, personalized and socialized power motivation, both types of power motivation assist in influential decision-making but that each type plays a different role in different situations. Personalized power motivation is associated with antisocial decision making and self-serving decision making. These individuals who have a high need for personalized power are relatively selfish, impulsive, uninhibited, and lacking in self-control. Also these individuals exercise power for their own needs, not for the good of the group or the organization. Socialized power motivation is associated with making decisions that will best serve others (Magee & Langner, 2008). Socialized power implies a more

The book begins with the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning explains that this Utopia breeds people by artificially fertilizing a mother's eggs to create babies that grow in bottles. Everyone belongs to one of five classes, from the Alphas, the most intelligent, to the Epsilons, morons bred to do the jobs that nobody else wants to do. All the babies are conditioned psychologically after birth, to make them happy citizens of the society with both a liking and an aptitude for the work they will do. One psychological conditioning technique is hypnopaedia, which is teaching people during their sleep, planting suggestions that will make people behave in certain ways. The Controller is one of the ten men who run the new world. One principle that the

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”

Power has many different forms in the world. The paths to power are very different from person to person. Many people are considered bad because of what they have done while they are in power. This isn’t necessarily true for all people but power has the ability to create great greed and conflict. Power can be made of fear or love but it has the ability to turn people into something else.