Obedience: In the documentary about MyLai the concept of obedience was very prominent and was shown through many examples both spoken and shown. Obedience is “following orders from an authority figure.” Obedience is following orders from someone one has more power than them, examples of this are parents, teachers, officers and leaders in the military. This definition is often paired with the idea that people will do anything if an authority figure tells them to do, which is explore in Milgram’s study of obedience aimed to justify the actions of accused war criminals from WWII during the Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Procedure: Milgram’s experiment started by having one confederate (a person in on the research but acts like they are part of the study) and participant and had them draw lots to find out who would be the learner and who would be the teacher. The lots was always fixed so the participant would always be the teacher. The participants were told that this experiment was to test learning and all the participants were males between the ages of 20 and 50. Mr. Wallace, the confederate, would be hooked up to an electric shock generator through wires and electrodes and the participant would watch him get set up. Then the participant was taken by the researcher (Milgram) in to a room next to the confederate and was shown the generator switch board that ranged from 15 volts to 450 volts with 30 shocks switches in between. The teacher was instructed by the
Milgram was interested on learning if people would hurt someone if given instructions to do so, Stanley Milgram recruited 40 males, ages ranging between 20 and 50 with jobs varying from unemployed to professionals. The participants drew straws to determine their positions (Learner or Teacher) although this was rigged so an actor was chosen as the learner every time and the volunteer as the teacher. As the learner got a question wrong the teacher would administer a shock, each wrong question the intensity of
Obedience. To comply with or follow demands. This is huge in anthem, in the beginning children are raised in this place called the home of infants and basically its a early brainwashing station. In this home there was nothing but several hundred beds for them and thats it because the council didn’t want them to have anything to distract or have something interest them, they wanted it to be as
The milgram experiment. The three people involved were: the one running the experiment, the subject of the experiment a volunteer, and a person pretending to be a volunteer. These three persons fill three distinct roles: the Experimenter an authoritative role, the Teacher a role intended to obey the orders of the Experimenter, and the Learner the recipient of stimulus from the Teacher. The subject and the actor both drew slips of paper to determine their roles, but unknown to the subject, both slips said "teacher". The actor would always claim to have drawn the slip that read "learner", thus guaranteeing that the subject would always be the "teacher". At this point, the "teacher" and "learner" were separated into different rooms where
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.
Obedience as an act can be traced back to the very beginnings of human history. The common belief has always been to obey authority at all cost. This act has never been questioned because authority corresponds to the common belief that respecting authority and obeying them will lead you to success in all aspects of life. Obedience is not defined to specific situations and its context can be portrayed in various ways. For example, Erich Fromm writes in his essay, “Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem; “Human history began with an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of disobedience.” This statement suggests that everything which we perceived to be
Milgram first tested his experiments on Yale students. Milgram's hypothesis stated that most of the teachers would not go beyond 150 volts (only 4%), as their consciousness would intervene. The results of Milgram's first experiment was far from his prediction. When Milgram performs his first test on Yale students, many argued that the students were too competitive and aggressive the results wouldn't be accurate for the majority. Milgram further expanded his subject pool to middle-class adults, white collar, and industrial workers. He found that all of the groups held identical results with the Yale students, with 60% of the subjects complying all the way to 450 volts.
According to the Oxford dictionary Obedience is defined as a compliance with an order, request, or law or submission to another's authority. In many situations authority demonstrates the ability to control man to go against their beliefs in what is morally right. Due to fear and the insecurities of man, authority may push the limits of society to a point where the individual may temporarily give up their identity. This is proven by The Stanford Prison experiment
orders two thirds of the time. These results were the same as the previous experiment done in the 1900’s. Obedience is the same idea as conformity. By definition, obedience
Milgram began his experiment by soliciting subjects aged from twenty to fifty, from all backgrounds under the guise of a simple memory experiment (Milgram, Obedience 15). By Milgram keeping the true study under wraps he was able to study subjects reactions with minimum bias towards the actual experiment. Milgram told those participating in the faux study that they were to act as teachers and assist in teaching a student a list of paired words. What the subject was unaware of however was that the student was actually in on the true experiment and was trained in order to test their reactions (Milgram, Obedience 16). So it went that whenever the student guessed the word pair wrong the teacher, in this case the subject, was instructed to flip a switch on a panel that they were led to believe would shock the student. They believed the experiment was to reinforce memory through punishment. After every “shock,” the subject was told to increase the intensity from 15 to 450 volts in a sequence of 30 switches they were labeled as the following for the subjects to avoid confusion: Slight Shock, Moderate Shock, Strong Shock, Very Strong Shock, Intense Shock, Extreme Intensity Shock, Danger Severe Shock, and XXX (Milgram, Behavioral).
For each experiment there was one teacher (participant); one learner (an accomplice called Mr. Wallace pretending to be a participant); and one experimenter (an actor called Mr. Williams who wore a grey lab coat). The participant and accomplice were asked to draw slips of paper from a hat, which was rigged, therefore, allowing the accomplice to always be the learner and the participant to be the teacher. The learner was taken into a room in Yale Interaction Laboratory, where he was strapped to an electric chair with electrodes attached to his arms. The teacher and experimenter were taken into another room where there was a shock generator with 30 labelled voltage levels ranging from 15 to 450 volts. 15 volts was verbally designated to be Slight Shock, and 450 volts was verbally designated to be a danger-severe shock (XXX).
The Stanley Milgram Experiment This experiment by Stanley Milgram was about obedience. He wanted to express the conflict between obedience and authority. He put an ad in the newspaper for male participants to take part in a study for learning at Yale. The experiment was that the participant was paired with another person and they drew straws to find out who would be the “teacher” and who would be the “learner”, but it was fixed so that the participant was always the teacher, and the learner was someone that Milgram worked with, who was only pretending to be a real participant.
Stanley Milgram’s (1963), Behavioral Study of Obedience measured how far an ordinary subject will go beyond their fundamental moral character to comply with direction from
I am now going to talk about what factors would make obedience more likely. First it all started with a man named Milgram. Milgram wanted to see how far people would go and what they would do. He conducted an electric shock experiment.
First of all, an idea of obedience was described in two texts. According to Tao Te Ching 49, Laozi said Master have to accept all the complaints that people had and treat them
Task: outline and evaluate findings from conformity and obedience research and consider explanations for conformity (and non-conformity), as well as evaluating Milgram’s studies of obedience (including ethical issues).