The Effect Of Obedience During The Holocaust

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.

As children, we are taught to listen to our elders or any authority figure and obey their instructions. This was what determined how “good” we were. Obedience I can be described as “willingness to agree with the directions of an individual with authority”. As children, obedience can help with their development, socially and behaviorally. It helps an

Obedience is the requirement of all mutual living and is the basic element of the structure of social life. Conservative philosophers argue that society is threatened by disobedience, while humanists stress the priority of the individuals' conscience. Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, designed an experiment that forced participants to either violate their conscience by obeying the immoral demands of an authority figure or to refuse those demands. Milgram's study, reported in "The Perils of Obedience" suggested that under a special set of circumstances the obedience we naturally show authority figures can transform us into agents of terror or monsters towards humanity.

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

Holocaust. A word of Greek origin that means sacrifice by fire. The Holocaust is a terrible event in our world’s history. During the course of the Holocaust six million men, women and children of the Jewish faith were murdered by Aolf Hitler and his Nazis in concentration and death camps across Europe. “Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.” Elie Wiesel----cite correctly with Ms. G. By remembering the victims of the Holocaust we are breaking the silence and honoring the lives that were taken too soon.

Stanley Milgram’s obedience study is known as the most famous study ever conducted. Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment that focused on the conflict between personal conscience and compliance to command. This experiment was conducted in 1961, a year following the court case of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram formulated the study to answer the question “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” (Milgram, 1974). The investigation was to see whether Germans were specially obedient, under the circumstances, to dominant figures. This was a frequently said explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II.

Miles Hewstone, who earned his PhD in social psychology from the University of Oxford, would concur, stating, “This evidence tends to rule out… the possibility that participants were sadists” (Hewstone 267). Milgram links these ordinary people to the soldiers and Nazi officials who carried out the Holocaust. Although this argument has partial merit, Milgram’s ineffectiveness, is tied to his failure to address the differences between the two groups. Baumrind effectively addresses this gap in Milgram’s logic; she states that the German soldier or SS officer had, unlike the subjects in Milgram’s experiment, no reason to believe that their superiors or authority figures were “benignly disposed towards himself or their victims” (Baumrind 93). Not only was the relation between the authority and the subject different, but the relation between the subject and the “victim” was as well. In Milgram’s experiment, the learner was an equal to the subject, while in Nazi Germany, the victims were viewed by the soldiers as sub-human. Baumrind accurately suggests that these altered relationships removed any of the guilt felt by Milgram’s subjects from the conscience of the German soldiers. Thomas Blass, who was an American social psychologist, Holocaust survivor, and author of the first published biography of Milgram, would add to Baumrind’s stance, stating, “Milgram’s approach does not provide a

The Holocaust is known as one of the most devastating, or perhaps even the most devastating incident in human history. On paper, the dizzying statistics are hard to believe. The mass executions, the terrible conditions, the ruthlessness, and the passivity of the majority of witnesses to the traumatic events all seem like a giant, twisted story blown out of proportion to scare children. But the stories are true, the terror really happened, and ordinary citizens were convinced into doing savage deeds against innocent people. How, one must ask? How could anyone be so pitiless towards their neighbors, their friends? In a time of desperation, when a country was on its knees to the rest of the world, one man not only united Germans against a

Authority cannot exist without obedience. Society is built on this small, but important concept. Without authority and its required obedience, there would only be anarchy and chaos. But how much is too much, or too little? There is a fine line between following blindly and irrational refusal to obey those in a meaningful position of authority. Obedience to authority is a real and powerful force that should be understood and respected in order to handle each situation in the best possible manner.

Stanley Milgram’s obedience study has become one of the most timeless experiments and is thought of as a work of art. In this experiment, Milgram examined if individuals would take requests from authority figures regardless if they felt that the requests were ethical or not. Milgram chose members for this study by daily paper advertising for male participants to partake in an investigation at Yale University. In World War II, Nazis justified killings by saying that they were simply doing what they were told. Milgram conducted a study to examine whether the Nazi killings during World War II occurred because Germans were being submissive to authority figures. Milgram’s technique for this study raised moral issues because

In the movie The Experimenter, we saw Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment. The objective of his experiment was to see if authority affects people, if they will so something they are not willing to do just because of the authority. The hypothesis was that authority definitely has an influence on people doings. In the experiment, the people did not want to continue “shocking” the person in the other room but, because they apparent doctor would say to continue on they would do so. Milgram is Jewish which is what brought him to making this experiment happen. The basis of the research is he wanted to examine justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on "obedience" - that they were just following orders from their superiors.

Stanley Milgram conducted studies into obedience of authority in order to understand how something like the Nazis’

Stanley Milgram conducted one of the most controversial psychological experiments of all time: the Milgram Experiment. Milgram was born in a New York hospital to parents that immigrated from Germany. The Holocaust sparked his interest for most of his young life because as he stated, he should have been born into a “German-speaking Jewish community” and “died in a gas chamber.” Milgram soon realized that the only way the “inhumane policies” of the Holocaust could occur, was if a large amount of people “obeyed orders” (Romm, 2015). This influenced the hypothesis of the experiment. How much pain would someone be willing to inflict on another just because an authority figure urged them to do so? The experiment involved a teacher who would ask questions to a concealed learner and a shock system. If the learner answered incorrectly, he would receive a shock. Milgram conducted the experiment many times over the course of 2 years, but the most well-known trial included 65% of participants who were willing to continue until they reached the fatal shock of 450 volts (Romm, 2015). The results of his experiment were so shocking that many people called Milgram’s experiment “unethical.”

According to Cardwell (1996) obedience is a type of social influence whereby somebody acts in response to a direct order from another person. There is an implication the actor is made to respond in a way that they wouldn’t have otherwise done without the order. You are in no doubt when you are obeying an order (explicit). It is obvious when you are following an order and you won’t change your attitudes as you are behaving as instructed. We will always find ourselves in situations in which we are told to do things by other people, for example boss or supervisor at work. Within society we work in a hierarchy. We may disagree or resent the orders we are given even when they are legitimate. It is unlikely we will be given an order or instruction that goes against our conscience or involves us inflicting serious harm on another person.

The Milgram experiment is probably one of the most well-known experiments of the psy-sciences. (De Vos, J. (2009). Stanley Milgram was a psychologist from Yale University. He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. Milgram wanted to investigate whether Germans were particularly obedient to authority figures as this was a common explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II. Milgram selected people for his experiment by newspaper advertising. He looked for male participants to take part in a study of learning at Yale University.