The Perils Of Obedience Analysis

A person’s decisions, whether they are following directions or are making their own choices, will change their lives. The effect of a decision is played out in the movie A Few Good Men. In the movie, Lance Cpl. Harold W. Dawson and Pfc. Louden Downey’s decision to follow the orders of Col. Nathan R. Jessup to perform a code red on Pfc. Santiago, a “sub-par marine”, results in them accidentally killing Santiago. Dawson and Downey are originally blamed for Santiago’s death; however, Lt. Daniel Kaffee is able to convince the jury to drop the charges of murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Despite this, both Marines are given a dishonorable discharge for performing the code red on Santiago (A Few Good Men). In Erich Fromm’s article, “Disobedience

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.

While writing "The Power of The Situation" Lee Ross and Richard E. Nisbett explains, there are no indicators on a persons reaction given a certain situation ( 149). Ross and Nisbett continue to say, a person 's past cannot determine how a human 's actions will take place in a future scenario, even if the human has a kind heart, they may not always be willing to help a person in need. Leading into this Ross and Nisbett state, " Social Psychology has by now amassed a vast store of such empirical parables" (Ross and Nisbett 149). Many people believe a past of a person will help them to identify or interpret how a person will act; However, Ross and Nisbett believe for this to be a fundamental attribution error (149). The power of a situation causes people to act in ways they may not have ever dreamed of, for instance The My Lai Massacre. "The My Lai Massacre: A military Crime of Obedience" written by, Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton consists of a small series of crimes committed by our own military ( Kelman and Hamilton 131). During the massacre military soldiers were humiliating and dehumanizing the enemies simply because their leading officer commanded them to do so (140-141). As their once simple actions became an everyday routine, the soldiers never questioned the unjust commands given by the authority (140). Dawson and Downey followed the orders given by their superior in command without a hesitation to stop and think whether or not the actions soon to be taken were

This leads Kaffee to defend his clients on the basis on which they simply followed orders from a higher ranking officer, Colonel Jessup (Reiner). According to Milgram’s experiments, even normal, harmless people are able to inflict pain on another individual. The military is based on a chain of command, the Colonel at the top, Privates at the bottom, and everyone else in between. Milgram argues that, when in problematic circumstances, people are proud of doing a good job for their authority (Milgram 221). In other words, they want to obey the orders given in order to please the person holding authority. Could this explain why Dawson and Downey executed the “Code Red”? This is precisely similar to the argument Kelman and Hamilton present in their article “The My Lai Massacre: A Military Crime of Obedience”. According to these authors, “American military law assumes that the subordinate is inclined to follow orders…” (Kelman, Hamilton 270). The soldiers in My Lai, although possibly interpreting the orders differently than intended, ultimately did what their commanding officer ordered. The Marines in the film may have also been under the impression that they would not be responsible for any harm which Santiago may endure. Again, Milgram could attest to this argument. He states, “The essence of obedience is that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes, and he therefore no longer regards

The movie A Few Good Men, made in December of 1992, is based on the premise of obedience to authority as its primary message. Two marines, Lance Cpl. Harold W. Dawson and Private Louden Downey were given orders from their superior, Colonel Nathan Jessup, to carry out what is called a “Code Red”. A Code Red is a form of hazing when a particular private does not perform his duties up to the marine corp standards. The two marines could not deny the order or else they would be punished themselves. Private Santiago was the marine who was victimized by the Code Red and later died from this extreme physical warning. This resulted in Dawson and Downey being arrested and set to trial for attempted murder. Two articles that have similar messages and idea with this movie, are “Just Do What the Pilot Tells You” by Theodore Dalrymple and “Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem” by Erich Fromm. In Dalrymple’s article he displays the idea of questioning the authority around you, but understanding when it is appropriate to follow people with more credibility. In Erich Fromm’s article, there is a sense of mankind being evolved by various acts of disobedience. The author discusses the moral violation of being obedient to authority vs. the social violation. Both articles connect to A Few Good Men, because the decision to obey authority is a moral and social one; furthermore, a vital part of obedience is thoughtfully judging the situation before one chooses whether to obey or

Throughout the years obedience has had an enormous effect on human history. It has caused nations to rise and fall, prosper and suffer; yet it has also brought destruction among innocent people. The Jewish holocaust is one of the best publicized examples of the perils of obedience. Hitler caused otherwise normal people to commit atrocious acts, acts that greatly reduced the number of Jewish people. Philip Zimbardo, a professor of psychology at Stanford university, questions to what extent will a person allow themselves to be imprisoned by obeying others commands; Andrew Wolfson, a senior investigative reporter working for the Louisville Courier Journal, similarly discusses how a young adult was brutalized because of our

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

Although many of the men were inexperienced in the battlefield and were traumatised that doesn’t excuse what they done. The senior members of military also have to accept some blame as they gave the orders and more importantly allowed the massacre to happen. However I leave the majority of the blame on the shoulders of the men in Charlie Company, nothing can excuse the deaths of innocent children and elderly nor the amount of rape reported. The villagers of My Lai deserve justice and peace, they were treated like animals in a slaughter house, after the initial raid a platoon was deployed to conduct a mop-up operation, which meant killing any of the victims who were still moving amongst the piles of dead. The villages were then burned to the ground. The men of Charlie Company carried out the action, although the orders had come from high above, and refused to hold responsibility. In November of 1970, the US Army began court-martial proceedings against 14 officers charged with participating in or covering up the My Lai Massacre. In the end, only Lt. William Calley was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for premeditated murder. Calley would serve only four and a half months in military

arrested, more than 200 were killed, and tens of billions of dollars worth of property was

A Few Good Men depicts the court case of two marines, Private First Class Louden Downey and Lance Corporal Harold W. Dawson, who had been ordered to perform a "Code Red" on a fellow marine, Private First Class William T. Santiago. Stanley Miligram, a 1970's psychologist who wanted to test obedience in

In “The Stanford Prison Experiment” Philip G. Zimbardo discusses an experiment he conducted, which consisted of college students portraying guards and prisoners in a simulated prison. Shortly after the experiment began, it was stopped, due to the mistreatment of the prisoners and the overall psychological abuse inflicted on them by the prison guards (Zimbardo 116). In “The Perils of Obedience” Stanley Milgram writes about a controversial experiment in which he requests volunteers to assist him in shocking participants who answer incorrectly to certain questions on the opposite side of a wall. The shock that the volunteers believe they are administering could cause great harm or even be deadly to the participants. After Milgram conducts

Title: Drawing on Milgram's classic laboratory research on obedience Examine and Asses the relevance of laboratory based research to real life. Please consider the suggestion below.

Situationism, as Doris puts it, allows that “seemingly insubstantial situational factors have substantial effects on what people do” (Doris, p.28). Whether finding a dime promotes prosocial behavior (Isen & Levin 1972), or an experimenter being in a room with a “teacher” encourages obedience while a voice over a radio does not (Milgram experiments 1960-63), situation to a significant degree governs action, more so than a person’s virtues or personality (dispositionalism). In no way forgiving the why, situationism allows for understanding how normal people willingly commit heinous and monstrous acts (as seen with the Holocaust). With that said, this is not to say that personality has no effect on action, rather that it is not dominant as made out to be.

In the realm of Social Psychology, there are innumerable subcategories that can be studied, researched and at least be somewhat understood. Three topics in particular are very important and also closely related to each other. Compliance is changing one’s behavior due to the request or direction of another person. Obedience is slightly different because it changes one’s behavior through direct commands. Conformity is also similar to these other two behaviors, however, it alters one’s behavior through an individual's need to be accepted by society. All of the three subcategories above have are different but have enough similarities that they can be connected to

In A Few Good Men, director Rob Reiner portrays the court case of two Marines named Dawson and Downey on trial for the murder of another Marine named William Santiago. Santiago was killed due to a code red ordered by Kendrick and Jessep, but Dawson and Downey felt that they were innocent because they were just following orders. The same situation arises in “The Perils of Obedience,” by Stanley Milgram. Milgram believes that everyone feels inclined to be obedient, but not hold responsibility. He proves this by including an experiment where one would only continue administering shocks if they were told they were not being held responsible. This experiment shows that even when the one administering the shocks can hear the screams of pain they continue. This indicates that many people are trained to be submissive when an authority figure demands that they do something. In A Few Good Men, Dawson and Downey were told to dehumanize Santiago, and the prisoners in “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” by author Philip G. Zombardo were dehumanized by the guards using many tactics such as numbers instead of names and embarrassing clothing. Zombardo states that one will immediately become obedient when in the presence of an authority figure. The prisoners lost all of their own unique identities and became submissive to the guards. In the movie it is shown that soldiers are very likely to follow orders and perform them seemingly without hesitation. In “The My Lai Massacre: A Military Crime