The Psychology Of Obedience

Conformity and obedience are both social behaviors that are influenced by those around us and determines our behavior in social situations. When we change our attitude or behavior based on those around us, we are conforming to their behavior. When we obey what we are told, by what we perceive to be an authority figure, we are being obedient. Conformity and obedience can have positive or negative results on our lives, depending on the situation and the individuals involved.

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

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

“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....”

Compliance refers to an individual’s response when given an instruction from somebody else. An individual is more likely to comply with that instruction if it comes from a person that is liked or if it fits in with own beliefs and opinions. Conformity is the process of going along with a group in order to be accepted or to fit in. Social pressure can cause an individual to change something about themselves like dress sense or what music genre they listen to just to follow the crowd. To add to that, another way why a person’s behaviour may change when part of a group is due to obedience.

During the Holocaust, millions of Jews were murdered. One specific person did not cause these deaths, because there was a division of labor. Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi organizer of these mass murders, never saw the direct effects of the genocide he was orchestrating. After the Holo-caust, Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to study the levels of obedience to authority; he used his experiment to find where evil resided in people and to discover the cause of the Holo-caust. Some people found his findings useful information, while others thought his experiment was morally unacceptable due to his use of deception. Diana Baumrind, author of “Some Thoughts on the Ethics of Research: After Reading Milgram’s ‘Behavioral Study of Obedi-ence,’” disagrees with Milgram’s use of deception and manipulation in his experiment. Con-trasting Baumrind, Richard Herrnstein, author of “Measuring Evil,” believes deception was nec-essary in order for Milgram’s experiment to be effective. Deception is ultimately needed in the experiment, especially because Milgram’s findings are beneficial information for social science.

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.

The issue with obedience is not totally psychological. The way that society is trying to form life and how it is being developed has a lot to do with it. There was a day when people were able to give a reasonable response to any situation because society would fully absorb what it meant to obey and to disobey. Obedience is an action during which someone obeys with the directions given by a leader or an individual in charge. There is one comparison between obedience and conformity that is each involved in the rejection of private responsibility. There are many variations between obedience and conformity . The primary one is obedience that an order or instruction given when, in fact, no instructions or an order had been placed. Erich Fromm states; "All martyrs of religious faiths, of freedom, and of science have had to

People have been changing their behavior or obeying someone else’s commands for years. This continues today in our everyday lives. Conformity and obedience seem similar but differ in several ways. Conformity is defined by psychologists as a change in behavior or belief to accord with others. Similar to this, is obedience. Obedience is defined acting in accordance with a direct order or command. Normally people conform to reap a reward or to avoid punishment. If we comply with a direct order or command it is considered obedience. Most of the time when people comply, it is to be accepted among others so they are not seen as outsiders. On the other hand, when we obey, we are obeying a command an authority figure

Obedience and Conformity Both obedience and conformity involve social pressure in obedience the pressure comes from behaving as you are instructed to do; whereas in conformity the pressure comes from group norms Behaviour in obedience is determined by social power, whereas in conformity it is influenced mostly by the need for acceptance. In nearly all societies, certain people are given power and authority over others. Our society, for example, parents, teachers, and managers are invested with various degrees of authority. Most of the time, this does not cause any problems.

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.

First, an individual usually internalizes compliance, but this is not necessarily the case in obedience. The latter can occur through internalization as well as through the existence of cognitive dissonance. In other words, conformity is a form of social influence that emanates from within the individual (Milgram, 2010). As it has been mentioned earlier, one does not have to be asked to do something for them to do it in the case of conformity. It is a decision they make due to the external pressures caused by group influence or the influence of another individual. Compliance is ethologically a survival tactic whereby one is forced to do certain things to fit in the group as doing the contrary will make them appear odd. This is not the case in

These words contradict each other, freedom is to live without being ordered, however, obedience is to obey orders. It is a complex subject: the way to freedom is by complying to the rules. The juxtaposition of these two words, is challenging to grasp.

A person’s obedience can be derived from social pressure and group minds. Most all people live their lives in groups such as with family, work groups, school peers, political groups, etc. Also most people want to belong to a group and can’t stand being unaccompanied. We are group animals and tend to think as the group thinks which makes it hard for an individual to maintain their own opinions. According to Lessing, “People who have experienced a lot of groups, who have observed their own behavior, may agree that the hardest thing in the world is to stand out against one’s group, a group of one’s peers. Many agree that among our most shameful memories is this, how often we said black was white because other people were saying it” (653). A person’s

Risking the psychological wellbeing of humans has been mostly necessary to understand power and obedience. Since the 1960s unethical experiments have been conducted to understand the mechanisms behind these phenomena. Recent studies explore the necessity of those unsafe practices to arouse new ideas in the psychological literature. Conversely, they also exploit the unnecessary risks of practices in which could’ve been alleviated to minimize harm to participants.