Society’s Tendency to Pass on Responsibility The Obedience to Authority Experiment of Stanley Milgram is one of the most studied experiments in American history due to its wide-ranging social implications. The study gained popular attention because it aimed to provide some insight as to why the Holocaust had escalated in such a way. The study was designed around testing the degree of inflicted pain strangers would give to others, under orders by an experimenter. Not only did the study defy what
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The Discoveries of Obedience Obedience; what does the word really mean? According to Griggs (2012), “Obedience is following the commands of a persons authority”(p.331). A psychologist named Milgram decided to take obedience deeper and studied it from the history to his basic discoveries and later results. Taking a look back at history for example, “My Lai Massacre, where soldiers were ordered to shoot the innocent villagers, including children, women and the elderly”(Griggs 2012). This is a prime
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following them. Deuteronomy twenty-seven and twenty-eight reemphasize and reestablish the Law of Moses which was introduced in Exodus twenty. The key idea to this covenant is that if Yahweh’s people obey him, he will bless them. In other words, with obedience comes blessings. This theme is carried out throughout the books of Kings. King Ahab, the seventh king of the northern kingdom of Israel, is considered one of the worst kings. He reigned for twenty-two years and was more evil than all who came before
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Evaluation points: Explanations of Obedience Agentic state Milgram’s participants knew it was wrong but put the responsibility on the experimenter At the Nuremberg Trials many Nazis said they were just following orders It explains why some people do not obey – they have stayed in the autonomous state A weakness is that there is no evidence that this shift takes place and it cannot be measured. The theory is vague and does not explain fully why or how the shift takes place. One way in
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their behavior due to a request from a group. On the other hand, obedience is a person changes their behavior to fit an "authority figure" (Ciccarelli , 453). Milgram's Obedience experiment is built by Milgram to test obedience. He set some to be "teachers" and others to be "learner". "Learner" was actually an actor, and he gave an authority to "teachers" to shock "learner" if they were incorrect on a simple test. Milgram's Obedience experiment is viewed as controversial these days because it reveals
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Conformity and Obedience 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). The following essay will be about understanding what is meant by and distinguishing the differences between the terms conformity and obedience. It will show the evaluation of two key psychological studies which seek to explain why people do and do not conform
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Obedience is compliance with an order, request, or law or submission to another authority. It is behavior that is mindful and respectful of rules and laws. Conformity is a change in behavior or beliefs as a result of real or imagined group pressure. We naturally conform to the “norm of society”. Obedience and Conformity are two of the most common types of human behavior. We normally obey our parent’s, authority figures, and rules/laws. The motivation to obey comes from either wanting to be rewarded
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Conformity and Obedience The term Social Influence is used to describe what happens when an individual’s opinions, behaviours of emotions are affected or changed due to the influences of another person or persons. This might be Normative Social Influence or Informational Social Influence. Normative often results in compliance as people often put their own opinions to one side and go along with the majority whereas informational could well be minority led, as it is based on an informed point of view
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it wasn’t about what I did, no, that it was all about complete and total obedience to God, that He would be able to say, “Well done, my good and FAITHFUL servant.” 2. What do the Steans mean on page 15 when they say that God wants to bless you, but not give you an easy life? I believe the Stearns mean that the ultimate blessing that we can receive from God in this life is to be used by Him, to have walked in obedience to Him. It is in the times when we are faithful to Him, that we are made
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Conformity and Obedience Why do we conform? Two basic sources of influence: normative social influence, the need to be liked, accepted by others and Informational influence: need to be correct and to behave in accordance with reality. Solomon Asch (1956) devised an experiment to see if subjects would conform even if they were uncertain that the group norm was incorrect. In his study he asked subjects to take part in an experiment. They were each asked to match a standard length line with three
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Dear Mr Baddeley, I am writing in response to your letter of complaint about my obedience experiment. I feel that I have done nothing wrong I would like to convince you that I have in no way ashamed the BPS. Firstly, my work was of practical value as it showed that individuals have a tendency towards destructive obedience. I believe that by showing the results of this experiment, it would have wider benefits to society as it could avoid such incidents in the future, as the one which triggered my
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Summary- Response: The Perils of Obedience In 1963, Stanley Milgram a Yale psychologists held a classic study on obedience, Milgram designed the experiment to force participants to violate their own conscience by following instructions given regardless of stressful circumstances, or to refuse the demands. Most communal living has a system that needs structure, or authority. The basic experiment consisted of two people testing the study of memory and learning, or so they were told. Randomly selected
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difference between obedience and disobedience seems fairly obvious. Obedience is following orders, and disobedience is not following orders.Some authors, including Erich Fromm, Crispin Sartwell, Philip Zimbardo, and Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, offer their own opinions about obedience, and from these articles we can look at obedience versus disobedience. However, in some situations, there can be some confusion between the two. How can something as straightforward as the difference between obedience and disobedience
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The structure of obedience and duty in society is vital to have a humane and functioning environment. Without it, humanity would be left in turmoil and disarray, but at what point does the conviction to that duty become excessive. When obedience is taken to the next step and not rooted in the right morals and values, it will only lead to greed for power and ill decisions. This is shown specifically by Sophocles in his final tale of Oedipus’s family called Antigone. Sophocles argues that the duty
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Obedience is a form of social influence in which a person yields to explicit instruction or orders from an authority figure so after world war II and the atrocities the Nazis committed a lot of people believed that the Germans have a character deficit which make them ready to obey people in authority no matter the act and that was what Milgram set out to question in his experiment. Milgram chose a sample of 40 volunteers by advertising in the newspaper. They were told that they will be participating
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The obedience of the Native Americans towards Columbus and other European settlers eventually resulted in the mass genocide of tribes all across present-day America. For example, Colombus reported that the Arawaks of the Bahama Islands “are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it” (3). The Arawaks’, complete willingness to share was seen as submission in the settlers’ eyes, Columbus even wrote that they would make fine servants, going as
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Christopher Columbus’ obedience of the orders given to him by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to find gold resulted in the slavery and genocide of American Indians. Columbus convinced the King and Queen of Spain to sponsor his expedition with the promise of gold, which was the mark of wealth in Europe during that time. When Columbus came across what he thought was Asia, he reported that “‘...there are many wide rivers of which the majority contain gold… There are many spices, and great mines of
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I must agree with Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, who believed that in our society an individual has become obedient to the immoral demands because they have abandon responsibility for their actions. In “The Perils of Obedience” by Stanley Milgram he states, There was a time perhaps, when people were able to give a fully human response to any situation because they were fully absorbed in it as human beings. But as soon as there was a division of labor things changed. Beyond a certain point
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This essay is about how Antigone would not follow through with Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment. Stanley Milgram's experiment, was when a “teacher”,a person who read materials in a specific order, was instructed to shock a “learner”,who was asked to repeat the materials the “teacher” said in the correct order, for every wrong order given, and if they did not answer they were shocked as well. The shock was not always the same voltage, for every wrong answer, the voltage would increase in increments
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In “The Perils of Obedience,” Stanley Milgram uses a progression of subject-experimenter dialogue to represent his changing notion of the human condition throughout the experiment. In his 1974 piece written for Harper’s Magazine, Milgram describes his revolutionary experiment that provided insight into the conflict between conscience and obedience, highlighting the disturbing ease which people transfer responsibility of their own actions to an authority figure. In the experiment, the experimenter
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Obedience and Conformity Experiments Response Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said, “Only he who believes is obedient and only he who is obedient believes”. In the experiment videos we watched, the subjects had obedience and believed in the authority figure in each setting. If these subjects did not believe or be obedient to the authority figure, the experiment would not have worked. I feel like obedience to an authority figure is something that is naturally instilled in us. When we were younger
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The obedience study by Stanley Milgram had made an extremely influence in the psychology. He studies how eager the human will try to obey authorities and instructions. Milgram had established that 65 percent of his research subjects had followed orders with the experimenter and administered the highest shock possible to a learner, even when they were uncomfortable in doing so (Milgram, 1963). In psychology, this result had made an extreme contribution. There were so many question on his experiment
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Describe a key issue in Social Psychology and explain using concepts, theories and research from Social Psychology (12 marks) Our key issue is whether or not social psychology can explain obedience to authority during conflict leading to the harm of others. This issue is about how people, generally in the army, will obey their superior officers in orders which can lead to the harm of innocent civilians. These orders go against their training (soldiers are trained not to harm civilians), and will
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Obedience. In July of 1963 a psychologist by the name of Stanley Milgram eternally sealed his fate in psychological journals almost over-night with a single study, the obedience to authority figures experiment. The original point and intended purpose of the experiment was to see how long a subject would inflict pain on another in order to please an authority figure. The entire experiment was designed to answer the increasingly relevant question at the time, “Could the Nazi’s have just been following
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Numerous readings we have studied this semester give insight on the impact that society has on an individual’s life, and include certain statistics that are studied within this topic. Many sociologists believe that individuals are submerged into their surroundings and conform to the norms and standards that are set around them. These people are conformists, who follow the majority’s desires or expectations. In my life, I am surrounded by people that are extremely similar, if not carbon copies of
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Explain the factors which might contribute to Obedience? By Lauren Stevenson Obedience: A form of Human behavior from social influence in which a person yields to explicit instructions or orders from an authority figure. Many Factors contribute on how obedient a person is willing to be and many psychologists have ran several studies on Obedience to test this: - Stanley Milgram’s (1963): Germans are different Hypothesis, Hofling et al (1966): Obedient nurses and Rank and Jacobson (1977): Not so
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Taking someone’s life is morally incorrect for most, but what if encourage by an authority figure? Would you still stick to your decision or change based on your obedience to the society you are living in? This is one of the different viewpoints that Philip Zimbardo brought into perspective of most, following the Milgram Obedience Study that took place less than a decade earlier. In his most famous experiment, the Stanford Prison Experiment, Zimbardo turned to Stanford University to prove that with
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chosen individual from a specific family would get, as can be seen in Bill Hutchinson’s family’s fate, specifically that of his wife Tessie (Jackson). The main theme that the author of this paper wanted to portray was the culture or practice of blind obedience to tradition, a tradition that was designed to keep the town thriving but is full of irregularities and can even be associated with perplexed compliance. This is based on the fact (more than just the notion) that Jackson really intended to directly
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One of the subjects from the previous class that caught my attention was the section about research ethics. We touched on two different experiments that were run: Little Albert and Milgram’s Obedience studies. Now, it is thought that both studies were unethical to perform. As a person that is interested in the field of healthcare, ethics is a subject that interests me. An ethical issue was brought to my attention at my workplace about a week ago. I work as a microbiologist in a lab. We receive
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Erick Borgen English 101 Mrs. Holladay February 16th 2015 Rough Draft Rebel without a cause "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God."- Benjamin Franklin. Millions of people in our history, maybe even billions have challenged some type of tyranny or structure. There’s are many rebels that we are not exposed to. We know George Washington, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther king, Mahatma Gandhi and the list goes on and on. In “One World, Many Cultures”
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