Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority (1974) revealed in the simplest and most understandable manner the flaws of human nature. Milgram demonstrated the very adaptable collection of tendencies of human nature and he showed that those human tendencies that are exceedingly esteemed by society such as discipline, loyalty, and duty would be the most dangerous for the continued existence of humanity as they can be exploited for manipulating people to do the most atrocious actions at any time precise conditions are in position.These conditions could be: the focus of power in institutions and individuals that present themselves with an impression of certified authority that place them above moral probing; and the inattention for the majority of people of the advance of crucial faculties made feasible through the employment by the force of the channels of education and communication as tools of misinformation and exploitation, at the benefit of the Church power in the historic past and of the power of the state today.Obedience is an essential and necessary aspect in the formation of social life.
A number of authority structures are a necessity of all collective living, and it is merely the man living in seclusion who is not compelled to react, in disobedience or capitulation, to the orders of others. Obedience has a distinct bearing to present time. Obedience has been unfailingly shown when in the period of 1933 – 1945 millions of people were methodically killed on order.Gas chambers were constructed, death camps were fortified, and certain number of dead bodies on a daily basis was churned out with the same competence as the production of machines.
These rules of cruelty and brutality may have its beginning in one person’s design, but they could not be successfully accomplished on an immense magnitude if a massive number of people did not obey orders. Applications of the Obedience Concept Obedience is the mental and emotional means that associates individual deed to political objective.Obedience is the temperamental bond that connects people to structures of power and authority. Historical evidence and examination in everyday living imply that for a number of people obedience is possibly a profoundly rooted behavior propensity, and certainly a predisposed impulse superseding training in moral behavior, ethics, and compassion. C.
P. Snow (1961) asserted the significance of obedience as: “When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.If you doubt that, read William Shirer’s ‘Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. ’ The German Officer Corps were brought up in the most rigorous code of obedience…in the name of obedience they were party to, and assisted in, the most wicked large scale actions in the history of the world. ” The annihilation of European Jews by the Nazi is the most excessive, if not the ultimate, occurrence of detestable immoral deeds performed by a large number of people in the matter of obedience.
However in a lesser extent this is relentlessly happening in such instances as ordinary people being commanded to destroy or subdue other people, and they obeyed the orders because they deem it their obligation to obey what they are commanded to do. Hence, obedience to authority, honored as a virtue, bears on another side when applied to an otherwise good cause. Obedience is converted into an atrocious virtue. But is obedience really a transformative offense?The moral issue of obeying and disobeying when orders clash with one’s conscience was argued by Plato in Antigone, and considered to philosophical examination in every historical period. Traditional thinkers contended that the foundation of society is imperiled by disobedience, and though the act imposed by an authority is iniquitous, it is better to perform the deed than to wrestle at the instituted authority.
Hobbes (1998) further contended that an act so carried out is not accountable to the person who executes the act but the authority that commands the act.Humanists, however, assert for the dominance of individual conscience by maintaining that the moral decisions of the individual should prevail authority when the two are in disagreement. Contributions of the Theory of Obedience to Psychology and to the World Stanley Milgram’s work and experiments on obedience to authority is the most important contribution in social psychology. Milgram’s studies, through diverse circumstances, showed how clearly people would harm others with no consideration to personal gain or malevolence and in conflict with their own morals.
The obedience research had many effects beyond the actual outcomes. Even with Milgram’s trepidation for ethical handling of his subjects, a number of people disapproved the experiments. Critics similarly associate Milgram to the character of vicious authority he was attempting to study. Milgram’s experiments undoubtedly contributed to the formation of the APA’s guidelines for handling participants and the government directing the employment of institutional review boards.Blass (2004) noted that social psychology is at times disparaged as being insignificant or just merely substantiating familiar knowledge. But Milgram’s obedience studies demonstrated that the criticisms were unfounded.
The remarkable nature of the obedience experiments contributed to popularizing social psychology primarily and psychology in a broader extent. Milgram’s experimental researches have been the theme of popular music, a movie in TV, and were reviewed sixty times that included such known publications as the L. A. Times and The Spectator of London (Blass, 2004).Stanley Milgram certainly helped rationalize social psychology some considered as insignificant, greatly contributed to the insight of humanity.
Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments may have generated a number of controversy, but he offered a much needed knowledge into the unethical experiments performed today by leaders of cult organizations and those known personalities of the past such as Jim Jones, David Koresh, Charles Manson, Heaven’s Gate Leader Herff Applewhite, Japan’s sarin gas cult leader Shoko Asahara of Aum Shinrikyo and a number of others all over the world.The Theory and the Theorist Stanley Milgram’s research is repeatedly taken by social scientists to point out how strongly people hold on to a sense of duty to obey, so greatly that ordinary people can do hideously inhumane deeds at the command of authority. Christopher Browning (1992), a holocaust historian, cited Milgram’s notion of obedience as deference in his endeavor to rationalize the slaughters of Jews in the villages of Poland by the ordinary men of a German Order Police troop.As argued by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1989), Milgram showed that “cruelty…correlates very strongly indeed with the relationship of authority and subordination. ” Milgram himself ascribed “the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority” to their “sense of obligation. ” The highlighting on enforced obedience in Stanley Milgram’s experiments has directed us off course in comprehending behavior in the experiment, obedience beyond the laboratory, and detrimental behavior in the holocaust.
First, obedience as a depiction should be cautiously differentiated from obedience as a rationalization. While the behavior of Milgram’s experimental subjects can be depicted as obedient in the precise sense that eventually subjects predisposed to behave in a way consistent with the directions of the experimenter, it does not signify that obedience to authority rationalizes why subjects behaved as they did. Secondly, action portrayed as obedient may be the outcome from a range of persuasions and manipulations of an authority.These could involve reverence for the supposed expertise of the authority, recognition of the likely use of reward and intimidation of the authority, or the sense of duty to obey a rightful authority. Milgram stressed felt obligation to obey an authority, however experimental evidence disputed his research. It can be contended that obedience springs from duty only in exceedingly extraordinary situations, even though obedience is frequently excused after the fact in matters of obligation.
Action depicted as obedient may additionally be the outcome of ordinary social persuasions that are not exactly attributable to the existence of authority.Two instances in Milgram’s experiment demonstrated this behavior: the effect of subjects’ deductions from the others’ behavior; and, the influence of the limitations and variations of social communication with the experimenter. The pattern of obligation-based model of obedience could send a misleading unqualified history and unequivocal psychology of the holocaust. Even if enforced obedience to orders from authority took an indisputable part in the Nazi rule, historical research likewise provides evidence in the degree to which the command and execution of the holocaust were fashioned from underneath the authority.Stanley Milgram: Brief Biography Stanley Milgram was born in 1933 and was brought up in New York City.
He obtained his High School education and graduated in 1950 at James Monroe High School, together with the imminent social psychologist Phil Zimbardo. He got his bachelor’s degree in 1954 from Queens College. Milgram pursued for advanced study and earned his Ph. D.
at Harvard under Gordan Allport. Stanley Milgram was notably interested in social issues, an up-and-coming discipline of urban psychology. Milgram’s dissertation examined intersecting cultural diversities in compliance to which he carried out in Paris and Norway.When he came back from Paris, he went on for advanced study in Princeton during the period 1959-1960 with Solomon Asch. Asch was involved with the study of conformity and had finished his famed inquiries of conformity that called for subjects to decide on lines ascertained to be of the same dimension. The right selections that would have been chosen were counterbalanced by simulated alternatives that were picked by the accomplices of the experimenter.
These differing judgments generated the selection of lines that were not even closely related in length as the other.Milgram modified the design model from lines to shocks and carried out his famed progression of experiments on obedience to authority. Stanley Milgram greatly chose to undertake subjects that had impact on the ordinary men and women on the street in contrast to those issues defined and pursued by academicians. In one instance, his mother-in-law inquired from him why passengers do not anymore relinquished their subway seats. Milgram inferred that New Yorkers were not cold and rigid inhabitants of the city, but were rather restrained against interacting each other. He deployed his students to look into this and reckoned his theory was correct.
He went back to Paris in 1972 to investigate Parisian’s mental maps of their city relative to New York inhabitant’s mental maps of the city of New York. Milgram’s Obedience to Authority was published in 1974. He was awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) with its annual award in social psychology for his remarkable work with obedience. In 1975 he was nominated for a National Book Award for his book on obedience which during this time had been distributed internationally and translated into seven languages. At the age of 51, Stanley Morgan died in 1984 in his native New York City.
