Obedience Theory

Further, additional experiments conducted by Milgram also suggest that social support enables the person to disobey the commands and orders of the authority. A disobedient one is not loved in any setting, and he will not be able to cope positively with his life’s challenges. A youngster is educated early on to respect the authority of adults, including family members, teachers, and community leaders. The Milgram study showed that obedience has not deteriorated over time. Burger also observed that both genders behaved similarly, implying that all participants would obey.

• If we had more people in positions of authority, we would be more likely to obey them.
• Therefore, the level of obedience is higher than if he were not considered legitimate.
• Cross cultural studies of obedience found rates of obedience similar to those of Milgram.
• In his subsequent experiment, where he ensured that the researcher was wearing regular clothes, the level of obedience dropped significantly.

One social psychology textbook presents the most frequently accepted definition of obedience. The definition of obedience is “the alteration of behavior brought about by submission to authoritative norms.” To put it another way, you obey an explicit command given to you by another person. Scholar and economist Stephen Gibson has recently cast doubt on the adequacy of such a definition.

Final Obedience Quiz

Milgram believed that the
teachers had acted in this way because they were pressured to do so by an
authority figure. Society is hierarchical in the sense that teachers, parents, police or law officers are above us. This authority is legitimate, causing us to obey them when we are told to do or not to do something.

Psychologists have typically defined obedience as a form of social influence elicited in response to direct orders from an authority figure. In the most influential set of studies of obedience, conducted by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s, the orders at the disposal of the authority figure were a series of verbal prods. However, recent research has suggested that Milgram’s experiments do not show people following orders.

Obedience

The study concludes by presenting a new definition of obedience that omits the need for direct orders. The Milgram experiment found that most volunteers follow directions even if they hurt others. If urged by an authority figure, two-thirds of the participants would give the learner the maximum shock. “Subjects had learned from infancy that it is a direct violation of personal morality to hurt another person without his agreement,” therefore, this result astonished Milgram. Milgram hypothesized that the participants entered an agentic situation in which they allowed the authority figure to take responsibility for their acts to explain why otherwise normal people might conduct potentially lethal crimes toward other humans.

• Both conformity and obedience refer to a person doing what is contrary to their own values.
• When a person shows obedience to the social norm and accepts what is told to him to do, he is accepted as a disciplined worker.
• Those with an authoritarian personality were more likely to be willing to obey those they viewed as higher or more authoritarian than them but were more openly hostile to those they regarded as beneath them.
• The result is a population that readily follows authority figures’ dictates since no one is willing to take any responsibility for anything.
• In Milgram’s subsequent investigations, when it was suggested that the participants would be taking responsibility and not the authority figure as was thought, it was found that they refused to obey.

Burger’s follow-up study indicated that participants who worried about the learner’s well-being were less likely to continue. He also observed that the more the experimenter encouraged participants to continue, the more likely they were to quit. Over 90% of participants completed the trial despite saying they did not like it. Compared to Milgram and Utrecht, Bocchiaro and Zimbardo showed similar obedience.

Embodiment of prestige or power

False – the pro aspect of obedience is called constructive obedience, the con aspect of obedience is called destructive obedience. Both conformity and obedience refer to a person doing what is contrary to their own values. In contrast to conformity, obedience is when explicit instruction is given by an authority figure to an individual. Conformity refers to both implicit and explicit pressures that a group puts on an individual. Although they’re both types of social influence, conformity doesn’t require instruction, but obedience does.

This type of feeling of lack of responsibility motivates one to obey orders. Secondly, die person ordering or the person conducting the experiment must have real life prestige, dignity and authority. Thus https://accounting-services.net/obedience/ a five year old child obeys his parents but does not obey his care taker or maid servant. Findings similar to Milgram’s study on obediency have been obtained by Kilhan and Mann-1974 Shan and Yahya, 1977.