Obedience

Humans have always wondered what influences one person to obey the commands of another. Researchers have been studying obedience since the 1950’s in order to better understand human obedience as well as determine what factors can influence it.

The most well known of these researchers is Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist interested in conflicts between morality and obedience.

Obedience is the act of following orders without question because they come from a legitimate authority. There are many legitimate authorities in a person's life from their parents to teachers at school and even spiritual leaders. Most of these authority figures that have been named are given their authority by society. We are just told to follow what they tell you to do. In other words we are obedient to these people. Every person at some time in their life has followed a superior without questioning why they are doing what they are doing. For example we never question why we take tests in school. We just take them because we are told to do so. We never question a lot of the rules that people say in are best interest because they are usually told to us by someone that is in a position higher than we are at.

Critics might argue that the price of conformity is small, and that group pressure easily outweighs any personal preference for accuracy. What if the behaviour being encouraged seems morally wrong or distasteful to the subject? Would he or she resist even direct pressure under such circumstances?

Milgram's Reseach
This was the question asked by the late Stanley Milgram (1933-1984) in a classic series of studies he commenced in the early 1960s. After World War II, much propaganda and public opinion maintained that the horrors of Nazi Germany were impossible in the United States, since Americans value independence and would never accept orders to harm others. Milgram wondered if such tendenceis to obey authority would indeed vary across cultures, so he designed an experiment to test this comparison.

In Milgram's famous experiment, subjects were asked to act as "teachers" reciting word-pairs for a "learner" to memorize. If, in being tested, the learner made a mistake, teh teacher wast o punish him by administering an electric shock. With each mistake, the voltage level of hte shock would be increaased. (Milgram in fact assured that no pain would actually be involved, by having an actor play the part of the learner. The teacher, unbeknownst to himself, was the only subject in theis experiment). An experimenter would urge the teadher to obey the rules of the experiment but would not threaten or harm him. How far would the teacher go before refusing to obey the experimenter's orders?

Social experts Milgram consulted insisted that only a small percentage of subjects would obey such orders, e3specially if the learner protested. Much to everyone's surprise, although the learner moaned and shouted throughtout the "painful" experience, 63% of the subjects in Milgram's first experiment went all the way to the upper limit of voltage (450volts) without disobeying . In a second series, Milgram had the learner complain of a heart condition and refuse to answer after 300 volts. In this series, 65% of the subjects nontheless obeyed all the way to the upper limit of voltage.



Trapped Like Monkeys

An interesting system has been used for capturing monkeys in the jungles of Africa. The goal is to take the monkeys alive and unharmed for shipment to zoos of America. In an extremely humane way, the captors use heavy bottles, with long narrow necks, into which they deposit a handful of sweet-smelling nuts. The bottles are dropped on the jungle floor, and the captors return the next morning to find a monkey trapped next to each bottle.

How is it accomplished? The monkey, attracted by the aromatic scent of the nuts, comes to investigate the bottle, the nuts, and is trapped. The monkey can't take its hand out of the bottle as long it's holding the nuts, but it is unwilling to open its hand and let them go. The bottle is too heavy to carry away, so the monkey is trapped.

We may smile at the foolish monkeys, but how often we hold to our problems so tenaciously as the monkeys hold to the nuts in the bottle. And so, figuratively we carry our bottle around with us, feeling very sorry for ourselves, and begging for sympathy from others, even from God.