Social Psychology: Obedience and Authority

Many U.S. citizens tend to believe that people who do not have as much as others (for instance, those who are very poor) should be treated fairly and that these people may legitimately demand resources from those who have more. This might not always work, but to the extent that it does it represents a type of legitimate power—power that comes from a belief in the appropriateness or obligation to respond to the requests of others with legitimate standing. However, on the second day, the prisoners tried to rebel against the guards. The guards quickly moved to stop the rebellion by using both psychological punishment and physical abuse. In the ensuing days, the guards denied the prisoners food, water, and sleep; shot them with fire-extinguisher spray; threw their blankets into the dirt; forced them to clean toilet bowls with their bare hands; and stripped them naked.

Because the participants had become so involved in their roles, the guards utilized authoritarian techniques to gain the obedience of the prisoners. Another point of controversy concerns the ethical treatment of research participants. Researchers have an obligation to look out for the welfare of their participants. Yet, there is little doubt that many of Milgram’s participants experienced intense levels of stress as they went through the procedure.

Expert Answer

Compliance involves changing your behavior at the request of another person, while conformity consists in altering your behavior to go along with the rest of the group. The punishments established within a culture help to define acceptable behavior and thus contribute to social stability. Through a microphone, the teacher administered a memory test to the learner in the next room.

• The third was a confederate who pretended to be another participant.
• Bosses have coercive power over employees if they are able (and willing) to punish employees by reducing their salary, demoting them to a lower position, embarrassing them, or firing them.
• Vertical and horizontal EEGs were recorded with two pairs of electrodes, one placed above and below the left eye, and the other 10 mm from the lateral canthi.
• In other cases, legitimate power comes more informally, as a result of being a respected group member.
• If the teacher saw the correct answer light up on his side of the wall, he simply moved on to the next item.
• It showed
  that people have a strong tendency to comply with authority figures.

An ability to influence others because they can lead those others to identify with them. Power vested in those who are appointed or elected to positions of authority. An ability to develop a clear perception of the situation using situational cues. Level of destructive obedience as a function https://accounting-services.net/what-is-revenue-expense-drawing-in-accounting/ of transmitter and executant roles in the Milgram obedience paradigm. These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word ‘obedience.’ Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors.

Milgram’s Results

Consider a classic study conducted many years ago by Solomon Asch (1956). The participants were male college students who were asked to engage in a seemingly simple task. An experimenter standing several feet away held up a card that depicted one line on the left side and three lines on the right side. The participant’s job was to say aloud which of the three lines on the right was the same length as the line on the left.

In our experiments, in the absolutely consistent situations, the participants faced clear judgment discrepancy, the sorting stimulus was easy, the participants were determined and confident, and the P3 amplitudes were large. In the relatively consistent situations, the participants faced obscure judgment discrepancy, the sorting stimulus was difficult, the participants were uncertain and not confident. It is worth mentioning that consistency level did not influence the P3 peak latency between conformity decision and obedience decision. This reveals that classification process is implicit in both conformity and obedience. Consistency level may affect conformity and obedience decisions in a similar neuropsychological pattern. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used in this study to explore the neural mechanism of obedience and conformity on the model of online book purchasing.

More meanings of obedience

The teacher was instructed to start with the 15-volt lever and move up to the next highest shock for each successive wrong answer. Leaders who are enthusiastic, committed, and self-confident; who tend to talk about the importance of group goals at a broad level; and who make personal sacrifices for the group. Power that is based on the ability to create negative outcomes for others, for instance by bullying, intimidating, or otherwise punishing. When one person is able to influence others by providing them with positive outcomes. In comparison to those with less power, people who have more power over others are more confident and more attuned to potential opportunities in their environment (Anderson & Berdahl, 2002). They are also more likely than are people with less power to take action to meet their goals (Anderson & Galinsky, 2006; Galinsky, Gruenfeld, & Magee, 2003).

• The ability of a person to create conformity even when the people being influenced may attempt to resist those changes.
• He found that obedience rates decreased when the learner was in the same room as the experimenter and declined even further when the teacher had to physically touch the learner to administer the punishment.
• After the participant and the confederate both consented to participate in the study, the researcher explained that one of them would be randomly assigned to be the teacher and the other the learner.
• The results show that compared with conformity decisions, obedience decisions induced greater cognitive conflicts.
• Participants were asked to make a decision, as quickly as possible, whether to buy a book based on the limited information which included book’s title keywords and the number of positive and negative reviews.
• The mistake might have been amusing, except the second participant gave the same answer.

The experimenter explained that the teacher’s job would be to sit in the control room and to read a list of word pairs to the learner. After the teacher read the list once, it would be the learner’s job to remember which words went together. For instance, if the word pair was blue-sofa, the teacher would say the word blue on the testing trials obedience refers to and the learner would have to indicate which of four possible words (house, sofa, cat, or carpet) was the correct answer by pressing one of four buttons in front of him. After the experimenter gave the “teacher” a sample shock (which was said to be at 45 volts) to demonstrate that the shocks really were painful, the experiment began.

Milgram’s Obedience Study

He argued that “if you’re not aware that this can happen, you can be seduced by evil. In the 1960s, the social psychologist Stanley
Milgram did a famous research study called the obedience study. It showed
that people have a strong tendency to comply with authority figures.