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The impact of Milgram’s findings on our understanding of obedience to authority
Outline and evaluate milgram's interpretation of the findings arising from his experiments investigating why people obey those in authority
What are the causes and effects of social pressure
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How did Orlando 's mock psychiatric study support Zimbardos findings. Conformity: Yielding to group pressure The influence a group has over an individual Reffered to a majority influence Compliance is a form of social influence Following the majority even if views arnt shared to fit in Conformity is a unambiguous task Informational social influence Identification in conformity Comformity to assigned roles Individuals alternate their general behaviour and opinions both privately and publicly. Being a member of a group is highly desirable.
In her essay, “Sizing Up the Effects”, Professor Sissela Bok states the harmful effects of aggressive media and accents her informational argument with scholarly accounts of emotion in order to grab both the hearts and heads of her audience. Bok references a study done on homicidal men and says “What is most startling about the most violent people is how incapable they are… of feeling love, guilt, or fear.” , shortly after she takes a quote from Macbeth “I am in blood. Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” By including these hard hitting, poetic pieces she stimulates a new part of each audience member, a personal element is introduced making all of her given information apply on a deeper level.
Stanley Milgram: The Perils of Obedience Stanley Milgram experiment is concerning peoples’ willingness to conform to an authority figure. The question Milgram was trying to answer was would a subject kill with electrical shock, due to an authority figure instructing them too. One individual was the learner being hooked up to electrodes, however, not literally.
It shows how tempting the bad can be. Believe it or not, good doesn’t always win. Depending on the strength of the person who defines you as your true self. As long as you have faith in yourself out of trouble and make the correct choices. Many should not let the bad people affect how people live their lives.
After World War II, several of the Nazi soldiers were questioned about their reasoning behind the corrupt actions they were guilty of---killing hundreds of thousands of men and women, destroying families in the process, and marking their time as a dark part of history. Who on earth would do such a thing? What could their excuse possibly be? Well, to them, they were simply following orders. It’s obvious to believe that the soldiers would find their humanity and resist their commands, but they didn't.
In the short story “The Catbird Seat,” the author James Thurber develops verbal, dramatic, and situational irony by his plot structure. In the beginning of the story Mrs. Barrows says phrases like “Are you tearing up the pea patch?” Right after that an employee explains to Mr. Martin what is means. He says, “‘Tearing up the pea patch’ meant going on a rampage.” That section of the story is verbal irony because Mrs. Burrows is saying phrases she doesn't really mean.
Likewise, people, and animals, tend to do what others are doing around them (Smith). Observers started noticing these behaviors in animals long before they discovered that these behaviors are also very evident in humans. It was not until the 20th century that observers started realizing this about humans. Additionally, herd mentality is a more conscious behavior influenced by peer pressure, a need of acceptance, and a desire for belonging and people who struggle with being themselves and are therefore more susceptible to obtain this way of thinking and behaving (Smith). This form of mob mentality causes people to behave summarily to what others in the group are doing.
The consequences are ignored when engaging in a crowd event that may seem normal but is actually
Similarly to the school experiment gone wrong, the effects of group
Many people can say they were taught at a very young age by parents the appropriate way to "behave" in certain situations. For example, horsing around in church, screaming in restaurants, throwing tantrums in stores, etc., are things your mother might have called "misbehaving" or "unacceptable behavior", but sociologists call such abnormal behavior, Social Norms. Social Norms are defined as, “the accepted behavior that an individual is expected to conform to in a particular group, community, or culture.” The social science experiment I correlated involved the violation of a social norm, while I documented the reactions of local observers for doing something classified as “unusual behavior” or “not normal” in society. I eported the reactions
Don’t Follow the Crowd The term “herd behavior” can be interpreted in many different ways, but is usually noticed when people change their beliefs and morals which they believe in to topics that others believe in due to the fear of being alone. In the teleplay “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” written by Rod Serling, the article “Why Do People Follow the Crowd,” written by ABC News, and the short story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, scenarios where people act in violent and in unnecessary ways in order to fit in with a crowd, are plotted. Having negative effects on people, mob mentality and herd behavior convince people of all types to change their personal qualities to traits that a group processes
This is a basic example of using these peoples suffering for their own benefit or use, these people who are fighting for their lives became an entertaining show. Many people would see Jewish people as less than everyone else because they are not “Aryan”, the superior race. This inclined people to hurt or injure them because they believe they were less than human. An example of this is when Idek “began beating [Shlomo] with an iron bar.
A well known study on the impact of group membership on individual behaviour was a study by Dr Zimbardo, the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE). This study revealed how groups can affect behaviour negatively. The aim of the study was to discover how people responded in harsh situations within groups and why . The SPE (1971) involved placing teenage students in a prison setting (in the basement of Stanford University)..
When we are in a group, whatever the group thinks we will one third of the times go along with. “Why did most subjects conform so readily? When they were interviewed after the experiment, most of them said that they did not really believe their conforming answers, but had gone along with the group for fear of being ridiculed or thought "peculiar." A few of them said that they really did believe the group 's answers were correct (Solomon Asch Conformity Experiment). ”
It results in people conforming to decisions they would not normally make. These people generally set aside their own beliefs and conform to the rest of the group. Real life examples of this could be the fact that many people, especially in school, follow the opinions and actions of those who are considered to be “popular”. In conclusion, Asch’s experiments prove that people are extremely determined to fit in instead of stand out, at least when it comes to social situations.
