Obedience To Authority

1926 Words8 Pages
Obedience to Authority During the course of our lives obedience, or the lack of, is a learned trait. Nobody is born with the cognitive abilities to obey or disobey. We don’t quite grasp the meaning behind what it is to obey. Certainly we learn as we grow up that there is a figure of authority, whether that be a mother, father, uncle, aunt, or whoever is charged with our upbringing. We start to learn as we mature that we must obey them, but for reasons that, at that age, we don’t quite understand yet. There may be signs of rebellion while growing up to separate ourselves from this authority in order to establish our identities and show that we don’t have to follow the course set out for us. But what happens when a person is faced with no perceivable means of escaping this authority and must obey? What happens when the actions being presented to us, and thusly their consequences, are contradictory to this very identity we’ve been establishing our whole lives? What motivates a person to obey at this point? Is it incentives? Punishment? No. People can obey morally conflicting orders if they vicariously carry out these commands as the will of their authoritarian. Ordinary people can, and have, been known to act completely out of their self-defined character under stressful situations. We’ve seen documented cases of this; in particular I’m referring to “The Stanford Prison Experiment” conducted by Philip Zimbardo (389). Here was an experiment where 21 Stanford students were selected to become role players in a prison environment. To eliminate any preference for the students, they were randomly assigned their roles, half of them would become the guards of the prison and the other half would be prisoners. What followed was a shocking case of what changes the human psyche goes through when presented with an extreme circumstance. During this experiment the prisoners and

More about Obedience To Authority

Open Document