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Authority is always going to be a part of life, and in life, everyone has demands they must comply to. Workers deal with their bosses, children deal with parents, students deal with their teacher, and soldiers deal with their commander’s demands that can impact one’s life. Obedience, while sometimes a necessity in learning the ways of life, can be taken too far to the extreme. Obedience can be a positive thing when it comes to religion or the care of a parent. Although, in some cases demands can become threatening and stressful after doing something that was forced upon them. A person’s conscience lets them be aware of right and wrong. Other people will sometimes try to act against this instinct, these people being negative authority that lead others to make bad decisions.
In the late 1930’s, one of the more classical psychological studies was obedience, an interest taken on by many psychologists. Stanley Milgram’s series of experiments on this topic were based on one question and had only one real subject participating. Milgram sees obedience as one of the basic elements that structure life in society. The question is “To what extent will one obey commands when in conflict with conscience?” The only real subject in his experiments is the teacher. The teacher is told the experiment is to examine the effects of punishment on learning. The learner (who was asked to act prior to the experiment) is hooked up to something similar to an electric chair, and is shocked at a certain level of volts when he answers the word pair incorrectly. Although the contraption is setup as a fake, what Milgram is really looking to see is the teacher’s reaction to his demands. He tests to what extents the teacher is willing to inflict pain on another in order to abide by his commands. The conflict begins when the learner shows discomfort in the shock treatment. Tension rises in the teacher and she begins to stress out. When this happens she will ask the experimenter if she should...