Conformity And Obedience

1093 Words5 Pages
Conformity and Obedience In this essay I am going to discuss a psychological approach to obedience. Firstly what is obedience, Obedience means to obey someone, to follow direct orders, usually a person that is in a position of authority like a policeman, teacher or officer in the army. There are three types of obedience, Internalizing this means to follow orders, but orders which you believe in. Compliance which means that you would follow someones instructions without necessarily agreeing with them and conformity. Conformity happens through social pressure, adopting the attitude and behaviour of what others do to fit in, this may be totally against what the individual believes but conforms never the less,Conformity can lead to destructive obedience, this refers to individuals following orders which they think to be immoral, which will cause them a lot of stress and regret. For example Adolf Eichmann, who was a logistical genius, was the officer who was executed in 1962 for his part in the holocaust. He was accused of organizing, transporting and the killing of millions of Jews, communists, gypsies and trade unionists. Eichmann stated that he was 'simply obeying orders'. After the Holocaust psychologists set out to investigate 'human obedience'. Attempts to explain the Holocaust focused on the idea that Germans had a distinctive culture that had allowed the Holocaust to take place. Stanley Milgram was one such psychologist, Milgram was himself a Jew whom had managed to avoid the same fate as thousands of his fellow people had met at the hands of the Nazis. Historians proposed that ‘Germans are different’ that Germans have a character defect which made them obey figures of authority no matter what the circumstance. Milgram’s experiment was set up to test a persons obedience to authority. To do this he advertised in a newspaper and by mail for
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