For example, the majority could make the minority feel uncomfortable about disagreeing, as we see in Asch’s study. Or the majority could even force them too with fear and power, as the Nazis did to so many Germans; they used scaremongering to enforce conformity. This is type of conformity is driven by the basic need to feel accepted and to have companionship with other people, the majority. Informational Social Influence This is where someone conforms to a view because they believe it to be correct. This is associated with Internalisation (conforming because you have accepted a group’s views and they now fit with your own beliefs).
Milgram believed they acted as a mechanism to help people cope with the strain of having to obey an immoral command. Agentic shift , people usually operate in an autonomous state behaving voluntarily and aware of the consequences following their actions. When Milgram’s participants were debriefed , many reported that they knew it was wrong to deliver dangerous electric shocks, but that they felt the experimenter was responsible and not them. Authoritarian personality is another explanation of obedience. It is that an individuals personality may make them more or less inclined to obey an authority figure.
Assess the importance of propaganda in the maintenance of Nazi power between 1933 and 1939. Propaganda is information put out by an organization or government to promote a policy, idea, or cause. It was a fundamental element in the maintenance of the Nazi Government power between the period of 1933-39. Joseph Goebbels was an important key figure in utilising Propaganda in Germany. Though it wasn't the only key element in the maintenance of power, Nazi Government also used other factors including; fear and the success Hitler turning Germany socio-economy around.
Describe and Explain why people obey. (12 marks) Firstly, Milgram proposed the Agency theory in order to explain the levels of obedience in his experiments. He proposed that an individual’s social consciousness can operate in two ways; the Agentic state – this is where someone else directs their behaviour and they assume that the responsibility is passed to that person (diffusion of responsibility), in contrast the autonomous state is when a person directs their own behaviour as they feel that they are responsible for their actions (following a moral code). This can be supported as in Milgram’s study; participants were in the agentic state as they passed the responsibility to the experimenter. Additionally, in Hoffling’s study 95% of the nurses passed the responsibility to Dr Smith when they were asked to administrate a lethal amount of a drug to a person.
Benefits come from belonging in a group, individuals may conform on the surface but disagree with the group internally. This is called compliance, going along with the majority despite knowing they are incorrect. Informational social influence; is powered by what people need or their motives. When people are unaware how to behave, think or feel in a social situation the need for conformity is the need to be safe. An example of psychological research in conformity is Asch (1951) line study, where there were varying amount of both participants and confederates and they were asked to state which line was bigger out of three.
In 1933 Hitler legally came to power after a series of miscalculations by the government, they believed they would be able to control Hitler but they were truth. In fact it has been argued by historians such as Kershaw that this was actually the key to Hitler’s success. Structuralists believe that Hitler was in fact a very weak dictator. They have argued that the Nazi regime evolved from the ‘pressure of circumstance’ and not from the role of Hitler himself. Hitler was considered to be incapable of making a decision and as a result his government lacked any form control of important decisions and his general poor leadership skills it is clear to see why Hitler can be seen to be a weak dictator.
Another rather ambitious aim of theirs was to indoctrinate the people with their Weltanschauung or in other words they were aiming to turn the population into committed members of their Volksgemeinschaft (a community whose members would be Aryan, genetically healthy, socially useful and politically committed to the regime). Nazi propaganda’s purpose was to influence people and to literally brainwash them without them even realizing it. Another aim was to ensure that the message delivered is so simple that even those without any education are able to understand it. It was carefully thought out to control and impose Nazi ideology. Hitler’s aim was to influence the nations spiritually on the behalf of the State and gain devoted followers on his side.
“In both cases the evil they did was not intended; it was perhaps easy to “feel” that the evil was not their doing, to feel that it had an accidental quality.” (p. 233) many of the people that participated in the experiment and the German soldiers that participated in the Holocaust believe that they are not responsible for what happened they were just following orders and doing what they were told to do. This shows how people do what they are told not thinking of the consequences of their actions.
A Comparative Critique of “The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: A Source of Sadism” and “The Perils of Obedience” How do we respond to authority? Obedience is defined as dutiful or submissive behavior with respect to another person or group of people. It is usually referred to as a positive aspect, but in the case of “The Perils of Obedience” by Stanley Milgram, in which obedience to authority causes other people harm, it can easily be argued as an extremely negative factor. Stanley Milgram, a psychology professor at Yale University conducted an experiment to see if participants would either violate their conscience by obeying the immoral demands of an authority figure or refuse those demands. In “The Perils of Obedience”, Milgram was trying to prove a point that shows how far someone will go to be obedient to the authority.
The person may suffer with responses that are un appropriate in certain situations as well as the usual signs (rapid heartbeat, sweating and nervousness. Anxiety disorders include post-traumatic stress, obsessive compulsive disorder and phobias. Psychotic disorders - involve distorted awareness and thinking. People experience images and sounds that are not real. The ill people believe they are true despite being shown evidence.