Obedience

---

In reality, the experiment focuses on people's willingness to obey malevolent authority. Each subject served as a teacher of associations between arbitrary pairs of words. After meeting the "teacher" at the beginning of the experiment, the "learner" an accomplice of the experimenter sat in another room and could be heard, but not seen.

Teachers were told to give the "learner" electric shocks of increasing severity for each wrong answer. If subjects questioned the procedure, the "researcher" again, an accomplice of Milgram would encourage them to continue. Subjects were told to ignore the agonized screams of the learner, his desire to be untied and stop the experiment, and his pleas that his life was at risk and that he suffered from a heart condition.

The experiment, the "researcher" insisted, had to go on. The dependent variable in this experiment was the voltage amount of shocks administered. The other classical study on obedience was conducted at Stanford University during the s.

Can you have faith without obedience?

Phillip Zimbardo was the main psychologist responsible for the experiment. In the Stanford Prison Experiment , college age students were put into a pseudo prison environment in order to study the impacts of "social forces" on participants behavior. The experimental setting was made to physically resemble a prison while simultaneously inducing "a psychological state of imprisonment". The Milgram study found that most participants would obey orders even when obedience posed severe harm to others. With encouragement from a perceived authority figure, about two-thirds of the participants were willing to administer the highest level of shock to the learner.

This result was surprising to Milgram because he thought that "subjects have learned from childhood that it is a fundamental breach of moral conduct to hurt another person against his will". Zimbardo obtained similar results as the guards in the study obeyed orders and turned aggressive. Prisoners likewise were hostile to and resented their guards. The cruelty of the "guards" and the consequent stress of the "prisoners," forced Zimbardo to terminate the experiment prematurely, after 6 days.

The previous two studies greatly influenced how modern psychologists think about obedience. Milgram's study in particular generated a large response from the psychology community. In a modern study, Jerry Burger replicated Milgram's method with a few alterations. Burger's method was identical to Milgram's except when the shocks reached volts, participants decided whether or not they wanted to continue and then the experiment ended base condition.

To ensure the safety of the participants, Burger added a two-step screening process; this was to rule out any participants that may react negatively to the experiment. In the modeled refusal condition, two confederates were used, where one confederate acted as the learner and the other was the teacher. The teacher stopped after going up to 90 volts, and the participant was asked to continue where the confederate left off.

This methodology was considered more ethical because many of the adverse psychological effects seen in previous studies' participants occurred after moving past volts. Additionally, since Milgram's study only used men, Burger tried to determine if there were differences between genders in his study and randomly assigned equal numbers of men and women to the experimental conditions.

Using data from his previous study, Burger probed participant's thoughts about obedience. Participants' comments from the previous study were coded for the number of times they mentioned "personal responsibility and the learner's well being". Another study that used a partial replication of Milgram's work changed the experimental setting.

In one of the Utrecht University studies on obedience, participants were instructed to make a confederate who was taking an employment test feel uncomfortable. Participants were told to make all of the instructed stress remarks to the confederate that ultimately made him fail in the experimental condition, but in the control condition they were not told to make stressful remarks. The dependent measurements were whether or not the participant made all of the stress remarks measuring absolute obedience and the number of stress remarks relative obedience. Following the Utrecht studies, another study used the stress remarks method to see how long participants would obey authority.

The dependent measures for this experiment were the number of stress remarks made and a separate measure of personality designed to measure individual differences. Burger's first study had results similar to the ones found in Milgram's previous study. The rates of obedience were very similar to those found in the Milgram study, showing that participants' tendency to obey has not declined over time.

Sign up, it's free!

Additionally, Burger found that both genders exhibited similar behavior, suggesting that obedience will occur in participants independent of gender. In Burger's follow-up study, he found that participants that worried about the well being of the learner were more hesitant to continue the study. He also found that the more the experimenter prodded the participant to continue, the more likely they were to stop the experiment. The Utrecht University study also replicated Milgram's results.

They also found that participants would either stop the experiment at the first sign of the learner's pleas or would continue until the end of the experiment called "the foot in the door scenario". One of the major assumptions of obedience research is that the effect is caused only by the experimental conditions, and Thomas Blass ' research contests this point, as in some cases participant factors involving personality could potentially influence the results.

In addition to personality factors, participants who are resistant to obeying authority had high levels of social intelligence. Obedience can also be studied outside of the Milgram paradigm in fields such as economics or political science. One economics study that compared obedience to a tax authority in the lab versus at home found that participants were much more likely to pay participation tax when confronted in the lab. Another study involving political science measured public opinion before and after a Supreme Court case debating whether or not states can legalize physician assisted suicide.

They found that participants' tendency to obey authorities was not as important to public opinion polling numbers as religious and moral beliefs. Both the Milgram and Stanford experiments were conducted in research settings. In , psychiatrist Charles K. Hofling published the results of a field experiment on obedience in the nurse—physician relationship in its natural hospital setting. Nurses, unaware they were taking part in an experiment, were ordered by unknown doctors to administer dangerous doses of a fictional drug to their patients.

Although several hospital rules disallowed administering the drug under the circumstances, 21 out of the 22 nurses would have given the patient an overdose. Many traditional cultures regard obedience as a virtue ; historically, societies have expected children to obey their elders compare patriarchy , slaves their owners, serfs their lords in feudal society , lords their king, and everyone God.

Even long after slavery ended in the United States, the Black codes required black people to obey and submit to whites, on pain of lynching. Compare the religious ideal of surrender and its importance in Islam the word Islam can literally mean "surrender". In some Christian weddings , obedience was formally included along with honor and love as part of a conventional bride's but not the bridegroom's wedding vow.

This came under attack with women's suffrage [ citation needed ] and the feminist movement. As of [update] the inclusion of a promise to obey in marriage vows has become optional in some denominations. Some animals can easily be trained to be obedient by employing operant conditioning , for example obedience schools exist to condition dogs to obey the orders of human owners. Learning to obey adult rules is a major part of the socialization process in childhood, and many techniques are used by adults to modify the behavior of children.

You might've seen this one before. The story of an imaginary word that managed to sneak past our editors and enter the dictionary. How we chose 'feminism'. How to use a word that literally drives some people nuts. The awkward case of 'his or her'. Can you spell these 10 commonly misspelled words? The dictionary has been scrambled—can you put it back together? Examples of obedience in a Sentence the drill sergeant demanded complete and unquestioning obedience from the recruits the cowardly obedience with which the dictator's henchmen followed his every command. Recent Examples on the Web As a result, areas exposed to the church for longer developed more impersonal norms, like individualism and impartial treatment, as opposed to obedience and nepotism.

Sister Jean reveals deeper stereotypes about nuns. First Known Use of obedience 13th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1a.

Apostleship for obedience to the faith

Learn More about obedience. Resources for obedience Time Traveler! Explore the year a word first appeared. Dictionary Entries near obedience obeah obeah man obeche obedience obediencer obediency obedient. Phrases Related to obedience in obedience.

Time Traveler for obedience The first known use of obedience was in the 13th century See more words from the same century. More Definitions for obedience. Kids Definition of obedience.

More from Merriam-Webster on obedience Thesaurus: All synonyms and antonyms for obedience Spanish Central:

• Chasing the Devil: A Dorothy Parker Mystery (Dorothy Parker Mysteries Book 2)
• That Thing Rich People Do: Required Reading for Investors
• My Weird School #10: Mr. Docker Is off His Rocker! (My Weird School series)
• The Return of the Native
• Imagining Modernity in the Andes
• Lord Calthorpes Promise 1 (Mills & Boon comics)
• Encore Valentine (Valentine Trilogy 2)