Obedience

9 Key excerpts on "Obedience"

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  Psychology for Nurses and Health Professionals

  • Richard Gross, Nancy Kinnison(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  187 Obedience 9 Introduction and overview Obedience is an active or deliberate form of social influence, which involves someone in authority requiring us to behave in a particular way in a particular situation. If we obey, we are said to be ‘complying’ with the authority figure’s request or instruction. Compliance is a major kind of conformity, namely, one in which overt behaviour does not reflect private beliefs. Compliance also occurs whenever we do what someone else ‘asks’ us to do, that is, whenever people make direct requests, such as when a friend asks us for a favour or a salesperson invites us to try a product or service. Many research-ers believe that attempts to gain compliance through direct requests are the most common form of social influence (Hogg and Vaughan, 1995). In the context of nursing, Obedience can be seen to operate both within the profession (as when junior nurses comply with the wishes/requests of the charge nurse or ward sister) and between nursing staff and doctors. Although Florence Nightingale may well have been offended by doctors’ definition of nurses as ‘devoted and obedient’, she must take the blame for starting the mili-taristic hierarchy that still survives (Heenan, 1990). In the context of health psychology, compliance refers to the extent to which a patient’s behaviour matches the advice or recommendations from their health professional (Horne et al., 2006; NICE, 2009a). In developed econo-mies, the most common health intervention is the prescription of medication; not surprisingly, most research into compliance is concerned with the extent to which medication is taken as prescribed. However, there is growing aware-ness of the vital role of lifestyle factors (such as physical activity and diet) in managing chronic illnesses (Horne and Clatworthy, 2010). Most researchers now prefer the term ‘adherence’, since this implies a more mutual relationship between the patient and the practitioner.

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  Encyclopedia of Leadership

  • George R. Goethals, Georgia J. Sorenson, James MacGregor Burns, George R. Goethals, Georgia J. Sorenson, James MacGregor Burns(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Obedience Obedience can be extremely functional—particu-larly in emergencies and high-stress crisis situations (e.g., a battle, a police raid, a space shuttle, a hospi-tal emergency room). Under these circumstances, it really helps to have someone in authority take the lead and issue commands that are unquestioningly obeyed. Consider what might happen in a battle if the troops decided to mull over every command given by their commander before deciding whether or not to obey. For this reason, Obedience is highly valued in groups that need to make decisions and take action very swiftly under life-or-death condi-tions. However, Obedience is also enshrined in more enduring groups that expect members to simply do as they are told and to unquestioningly follow specific orders and more general rules and principles. Such groups are often thought of as being orthodox and as having a strong leadership structure based on power—for example, the military in general, many religions, cults, gangs, and some societies. Although Obedience can be valuable, it can also be destructive if the commands that one is obeying specify actions that have harmful consequences. The classic example of this is the plea “I was only obey-ing orders,” which has repeatedly been made by peo-ple accused of crimes against humanity. The key question is, what is the psychology of blind obedi-ence that causes people to simply obey a leader irre-spective of what the orders ask one to do? This entry focuses primarily on the social psy-chology of blind and destructive Obedience to outline the conditions that enhance or weaken Obedience that has harmful consequences. Much of what is known about Obedience rests on the classic and controver-sial research of Stanley Milgram during the 1960s. CONFORMITY, COMPLIANCE, AND Obedience Research on social influence makes a distinction between conformity and compliance.

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  Great Ideas in Psychology

  A Cultural and Historical Introduction

  • Fathali M. Moghaddam(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Oneworld Publications

    (Publisher)

  Imitation . Obedience involves compliance with orders, whereas conformity involves imitation and the adoption of similar behavior. Military officers issue orders that they do not have to follow themselves but that their subordinates have to comply with, whereas the soldier conforming with a group norm in a group of soldiers does so by imitating other group members.

  3. Explicitness . Obedience involves compliance with explicit commands; we readily acknowledge acting under orders. But norms are generally implicit and lead to conformity to implied and tacit requirements that are seldom acknowledged.

  4. Voluntarism . In explaining their behavior, those who obey attribute responsibility to authority figures (“I was ordered to do this”), whereas those who conform typically claim to be doing what they do on a voluntary basis (“I dress the way I like, irrespective of how my group dresses”).

  THE HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT LEADING TO PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH ON Obedience

  There is a continuing and long-running debate about the optimum level of Obedience necessary for the proper functioning of an open society. Much of this discussion, going back several thousand years to Plato, has been concerned with the challenge of how there can be Obedience to authority without that authority becoming corrupt. In more recent history, republics such as France, but most of all the United States, were strongly influenced by the ideas of the Roman scholar Cicero (106–43 BCE ) to introduce a system of checks and balances to control executive power, even or particularly when the president has popular appeal. Theorists have argued in favor of both the extreme position that “Obedience is essential and must be achieved by cunning” and the position that “Obedience as we know it is unnecessary.” Regarding “Obedience as essential,” Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527) explored, in The Prince

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  Psychoanalysis, Classic Social Psychology and Moral Living

  Let the Conversation Begin

  • Paul Marcus(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Social psychologist Muzafer Sherif, who headed the classic Robbers Cave experiment (1961), noted that “Milgram’s Obedience experiment is the single greatest contribution to human knowledge ever made by the field of social psychology, perhaps psychology in general” (Reicher & Haslam, 2017, p. 111). If Sherif’s exalted characterization of Milgram’s Obedience experiments is plausible, how did Milgram and later researchers explain his deeply troubling findings?

  By Obedience, Milgram meant “the action of the subject who complies with authority,”6 while its cousin term, conformity, as described in the Asch line judgment experiments, refers to “the action of a subjects when he goes along with his peers, people of his own status, who have no special right to direct his behavior” (Milgram, 1974, p. 113).7 There have been mainly two social-psychological explanations of Obedience to authority, the one given by Milgram, called the “agentic shift” account (1974), and the other, called the “engaged followership” account (Haslam et al., 2015b). While there have been hundreds of studies investigating Milgram’s experiments, including those that have made methodological advances (Hollander & Maynard, 2016), and those lodged in recent information gathered from Milgram’s personal archive at Yale University (Jetten & Mols, 2014), the challenge of satisfactorily explaining the Obedience to authority effect has not been resolved. It has, in part, been used to explain behavior during the Holocaust, the My Lai massacre, Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses, terrorism (Gibson, 2014, p. 436), and other toxic social phenomena.

  As Milgram describes it, the individual, upon entering the laboratory, becomes integrated into a situation that carries its own psychological momentum and drama. The naïve subject’s struggle is whether to stay engaged in the ugly destructive direction and harm another human being or resolve the struggle by disobeying orders. The naïve subjects, reasons Milgram, have entered into an “agentic state” in which the individual no longer views himself as responsible for his own actions but defines himself as an instrument for carrying out the wishes of others (somewhat like Zimbardo’s deindividuation). The agentic state is not just a replacement term for Obedience; rather, it is a “mental organization which enhances the likelihood of Obedience” (Milgram, 1974, p. 148). According to Milgram, a major alteration of moral consciousness occurs such that the “person becomes something different from his former self, with new properties not easily traced to his usual personality” (ibid., p. 3). A transformation of moral thinking occurs so that naïve subjects feel more obligated to the Experimenter than they do the Learner/victim they are allegedly painfully shocking. As Milgram puts it, “Although a person acting under authority performs actions that seem to violate standards of conscience, it would not be true to say that he loses his moral sense. Instead, it acquires a radically different focus,” namely, “living up to the expectations that the authority has of him” (ibid., p. 8). Once in this state of agency, certain powerful “binding factors” cement the individual into a role that is not easily reversed. The recurrent nature of the action demanded of the Teacher/naïve subject during the experiment itself creates binding forces. As the Teacher/naïve subject delivers more, increasingly painful shocks, he must seek to justify what he has done. One form of justification is to continue shocking to the highest level on the shock generator. By doing so, the subject reassures himself that what he has done before and what he continues to do now is correct and acceptable.

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  Social Beings

  Core Motives in Social Psychology

  • Susan T. Fiske(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Some of the more unusual cases of reducing uncertainty occur in the social transmission of urban legends or rumors. The joint roles of understanding and belonging are clear throughout this work. Obedience: Belonging, Controlling, Trusting, and Understanding by Doing What Others Say Earlier, we defined Obedience as the influence of authority demands on subordinates. In discussing Obedience, we examine the notorious Milgram studies, which illustrate social forces influenc- ing the individual, and power in general, which especially illustrates controlling resources and maintaining relationships as methods of influence. Social Forces: Milgram The single most famous study of Obedience—and arguably the best-known study in social psychology—remains hugely impactful. Following his mentor, Solomon Asch, Milgram designed a simple but elegant paradigm for studying Obedience to malevolent authority (Elms, 1995; Milgram, 1963, 1965). He used the very structure of the experiment to create an authority who could demand Obedience. The experimenter welcomed two community participants to a 438 SOCIAL INFLUENCE: DOING WHAT OTHERS DO AND SAY laboratory at Yale University. The experimenter described a learning experiment in which the teacher would punish the learner for errors by using an electric shock machine (described earlier as the Buss aggression machine, Chapter 10). The participants, typically both middle-aged men, drew slips of paper to determine their roles, and the teacher’s first job was to strap the learner’s wrists to the chair arms, so the electrodes would not accidentally fall off. The teacher received a sample shock—an unpleasant 45 volts—and then went to the adjoining room to begin teaching the learner a series of word pairs. The learner started out well but progressively made more mistakes, each one requiring the teacher progressively to administer 15 volts more shock.

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  The Determinants of Free Will

  A Psychological Analysis of Responsible, Adjustive Behavior

  • James A. Easterbrook, David T. Lykken(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  INDIVIDUAL AUTONOMY IN A SOCIAL CONTEXT This page intentionally left blank Obedience The men whose economic activities were changed by McClelland's achieve-ment training program had evidently been used to wielding power. Moreover their achievement fantasies revealed detailed knowledge, or analytic thought, about how successes were to be attained. Their heroes were represented as competent and as engaging in original, rather than compliant, activities. The contrasting group, whose economic activities did not subsequently change, had contrasting characteristics. They were accustomed to others having more power than themselves, and their fantasy characters tended to act conforming and com-pliant. Similar interpretive stories have been reported to be produced by men with generalized expectancies of external control. It appears, accordingly, that tendencies to compliant thinking and action inhibit the freedom of will that initiative and enterprise demonstrate. It is the object of this chapter to describe some evidence and theory on these tendencies. APPEARANCES AS CRITERIA FOR ACTION An experimental test of two types of conformity was introduced to psychology by Solomon Asch (1956). A number of people sitting together are requested to take turns making vocal reports or judgments about visible figures—for instance, to say which in a set of three lines on a wall display is the same length as a target line. The discriminations are easy; virtually no one makes a mistake when tested alone. For several trials every individual judgment is correct. Then, on a test trial, other testées who are confederates of the experimenter each in turn give the same incorrect answer, and the real testée, coming last, is faced with a quandary. What does he do? 97 98 Obedience In fact, about one out of every three testées will go along with a group of three or more who are in unanimous agreement, although the exact ratio depends on the shapes of the figures and other factors.

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  Research Methods for Social Psychology

  • Dana S. Dunn(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Hold on for a moment, however. Let us consider another, more emotionally arousing experiment dealing with a stronger form of social influence: Obedience to authority. Can we be compelled by others, notably authority figures, to perform acts that go against our beliefs? What are the social and moral consequences of following orders we know will harm others? What ethical concerns arise when social psychologists explore these questions in settings that intentionally create distress in participants? Imagine yourself in this setting: You answer an ad to take part in an experiment at Yale University on the effects of punishment on learning. You meet a dour experimenter in a gray lab coat who introduces you to a fellow participant, a genial middle-aged man. You and this person draw slips of paper from a hat. Your slip is inscribed “teacher”; the other participant reports that his slip says “learner.” The experimenter explains both roles. As teacher, you will read a list of word pairs to the learner (e.g., “wild–duck”) once and then test the learner by seeing whether he can correctly recall the second word in each pair. Here is the catch: For every wrong answer the learner makes, you are required to press a switch that delivers an electric shock to him. Here is the problem: As his errors mount, the shocks get progressively stronger. The shock-generating machine delivers shocks ranging from 15 to 450 Volts (V) (levels were labeled with descriptions starting with “Slight Shock” to the last levels, “Danger: Severe Shock” and the ominous “XXX”). To put these voltage levels in proper perspective, a standard wall plug in the United States carries 115 V. To give you a real sense of what the learner will face, the experimenter gives you a mild electric jolt. Before you sit down in front of the shock generator to begin the experiment, you watch the experimenter strap the learner Ethical Issues in Social Psychological Research 47

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  Obstacles to Ethical Decision-Making

  Mental Models, Milgram and the Problem of Obedience

  • Patricia H. Werhane, Laura Pincus Hartman, Crina Archer, Elaine E. Englehardt, Michael S. Pritchard(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Each of these four women differently exemplifies the various ways in which individuals relate to authority. In Chapter 2 we have argued that all of our experiences are socially constructed by incomplete mental models, some of which can create 43 44 The Milgram studies biases or blind spots that can lead to fatal errors in judgment. Some of these errors in judgment are caused when people obey a person or organization that they perceive to be in authority, even when they are asked to engage in absurd, unethical, illegal, or even harmful behavior. One of the most disturbing studies of Obedience is the 1960s Milgram experiments, which, taken together with the many follow-up experi- ments and studies that they inspired, demonstrate that Obedience to authority is a pervasive mental model. We learn as children to obey our parents, then our teachers and coaches, and this followership habit has a tendency to reappear in adults, particularly when, in difficult situations, we try to transfer responsibilities to others, often others we perceive to be in authority. For example, as we discovered in the Challenger and Columbia disasters, engineers and managers built up habits of analysis and mindsets about leadership that contributed to their failure to blow the whistle concerning anomalies in the shuttles: they were not encouraged to question those problems. Many working on the shuttle went along with test results even when they were flawed. In the case of the Challenger, no one would disobey the leadership deci- sion to launch, even when the engineering analysis demonstrated the many risks facing this particular launch. In this chapter, we will examine in more detail the Milgram (1974) experiments, the well-known studies that tested whether or not naive participants would engage in unconscionable acts if encouraged or told to do so by a person in authority.

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  Social Psychology

  • Kenneth S. Bordens, Irwin A. Horowitz(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  norm of reciprocity is energized when the person making the request makes a “concession.” The door-in-the-face technique may also work because we do not want to seem cheap, through perceptual contrast or to be perceived as someone who refuses a worthy cause. This latter explanation is the worthy person hypothesis.

  The low-ball technique is another two-stage process. A product is offered at a very low price and then, after a commitment is made, the price is raised. Commitment and consistency are the principal forces that make low-balling work. The commitment occurs when you take significant steps toward buying the product. Once the commitment is made we then strive to maintain consistency between our thoughts and our actions. Refusal of the higher price would be inconsistent with all the positive thoughts we developed about the product.
• What do social psychologists mean by the term “Obedience”?
  Obedience is the social influence process by which a person changes his or her behavior in response to a direct order from someone in authority. The authority figure has the power, which can stem from several sources, to enforce the orders. Generally, Obedience is not always bad. Obedience to laws and rules is necessary for the smooth functioning of society. However, sometimes Obedience is taken to an extreme and causes harm to others. This is called destructive Obedience.
• Are evil deeds done by evil persons?
  We might like to think that those who carry out orders to harm others are inhuman monsters. However, Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Adolph Eichmann, a Nazi responsible for deporting millions of Jews to death camps, suggests that evil is often very commonplace. Those who carry out acts of destructive Obedience are often very ordinary people. The false idea that evil deeds can be done only by evil people is referred to as Eichmann’s fallacy .
• What research has been done to study Obedience?
  Recurring questions about destructive Obedience led Stanley Milgram to conduct a series of ingenious laboratory experiments on Obedience. Participants believed that they were taking part in a learning experiment. They were to deliver increasingly strong electric shocks to a “learner” each time he made an error. When the participant protested that the shocks were getting too strong, the experimenter ordered the participant to continue the experiment. In the original experiment where there was no feedback from the learner to the participant, 65% of the participants obeyed the experimenter, going all the way to 450 volts.