Social behavior is defined as “the study of how people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by other people”. My life and the lives of many surrounding me have often been shaped and influenced by society. Through conformity, compliance, and obedience, many have changed their actions for other people. Conformity is a change in one’s behavior done to mimic the actions or responses of another. Compliance is a change made in response to a direct request. Obedience is a response in behavior made after a directive is made by an authority figure. Because of conformity and obedience, I have often influenced the decisions I make and my behavior more so then for any other reason. In psychology, there is one very famous study
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I just saw it as a thing a person had to do to show respect to an authority figure. I did not realize that obedience could change a person’s beliefs and behaviors so severely. Growing up, I was raised to be an obedient child. My parents taught me that if I did not listen to what a person of authority, including themselves, was saying then I was being rude. This is not wrong, especially for a child. As I grew up, I started experiencing problems with obedience. I have found that it is very hard for me to stand up for myself in the workplace. I have engrained in me that I must be obedient to the authority, so when my boss asks me to do anything, I will do it, even if I know I am not the best person to do the job or if it is not in my best interest to do what is asked of me. Milgram did an experiment similar to this. He wanted to see how far people would follow orders from an authority figure. He had a participant act as a teacher and put a confederate though a word recall test. Every time the learner got a question wrong, the teacher was to deliver a painful shock to them, going up in voltage for every wrong answer. The confederate was instructed to give the wrong answer every time and never did receive a shock, but made it sound as if they did. Sixty-five percent of people kept shocking until the end, even though they knew that the shocks they were administering were lethal. The participants kept
I just saw it as a thing a person had to do to show respect to an authority figure. I did not realize that obedience could change a person’s beliefs and behaviors so severely. Growing up, I was raised to be an obedient child. My parents taught me that if I did not listen to what a person of authority, including themselves, was saying then I was being rude. This is not wrong, especially for a child. As I grew up, I started experiencing problems with obedience. I have found that it is very hard for me to stand up for myself in the workplace. I have engrained in me that I must be obedient to the authority, so when my boss asks me to do anything, I will do it, even if I know I am not the best person to do the job or if it is not in my best interest to do what is asked of me. Milgram did an experiment similar to this. He wanted to see how far people would follow orders from an authority figure. He had a participant act as a teacher and put a confederate though a word recall test. Every time the learner got a question wrong, the teacher was to deliver a painful shock to them, going up in voltage for every wrong answer. The confederate was instructed to give the wrong answer every time and never did receive a shock, but made it sound as if they did. Sixty-five percent of people kept shocking until the end, even though they knew that the shocks they were administering were lethal. The participants kept