Obedience And Conformity Essay

and choose their thinking and actions for them; or what we called obedience? Obedience, which goes hand in hand with the power of situation, is another factor that explain how situational forces make people act differently. It is also a form of conformity, but quite different from conformity. Here, we are going along with what we are directly told to do. If conformity is when you follow the flow of the group, obedience means following commands that are given by an authority figure (Myers, 2015, p.528). It means when someone tell you to do something, you would tend to obey them and do what they have told you. Obedience depends on social power, and usually relates to obeying orders from somebody that has a higher status than you. It is understandable for people to do that because human learn to obey since they were kids. Obedience has become a part of …show more content…
In our world nowadays, obedience allows things to run smoothly and efficiency. However, in some instances, obedience can take over and cause a person to do things that they don’t usually do; either good or bad things. So, how far could obedience take to force an individual to do something even though it was not right or immoral? Psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to study the effect of obedience due to the tragedy that happened in World War 2: The Holocaust. His family was one of the Jews that suffered from this catastrophic genocide. More than six million Jews were killed by more than ten thousand German under Hitler’s command. How did Hitler use the power of obedience to make them obey him and create the most catastrophic genocide? Milgram later found his answer by conducting an experiment to test how far people would do things under the pressure of command. In the laboratory, an authority figure told the participant to teach the “learner” a list of words and asked him questions. To punish this “learner” whenever “the learner” gave the wrong answers, the participants were asked to deliver