Nisbett's Theory Of Obedience

Many scientists such as Stanley Milgram, Erich Fromm, Lee Ross and Richard E. Nisbett have tested their theory of obedience to authority. Their findings might frighten people on how obedient people are and what the sick and twisted things people will do. An example of obedience to authority is the writing of this paper for Doctor Campbell, if not done properly with obedience the grade of the student will plummet. Another example of people listening to orders given by an authoritarian person that inflicted pain, suffering, and even death is the Holocaust; the Holocaust was set up by Adolf Hitler and Nazi officers in concentration camps. The Nazi officers were told to run these concentration camps filled with innocent people and to exterminate …show more content…
Their theory was that most people will do anything they are told, if the order is given by a person in authority or what they perceive as an authoritative figure. The experiments and observations defied morals and common sense. Obedience, a virtue, is giving up of one’s self to another if they are in authority even if it is wrong. Disobedience is a vice and is the not giving up of one’s self, standing up, even in the face of being wrong or ridiculed. Erich Fromm stated in the article “Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem”, “Man continues to evolve by acts of disobedience.” To disobey an order is wrong and to obey is a virtue that man must want and need to survive. He discusses his theory with examples of the Hebrew myth of Adam and Eve living in harmony with the earth until they disobeyed and Prometheus, a Greek myth, stealing fire from the gods, disobeying the order of the gods. There are different varieties of disobedience some being destructive and others being life …show more content…
The test proved that seemingly normal people are likely to follow orders given by a person of authority even to the extent of killing another because obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up. This experiment forced participant to either violate their conscience by obeying immoral demands or not. Milgram’s experiment recruited forty males to take part in the study of “learning” with a total of six hundred thirty-six participants in eighteen separate tests. The participants actually believed they were shocking a real person unaware that the learner was actually acting like being shocked. Milgram set the illusion in order to stage the revelation of “difficult-to-get-to-truths.” All the participants, whether skilled or unskilled, continued to the level of three hundred volts. Sixty-five percent of the participants, those who were the professionals or highly educated, continued to the highest level of voltage even knowing that the learner could possibly die at four hundred fifty volts. The participants were exposed to very stressful situations and caused three of the participants to have seizures, one so violent that the experiment was stopped. After the conclusion of the experiment and the participants had been told of the illusion only 1.3% of the participants stated that they wished they had not been