Social psychology

On “The Bad Show,” an episode from Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich’s popular Radiolab, respected psychology professor Alexander Haslam provides his own take on Nazi motives in the context of the Milgram experiment. Haslam references a speech from Heinrich Himmler to other leaders of the Schutzstaffel, in which Himmler gave German officers tasked with…

In 2015, I was notified by my supervisor that she was resigning and moving to another country. She informed me that I would receive a new supervisor, a male. Since I have been employed with the agency I haven’t had a male supervisor. I didn’t know how well I would work with a male. I thought maybe he would be difficult to communicate. Attributional style refers to the type of attributes that we tend to make for the events that occur to us. These attributes can be to our own characteristics…

One concept we talked about is class was obedience, people’s tendency to conform to authority, and was demonstrated in a famous experiment done by Stanley Milgram. Very recently I had an experience with this phenomenon. It was here in China, two weekends ago when Lion took us on a Saturday trip to the Leshan Giant Buddha. At the beginning of the trip we met as a group near the main entrance to the mountain. Paul said we would have two hours to do what we wanted then we would meet back at that…

“The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disaster with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain,” said by Colin Wilson. A conformist is a person who conforms to accepted behavior or established practices and stoicism is the endurance of pain or hardship without display of feelings and without complaint. This quote is meaning, like cows in the rain we are often paralyzed not by a lack of will, but fear of an imagined outcome. A conformist is someone that goes with the flow, and…

In the twenty-first century, obedience has forced its way into everyday lives in the most unexpected places. Obedience is found in the lives of young children, adolescents, and the elderly. Everyday lives are guided so much by obedience, most don’t even notice its presence, even in the simplest activities completed daily. In the film, The Crucible, obedience is found throughout the actions of the townspeople. The results of obedience in the film lead to the deaths of multiple important…

Stanley Milgram, a famous psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment to see how far people would go when being directed by an authoritative figure. This experiment focused on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. Milgram's reasoning behind this experiment was to examine the justifications for acts of genocide and answer his question, "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders?" (Milgram, 1974).…

Fear is the Guard, and I am my Prison. Fear is the force that drives the people to obey the Council. Over years of the Council having authoritative control over the people, it has engraved the ideas of obedience into the minds of their subjects. Their policies have led to the citizens of the state policing themselves, as their fear of disappointing the Council controls them. Few dare to question the rules, and the ones who dare to dare not question aloud. Fear is what allows the Council to run…

When Is It Wrong to Obey Authority? In the recent discussions on authority, a major dispute has been whether it is wrong to obey authority. On one side of the argument, some claim that obeying authority is wrong. From this perspective, many people see Milgram’s shock experiment and Zimbardo’s prison experiment as examples of how dangerous obeying authority is. As Milgram states the subjects in the experiment were “proud of doing a good job, obeying the experimenter under difficult…

“Never judge a book by it’s cover”, this is a common and universally known adage. Furthermore, it simply means, individuals should not prejudge and draw conclusions based on superficial characteristics. However, in most of society, stereotyping and prejudging are the methods we utilize in determining a person's identity. For example, developing preconceptions about an individual from the way they speak, appear, act, or any other physical trait is indeed stereotyping. Additionally, the reason…

After reading and viewing the mob mentality pieces, I conclude that people in mobs lose control of what is morally right. For example, Edmonds writes, mobs follow the other mob members, because they are “emotional” and “angry.” She also says “it only takes one act of violence to whip the crowd into a fury.” Mob members can be furious, bitter, or enraged. When people are so angry, they do not always think about what they are doing before they proceed to do it. “Being a part of a group can destroy…