Behavioral Study Of Obedience: Analysis

Obedience to destructive authority is a recurrent social issue in human history. And more than often, human beings do not need to hear the imperative sentence “ Thou Shalt Obey ” in order to comply with a destructive rule, a questionable decision, or with an odd order. All over the world, human beings seem to strive toward obedience to destructive authority. I could not help but connect this reasoning with real-life events such as the Holocaust, suicide bombings, and local events such as the case of the two high school students, in the U.S., who obeyed to their teacher’s orders to throw a classmate out the window. It seems that obedience to destructive authority is something all human beings had and still have, regardless of time, space, culture,
Alexander Haslam, 2011; Stefano Passini & Davide Morselli, 2009) seem to provide evidence that obedience to destructive authority differ by culture, other hypotheses ( e.g., Stanley Milgram, 1963; Thomas Blass, 2012) seem more likely to infer that obedience to destructive authority is a cultural universal—a trait that all human beings have, regardless of their culture.
In his article” Behavioral Study of Obedience”, Stanley Milgram (1963) offered an analysis of how authority may influence obedience. The purpose of the study was to provide the readers with criteria for obedience in order to explain why people obey to destructive authority. Milgram (1963) conducted an experiment that consists of
Ordering a naive subject to administer an electric shock to a victim. A simulated shock generator [was] used, with 30 clearly marked voltage levels that range [d] from 15 to 450 volts. The instrument bears verbal designations that range [d] from Slight Shock to Danger: Severe Shock… two switches after this last designation [were] simply marked XXX. (p. 372
It also shows that obedience to destructive authority has been found in the United States and in countries outside the United States. This might prove that obedience to destructive authority is a cultural universal. However, the literature review also shows that obedience to destructive authority is not an inevitable behavior connected to the survival of the human species such as eating, drinking, and learning, but rather it is a social construct. In other words, obedience to destructive authority is influenced by the values, symbols, and behaviors of a society. Thus, if authority respects the rules, roles, and values of the society/group in which the authority exists, obedience is considered an acceptable act; even obedience to destructive authority is