Obedience can be broadly defined as a type of social influence on human behavior, including but not including limited to it, the extent to which we are influenced by other people. in relation to respecting a direct order, as opposed to responding to social pressure, real or imaginary, which would be qualified as conformity. It should be noted that the person giving an order is generally perceived to have significant authority and the power to punish when they do not obey. According to Fiske (1993), authority figures manifest the phenomenon of “social power” which allows them to create the desired obedience when it should or should not be received out of anxiety about the consequences of disobedience. This hierarchical figure evolves depending on the social context, the era or the age of the obedient person. For example, a teacher-student relationship or a parent-child relationship is based on principles of age and status. Another example, this time based on driving authority, would be a relationship between prisoner and prison guard, such as that explored by Zimbardo's 1973 study of compliance, which emphasized the importance of situation in explaining conformity to prisoner brutality roles in the late 1960s in the United States. There has been various research into obedience, with many studies highlighting the importance of a number of variables, which have revolutionized the way we perceive occurrences of various real-world atrocities. The essay will focus on historical examples of obedience and how they can explain examples such as the behavior of the Nazis and Hitler during the Holocaust, the events of Abu Gharaib in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 , as well as the My Lai massacre near Quang Ngai, Vietnam, among others. others.Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay One of the most historically significant examples of influential research on obedience would be Stanley Milgram's original study on obedience from 1963. The inspiration for this study was sparked by the Nuremberg Trials of 1961 , particularly the trial and eventual execution of Adolf Eichmann, the late Nazi soldier who famously (following his orders was the) "most important thing in my life." This quote inspired Milgram, who led him to formulate his first hypothesis: "Are Germans different." After months of research preparation, he developed his basic study, against which all others would be compared. The original study included 40 male participants divided into teachers and learners. A word association game was played with flash cards and when the learner gave the wrong card to a question, the teacher was asked to give them an electric shock, which increased with each subsequent error until a maximum of 450 volts, a fatal shock. shock. All participants believed the shocks were real, and when they did not want to administer them, an experimenter dressed in a lab coat gave them a sequence of demands. According to a group of leading researchers at the time, 1-3% of them obeyed, when in reality 65% ​​of them showed complete obedience at the highest shock voltage. In a replication of the study conducted to precisely define the root cause of obedience, several situational variables were manipulated while the original procedure was conducted, including uniformity, proximity, and location. It is interesting to note that all situational variables had amarked impact on the obedience rate. Yale University's move to a dilapidated office caused obedience to drop from 65% to 47.5%. Proximity of teacher and learner in the same room caused obedience to drop to 40%, while changing the experimenter from a lab coat to a civilian caused the most dramatic reduction , going from 65% to 20% of overall obedience. Similar results have been studied. by Bickman et al's 1975 field study of uniform obedience who conducted an experiment in New York where three different people wearing three different uniforms asked 152 passersby to obey requests such as "put a dime in the meter”, “stand on the other side of the bus stop” and “pick up that trash”’. Out of three uniforms, a milkman scored the median obedience level of 56% while the security guard uniform scored well over twice as much obedience at 89% as the civilian uniform of 39%. not only supporting Milgram's studies, but also providing a basis. for the interpretation of atrocities involving situational factors, such as the Holocaust. More than 6 million Jews, Gypsies and members of other minority groups were killed during the Holocaust and, the above research shows that, just like the experimenter, Hitler and Stalin had authority legitimacy because they had the power to punish, a professional uniform. , hierarchical status and close proximity to their soldiers. The testimony of a Nazi officer, Eichmann, gives us a better idea of ​​why so many officers were able to obey. It may also give us greater insight into the 2003/2004 events in Abu Gharaib prison, during which US military guards committed violent, sexual and humiliating acts on Baghdadi prisoners, although this case is still under investigation. controversial as to whether the primary process was obedience or conformity. or a mixture of the two, which is an important point to make, that more often than not, there are many explanations for a phenomenon, and it seems plausible that obedience research is questioned in terms of its validity . It is unacceptable to reject counter-theories. Zimbardo's 1973 study showed that some of their guards identified more with their roles than others. For example, a third of prison guards actively sympathized with them, offering them cigarettes and restoring their privileges. Fromm 1973 also accused Zimbardo of ignoring the impact of dispositional influences and relying too heavily on situational effects, which is a conclusion that has been studied by many other researchers and to which we will return later in this test. Legitimacy of authority, another socio-psychological explanation of obedience concerns the theory of the agentic state. Autonomy is the exact opposite of agency and means being free to make your own choices, unaffected by the wishes of others. Agency means that the person executing the order has gone through the change of agent. Moving from autonomy to action involves perceiving others as an authority figure across the social hierarchy and being able to carry out requests as if it were not done personally, i.e. -say by the wishes of their master or leader. Constraining factors allow the person to perform the activity while minimizing the effect of anxiety on the person by shifting blame or ignoring consequences. This socio-psychological phenomenon is particularly useful for understanding the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War. In 1968, 504 innocent civilians were executed by American soldiers. Of theWomen were gang raped and people were shot dead as they left their homes with their hands raised. The soldiers here gave the same answer as the Nazi soldiers, that they were just following orders. This could be explained by the agentic state and bonding factors that allowed them to minimize the personal distress experienced as a defense mechanism. There are also a handful of other explanations for the My Lai massacre. Additionally, as we have seen with all of these examples, destructive authority seems to be a recurring theme in all of these atrocities. This happens when people in positions of power use their powers in ways that provide a basis for behaving in cruel and callous ways. Leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Chairman Mao all abused their authority over time, causing widespread pain and suffering. . Furthermore, it could be that dispositional factors play a more important role than situational factors. Another historical example of this was given by Mandel (1998), who believes that situational factors provide an excuse or alibi, for where the “obedience alibi” for perverse behavior. According to him, this monocausal explanation actually constitutes an offense to Holocaust survivors, because it implies that Nazi soldiers were themselves victims of situational factors beyond their control. In his research, Mandel (1998) draws attention to an example from the Holocaust that suggests that Nazi behavior simply cannot be explained by factors such as change in agentic authority. The relevant incident was committed by the German Police Reserve Battalion 101, composed of Nazi soldiers who obeyed orders to shoot residents of a small town in Poland, although the men did not receive direct ordered to do so and offered to be killed. assigned to other tasks if they preferred non-physical work. As these men were not directly ordered to murder civilians, this calls into question the evidence against these explanations of obedience. The final explanation for obedience that will be explored in this essay is known as the authoritarian personality, which is a particular personality type identified by Theodore. Adorno when, like Milgram, he wanted to discover why so many people during the Holocaust obeyed the authority figure and rejected their human morality. In his early research, Adorno (1950) conducted surveys of 2,000 middle-class White ethnic groups and unobtrusively interrogated their attitudes toward other racial groups to identify their unconscious logics. What emerged was the potential for a Fascism Scale, widely known as the F Scale. Its results showed that those who scored high on the scale exhibited certain tendencies in their personality, such as conscientiousness of social class, status and respect, as well as disdain for lower social classes and submission to the authority figure. They also found a high level of bias and a distinct categorization of right or wrong, with no “gray area.” They also believed that we needed strong and powerful leaders to enforce the rules of society. Adorno initially said that the authoritarian personality came from an overly harsh and disciplined parenting style with little reward or reinforcement but harsh punishment for any perceived wrongdoing by the child, causing resentment that scapegoats toward others. perceived as being inferior in social class. The description of the authoritarian personality type seems.