She has experience as Subject Leader for Psychology and Sociology, and her favourite topics to teach are research methods (especially inferential statistics!) and attachment. She has also successfully taught a number of Level 3 subjects, including criminology, health & social care, and citizenship. Obedience is important in society because it helps maintain order, but it’s also crucial to think critically about when and why we choose to obey. By obeying in all things, even the mundane, you are showing God that you are willing and able to obey whatever he asks of you.
Factors That Impact Obedience
Orders of strong and powerful people, people with power and authority are obeyed by weak and less powerful people, who have less authority or power in the society. Obedience and conformity are both forms of social influence which impact an individual’s behaviour. Both of these require an individual to surrender to another individual or group of people, which causes the change in behaviour. Both conformity and obedience refer to a person doing what is contrary to their own values. In contrast to conformity, obedience is when explicit instruction is given by an authority figure to an individual.
What is the reward of being obedient?
A therapist can help you understand your relationship to obedience and authority and encourage you to change your life. Evidence indicates that when therapy is administered online, it can be just as effective as in-person therapy. Before the scientific investigation of obedience, the concept was debated by philosophers throughout history.
Zimbardo’s experiment
They then extrapolated their findings to a larger social context, determining that obedience to authority has likely been a crucial part of success for most human groups throughout history. Milgram’s experiments have long been criticized as unethical, but more recent findings have further complicated the legacy of his research. After examining experimental archives, researchers found that participants in the famous study were often coerced into delivering shocks, which has significant implications for the study’s final results.
- During the 1950s, a psychologist Stanley Milgram became intrigued with the conformity experiments performed by Solomon Asch.
- Adam studied at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Medicine for his MSc and PhD in Developmental Physiology, complemented by an Honours BSc specializing in Biomedical Research from Queen’s University.
- Analyzing these terms sheds light on the multifaceted nature of social influence and behavior.
- They then extrapolated their findings to a larger social context, determining that obedience to authority has likely been a crucial part of success for most human groups throughout history.
- Research from 2023 indicates that authority demands sometimes conflict with a person’s values and norms.
Asch’s work had demonstrated that people could easily be swayed to conform to group pressure, but Milgram wanted to see just how far people would be willing to go. SYNONYMS compliant, docile, tractable, yielding, deferential, respectful. If they are asked by the law and order authorities not to throw stones on persons or not to destroy public property, they don’t listen to it if they get support from others. Support from others plays a very significant role in determining the degree of obedience in a given situation. The pressure of a partner in Milgrams experiment on obedience, reduced, the proportion of obedient subjects to ten per cent. This indicates that support for defiance or disobedience usually helps attempts for resistance.
What are the characteristics of an obedient person?
While situational factors are crucial in understanding obedience, dispositional (personality) factors also play a role. Further, 90% of these participants reached the level where the accomplice would pretend to faint. This showed that the participants obeyed the researcher’s commands to continue, all while feeling high levels of stress and “harming” another individual.
Milgram and his team theorized that most people would apply lower-level shocks at the experimenter’s behest, but few would apply the maximum electric shock, despite the experimenter’s pressure. Obedience is a form of social influence that involves acting on the orders of an authority figure. It often involves actions a person would not have taken unless they were directed to do so by someone of authority or influence.
The missing link today in our Christian experience is OBEDIENCE, which is KEY and the true test of our faith. Use obedient to describe someone who knows the rules, toes the line, and follows instructions. The word can refer to people (an obedient student), a group (obedient citizens), or even animals (an obedient dog).
Life and Legacy of Psychologist Sidney Jourard
While Milgram’s study had problems, subsequent research has suggested that people are surprisingly willing to obey orders. Raj joined Save My Exams in 2024 as a Senior Content Creator for Psychology & Sociology. Prior to this, she spent fifteen years in the classroom, teaching hundreds of GCSE and A Level students.
- However, one 2012 study attempted to replicate the experiment by examining whether a person would disobey and become a whistleblower when encountering unethical behavior.
- However, if you clean your room because you’re being told to do it, that is obedience.
- When a father orders the child not to see cartoon network or not to play, but to read, but the mother supports the child, the child is encouraged and does not give up seeing cartoon network, i.e, does not obey his father.
- Using data from his previous study, Burger probed participant’s thoughts about obedience.
- Since Milgram’s pioneering work, subsequent studies have built upon his foundations and further explored the factors that influence obedience.
How we ensure our content is accurate and trustworthy?
Obedience, in human behavior, is a form of “social influence in which a person yields to explicit instructions or orders from an authority figure“. Obedience is generally distinguished from compliance, which is behavior influenced by peers, and from conformity, which is behavior intended to match that of the majority. But even sometimes persons without authority and power to award punishment, and people who are strangers command orders on submissive persons and produce high levels of obedience in others. Milgram conducted a number of experiments to find out the existence of evidence if any, infavour of the above view i.e., whether individuals would obey commands from a relatively powerless define obedience in psychology stranger.
It highlights the psychological concept of obedience and how hierarchical social structures can have a powerful influence on individuals. However, it was not until the 20th century that obedience garnered significant attention as a distinct area of empirical study within social psychology. Pioneering experiments by researchers such as Stanley Milgram shed light on the extent to which individuals are willing to obey authoritative commands, even at the expense of their own moral judgments. Such studies have profound implications for understanding the mechanisms that underpin social order and the potential for coercion in various contexts.
Thus a five year old child obeys his parents but does not obey his care taker or maid servant. Obedience is a type of social influence where in people try to accept, agree and respect the request and order of another person. The most significant characteristic of obedience is that it is the most direct way through which a person tries to change the behaviour of another person through orders, verbal or non verbal. Thus obedience as a human value and as a quality required for socialization is a much talked term in our daily life. He cannot adjust with the circumstances of life in healthy way if he is disobedient. The child from the early state is taught to obey the advice and instructions of his senior family members, teachers and respectable persons of the society.