Obedience to Authority To what degree of obedience are we to push our sense of morality? It is a known fact that obeying authority is crucial to our society; it is the very essence of it that brings about structure and order. However, there are times we have to question whether we should obey when our morals are suppressed to an extent. Every order followed and every action taken always has an impact on the individual, depending on the magnitude of said order. Throughout history, we have seen men of high authority subjugate men who are lesser to do horrendous acts. Being under a higher authority gives a sense of vulnerability, making compliance inevitable. It was a little over seventy-seven years ago that we see this exact situation take place, the Holocaust. The example of the concentration camp shows the very odd cycle of social pressure and avoiding responsibility. The Nazi people who took part in killing all of these people were not all evil or sadistic, but they were manipulated by "mass mind" and were obeying orders of someone higher in command, similar to the results of Milgrim's experiment. Even though they might have personal conflicts with their actions, the social pressure overcame their objections. This is significant because authority and social pressures are one of the most hazardous mixtures there are. The entirety of society has been programmed into a social structure that is harmonious with authority. This common ideology is making individuals blindly obey authority, even when such obedience is clearly unnecessary and despicable.
In "Perils in Obedience," Stanley Milgram studied the concepts of social forces and influences of obedience. Although some people might consider Stanley Milgram's experiments to have been seen as controversial and unethical, his work brought much attention to different behavioral tendencies among people, whose influence is both fascinating and disturbing. The data that was recorded was to make people aware so that people can get a better idea of the different reactions present and possibly change them. Milgram makes the subjects think they are shocking individuals in a chair if they get wrong answers to questions. The results showed the participants actually conformed to the higher authority by going against their own morality. Milgram stated that "group pressure need merely be inserted into a social situation on one side of a standard or the other in order to induce movement in the desired direction" (Milgram, 133). Milgram would have never thought that the participants would administer that high of a shock; they suppressed their morality to comply with the authority.
In Milgram's experiment, the authority figures kept pushing the participants; Milgram states that they "continued to shock an unresponsive and possibly dying "learner" up to the maximum 450 volts " (Haslam et al, 14). Milgram's experiment clearly illustrates that power influences authority and social pressure, the more power ...
