Social Control Essay Research Paper Conformityh Conformity

h Obedience is doing what you are told, people comply with a demand because they feel they must or should do so. In a lot of occasions, the failure to obey may have severe consequences particularly if the request/demand comes from someone who is perceived to be in authority. Obedience implies that the individual is ordered to go along and do what they are told.

Psychologists after the Second World War were determined to find out why the Germans killed so many Jews in the war, and why they had obeyed orders to kill 6 million Jews. Because of the scale of destruction led by the Nazis, many people started to believe that the perpetrators of such a horror could not have been ordinary men and women.

h In the 1960 s, Stanley Milgram conducted a series of laboratory studies to see just how far people would go.

In 1963, Stanley Milgram carried out the Milgram experiment. The applicants were chosen through recruitment advertisements in the local newspaper.

h Milgrams experiment was conducted at Yale University and on arriving at the laboratory the candidate would meet another man in his fifties. This would be an actor, an assistant of the experimenter.

In Stanley s experiment, he would then appear and introduce himself and explain that the following experiment was to establish the effects of punishment on learning. It was then explained that one of the subjects was to be the teacher and the other to be the learner. The assistant was always assigned the role of the learner and the participant the teacher. The teacher was then shown to a nearby room where the learner was strapped into a chair with his arms attached to electrodes, which could give a shock. The subject was shown the shock generator and was given a mild shock to prove it was real. The assistant then warned the experimenter that he had a heart condition.

h The teacher then sat in a separate room with the shock generator and asked the learner a series of memory questions. The learner would then respond via a light system, and if he responded wrongly, the teacher pressed a 15-volt button. After this the voltage was increased by 15 volts for every wrong answer he gave. At about 150 volts the learner would start to complain; at about 250 volts he yelled, let me out, my hearts bothering me know. At 300 volts he kicked the wall and then went silent. The teacher was not bullied into carrying on, but rather obeyed the calm requests of the authority figure. At one point the subjects were heard to laugh at the point where the learner appeared to be in severe pain. Milgram explained that this was not because they thought the situation was amusing but rather as an expression of deeply felt anxiety. This also occurs when people are under extreme emotional pressure for example when soldiers go into battle or when individuals are hysterical due to bereavement.

h Milgram described the situation beforehand to psychiatrists and they were asked to predict how many people would give shocks as high as 450 volts. The answer was that less than 1 percent would continue to this extreme level.

However the actual results were quite alarming. About forty subjects were tested and 26 out of the 40 subjects (65%) went all the way in steps to the maximum shock levels, and without exception, all of the subjects went as high as 300 volts.

After this it became quite alarming that a significant amount of people could inflict harm on others to such an extent and this gave rise to a series of subsequent studies that attempted to isolate the main factors contributing to obedience.

Factors influencing obedience

h Some of the participants reported that they had contributed to 450 volts because the experiment was carried out at an important American university. Milgram ran the same experiment at an office away from the university and the obedience level was still 49 percent, therefore this was not a major factor.

h Milgram wanted to know if the nearness of the learner was a valid factor and if the teacher was in the same room as the learner and could see the learner, would the obedience rate be lower. He also questioned what would happen if the teacher was requested to hold the learners arms down. Milgram expected the obedience level to be lower this time, and it dropped to forty percent when the learner was in the same room and to thirty percent when the learner s arms were held down. Although it had dropped, the obedience rate still remained quite high and the nearness of the learner was therefore a factor but not an important one.

h A third factor was the presence of the experimenter in his lab coat. Milgram repeated the experiment and in situations where he left the room and issued instructions via the telephone the obedience level dropped to almost zero. In these cases the participant would pretend to press the button or they would press the button for a lesser shock than they ought to.

h Another important factor emerged. On a number of occasions the experimenter was asked if he would accept responsibility for what happened, and he was scripted to say yes. Once this had been established, the participants did not complain much about the experiment and carried on. The experimenters absence seemed to give a greater feeling of personal responsibility for their own actions and it became clear that many people would inflict a greater amount of pain if someone else took responsibility as it took away the guilt. This can be seen in the second world wart where it was often that the nazi war criminals plead that they only did as they were told and that someone else higher up accepted responsibility for it.

h Another factor was seen that if the participants were given an important role, if they felt they were helping with important scientific research, they would continue to higher voltage. This is also apparent with the Second World War, where the nazi war criminals believed that they were doing it for their own country, for a purer, better Germany.

h Crutchfield also states that if the group is too discuss what is going on they find less problems with it and will get on with it. This is also apparent in real life too, where discussion is limited and that all the facts are not known. In some situations there are no facts or correct answers at all, only opinions. The fact that a group believes something may actually prevent its members from looking for further evidence about it.

h Hofling conducted an experiment in 1966 and he shows that obedience to authority is not just confined to the laboratory. Hofling conducted an experiment on nurses on normal duty at two American hospitals. Each nurse received a phone call from a doctor whom she had not met before but who was from the psychiatric department and who said he was coming to see a patient shortly. The doctor asked the nurse to look for a drug called Astroten and administer 20mg to the patient. The label on the container stated that a maximum dosage of 10mg was allowed per day but despite this 21 of the 22 nurses went as far as pouring out 20mg of the drug before being stopped by a confederate of the researchers. There was also a hospital rule not to take orders over the phone. The authority of a doctor over a nurse was enough to produce obedience rather than questioning.