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  • Essay / Exploring the nature of people's obedience to authority

    A once peaceful country, with just one blast of the command whistle, turns into a zone of bloodshed, running for safety, screams, forced incorporation into the army of adult men and young people, incarceration and extermination of civilians. In Nazi Germany, belief in a form of destructive obedience was manifested during World War II under the command of Adolf Hitler. More than six million Jews, communists, Roma and trade unionists from Nazi Germany and all other areas under Nazi rule were taken to concentration camps and killed. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The questions that arise from this massacre are: How could people have been massacred on command? How to build gas chambers and monitor torture concentration camps? How could a person who was a neighbor be exposed to extreme forced labor, starvation, hunger and poison? Does this mean that there were dispositional factors that led to such evil, in the sense that humans are inert and evil? Obedience to authority requires that all members of the hierarchy accept the leader's legitimacy, knowledge, and competence in administering command. Thus, the one who gives the orders has a higher rank than the one who receives the orders. Obedience also occurs when we are asked to perform a task that may have good or bad results. For example, Germany's main Holocaust planner, Adolf Eichmann, claimed that he had no hatred for Jews. Instead, he simply followed orders to ensure that the collection, transportation, and slaughter of victims went smoothly. In this scenario, obedience is a natural phenomenon, but extreme and blind obedience to authority has disastrous consequences, and their morals should guide them in choosing what is right for them, because all humans have the gift of free will. In today's society, being obedient is a vital part of many people's lives. Obedience is vital for peaceful coexistence in society, and only people living in isolation are those who cannot be forced to respond or submit to the orders of others. Being obedient is a character ingrained in the hearts of many people, and it takes precedence over ethical training, moral conduct, and sympathy. Disobedience, on the other hand, has harmful consequences for those who practice it. Disobedience is the failure to obey the orders of the person in authority. As a result of disobedience, the officer may feel embarrassment and discomfort that we are disrupting an order. This often leads to anxiety on the part of the one disobeying the order, as it can lead to punishment. What if Nazi soldiers disobeyed command for reasons of morality and humanity? Was fear a driving force behind the soldiers' acts of brutality? Eichmann's actions could be considered those of a mad man since his blind obedience without questioning authority led to the holocaust that sends a fearful stab into the hearts and minds of many. As a result, Eichmann was examined by six psychiatrists to check his mental health and later diagnosed that he was very sane and that his life was that of an average human being. Since he was a normal human being, his inhuman conduct was therefore the result of blind obedience coupled with situational factors that affect all humans and can lead toenormous acts. After the effects of the Holocaust of World War II, psychologists decided to examine the wonder of human obedience, as the first trials conducted focused primarily on German culture, which was considered distinct. But if we were in the same situation as the Nazi soldiers, would we have obeyed orders to torture and massacre human beings who were once our neighbors? The dilemma of obedience to authority has its origins in ancient times, when Abraham was told to leave his ancestral land and go to an area he did not know. In the historical era, human obedience has been studied by many people, and the question that remains is whether people should submit to authority even if that submission would compromise human morality. Conservative sophists claim that since society faces the threat of disobedience, people have no choice but to obey. On the other hand, researchers emphasize the supremacy of personal conscience. The philosophical view of obedience gives very little insight into how humans behave in extreme situations. Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram studied the justification for the actions of those who were tried at the Nuremberg war criminal trials for causing the Holocaust. Many of those convicted based their justification on obedience to higher authorities. Milgram wanted to examine whether Germans were distinctly obedient to their superiors in power or whether obedience extended to all humans. Milgram's experiment at Yale University was repeated with ten male participants from the university to quantify obedience. The pain was inflicted on a learner by the teacher according to the instructions of the experimenter, a professor at the university. From experience, a harsh authority opposes the morality of the teacher, opposing him to hurt the learner. The teacher could hear the victim screaming from the pain of the electric shock generator, but he could not stop administering the shocks and, instead, he chose to follow the experimental scientist's order. The study shows that humans are capable of going further to obey orders. In the experiment, we test the learner's ability to memorize pairs of words. The learner must remember the second pair of words after hearing the first, otherwise an electric shock of different voltages must be administered. The learner is strapped to an electric chair and their wrists are also tied to an electrode to minimize their movements. The main objective of the experiment is to see how far a teacher would go in administering shocks to the learner after being ordered to obey. what the experimenter wants. The teacher then sits in a chair placed in front of an electric shock generator that has horizontally placed toggle switches ranging from 15 volts to 450 voltages. The switches indicate shock intensity from mild to extremely dangerous, denoted XXX. The indicator lights that correspond to the different switches glow bright red when turned on. In the experiment, the teacher is an ingenious subject who comes to experiment in the laboratory. The victim is the learner who ultimately does not receive shocks (Behrens and Leonard 584). In the modern world, human rights activists consider the after-effects of shock administered to a human being as a crime against humanity and more so, no one will be willing to suffer such a crime. The Yale University laboratory, the electric shock generator, the lab coat, the electric chair and the screaming drive home the point of view of the experimental scientist. Heis to study the extent to which a human being can obey and administer pain to a complaining victim when ordered to do so by a person in authority. The shock occurs when the learner demonstrates that he or she experiences pain when switching switches on the machines. At moderate shocks of 75 volts, it growls; when the switch goes to 120 volts it whines; the learner commands to exit the experiment at the voltage of 150, and he protests with emotion and intensity as the energy continues to increase. At a voltage of 285, his scream indicates extreme torture, and then no sound comes from the learner. The teacher feels the moral need to stop administering shocks when the learner screams vehemently. But as soon as the teacher wants to stop; the experimental scientist orders him to continue. At 330 volts, it is a fierce struggle between the teacher obeying his morals or submitting to the fatal orders of the experimental scientist. From the results, it is evident that humans can go a long way by obeying people in positions of authority rather than using their conscience to distinguish evil from good. Even though the learner shouted, 65% of the participants did not obey their morals and performed the experiments at the full voltage of 450 V and chose to listen to the experimenter's prodding. What mattered to them was obeying the experimenter's orders. In Nazi Germany's concentration camps, people were subjected to harsh conditions, exposed to cold, starvation and brutal treatment. The soldiers were not concerned about people's lives. Instead, they tortured and took people to poisoned gas chambers. Soldiers came a long way to see their fellow men suffer immensely from 450 voltage, as indicated by Milgram's electric shock machine, so that they could achieve Adolf Hitler's goals. Obedience is a natural phenomenon and we all face hierarchies in our homes. , at school or in the workplace, and as such we hand over our control to another person. We arrive at an agent state that has four components: ability of an agent, becoming an agent, characteristics of an agent, and limiting factors that prevent us from exiting the agent. The role of the agent is made social in many spheres of our lives where there are rewards for obedience and punishments for disobedience. We usually find ourselves acting as agents because as humans we value order and, even more so, we no longer feel responsible for our actions and we apply the rules of whoever is in authority. In Nazi Germany, soldiers no longer felt guilty about killing and torturing millions of innocent civilians because they were acting in the name of their leader Adolf Hitler. The agency also binds us in such a way that we cannot get out of it. When we feel that we have done something wrong, morally we are obliged to abandon it, but according to Milgram, consistency prevents us from admitting that our actions are sometimes illegal. We always feel obligated to our leader for authority and we tend to ignore the legitimacy, knowledge and competence of the leader. Soldiers who participated in the Holocaust felt obligated to carry out the monstrous orders of their leader and consistency made them no longer feel responsible for their actions. Based on Solomon Asch's study on opinions and social pressure, a study was carried out to find out the impact of group pressure on individuals. The study aimed to determine the extent to which individuals' judgments are affected by force exerted by other people. The result of.