Roles of Obedience & Discipline in Society

In the 1970s, Dr. Stanley Milgram, Professor of Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, published the results of a series of experiments on the tendency of subjects to accede to authority eve to the point of performing acts which they themselves considered unethical or immoral. The issue raised by Stanley Milgram and examined by him in his research is the disjunction between an individual's personal moral sense and his or her actions when performed under someone else's orders. The dichotomy is between conscience and authority, and Milgram says it is found in the very nature of society. Only the individual who lives in a remote area entirely alone escapes the role of social authority completely and can act only according to his or her conscience without pressure to do otherwise. The individual in a social setting who acts only according to his or her conscience will most certainly do so in a context of pressure and even coercion to act otherwise on certain occasions. Some societies enforce their strictures more directly and strenuously than do others, but all societies in some degree try to enforce conformity on members, at least in certain areas of conduct. Thus these experiments have much to say about the social order, how it is achieved and maintained, and what this might mean to anyone concerned about the morality of government actions with or without the acquiescence of the people.

Milgram states at the outset his view of the roles of

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anding explanation (Milgram, 1974, 5). Many of those studied were against what they did to the learner, and many expressed this even as they obeyed. Milgram notes why they might have performed the task anyway: But between thoughts, words, and the critical step of disobeying a malevolent authority lies another ingredient, the capacity for transforming beliefs and values into action. Some subjects were totally convinced of the wrongness of what they were doing but could not bring themselves to make an open break with authority. Some derived satisfaction from their thoughts and felt that--within themselves, at least--they had been on the side of the angels. What they failed to realize is that subjective feelings are largely irrelevant to the moral issue at hand so long as they are not transformed into action. Political control is effected through action (Milgram, 1974, 10). Milgram notes a variation on the primary experiment which poses a different dilemma. In this case, the subject was not ordered to push the trigger that shocked the victim but only to perform a subsidiary act, administering the test, before another subject delivered the actual shock. In this experiment, 37 of 40 adults continued to the highest shock level

Category: Psychology - R