Argumentative Essay

Argumentative essay

No human social organization can function without some degree of obedience to authority, as the alternative would be anarchy leading to total chaos. Therefore, there are rules and norms that one must obey in societies where certain individuals exercise authority over others. According to Monroe & Reeder (2008) almost everyone will agree that some degree of authority in certain individuals or groups (and their obedience by other groups) is desirable for the proper functioning of a society. The problem arises when the obedience to authority is taken to extremes to harm or act in aggressive and unethical behavior towards others. Unfortunately, this type of obedience happens often in prison, schools, households and experiments among others.

The conflict between compliance with the demands of those in authority and individuals, which have private and sometimes different views, has been a subject of debate since ancient times in religion and philosophy. For example, in the story of Abraham and Isaac, Abraham was commanded by God to offer his son up as a sacrifice in the land of Moriah. Many psychologists have thought about, discussed and conducted experiments to understand this human uncommon characteristic. The psychology experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram to study obedience to authority among ordinary individuals are, perhaps, the most significant and startling.

According to Milgram (1963) his experiment consisted of selection of "teachers" from ordinary people who were asked to participate in a study on the effects of punishment on learning in which the "teacher" was to ask certain simple questions from a "learner" who was a confederate. The participants were told to assign electric shocks each time the "learner" got the question wrong. Each time they got the questions wrong the volts would increase by fifteen volts (from 15 to 450 volts). Milgram wanted to see how long participants would keep giving shots if requested by the experimenter. Undoubtedly, this experiment has been criticized because Milgram manipulated the participants and gave stress to them, but without this method, it was impossible to get a real reaction from people towards authorities. However, 84% of the participants were happy about being involved in the experiment which changed their way of thinking towards authority figures (Milgram, 1963).

Another experiment called "Stanford Prison Experiment" constructed by Philip G. Zimbardo was set up in order to study "the ability of individuals to resist authoritarian or obedient roles, if social setting requires these roles (Zimbardo, 1973, p.389)." Twenty one emotionally and physically healthy males were involved in an experiment and the participants were randomly assigned to take on roles of either the prisoner or prison guards. In the results of experiment the participants who played the role of the prison guards showed sadistic roles. The guards became quite abusive and aggressive towards their prisoners whereas the prisoners became passive and slowly loss all sense of identity, so "the planned two-week experiment was aborted after only six days and nights (Zimbardo, 1973, para.54)." The study showed that participants were not protected from harm. Furthermore, the participants were deceived as they were not told about the hypothesis of the experiment. However, if Zimbardo would not deceived the participants about the nature of the research then the result of the experiment would had lack of realism as the participants would have known what they were getting