Obedience

  Obedience is a form of social influence where an individual acts in response to a direct order from another individual, who is usually an authority figure. It is assumed that without such an order the person would not have acted in this way. Obedience occurs when you are told to do something (authority), whereas conformity happens through social pressure (the norms of the majority). Obedience involves a hierarchy of power/status.

Therefore, the person giving the order has a higher status than the person receiving the order. Obedience is the act of obeying orders from others.

As humans we are indoctrinated to obey authority figures. This training begins from the moment of birth as we are reliant on our parents to take care of our every need, in turn being subservient to our authority figure or parents. As we begin to mature and are thrust into society we obtain more influential authority figures from outside the household.

Schools have a system of order and authority. Teachers give us guidance and direction academically and even socially because we begin to learn how to act in a group or societal setting. The school environment is all a preparation for careers.

When we begin working most of us work for a company or organisation with all levels of management who we must be obedient to. As we mature we are given more and more responsibility over our actions and judgments, thus making it more beneficial to our societal advancement to be obedient. Stanley Milgram, a famous social psychologist, performs a number of experiments on human obedience in the 1960’s.

Obedience, in human behaviour, is the quality of being obedient, which describes the act of carrying out commands, or being actuated. Obedience differs from compliance, which is behaviour influenced by peers, and from conformity, which is behaviour intended to match that of the majority. Humans have been shown to be surprisingly obedient in the presence of perceived legitimate authority figures, as demonstrated by the Milgram experiment in the 1960s, which was carried out by Stanley Milgram to discover how the Nazis managed to get ordinary people to take part in the mass murders of the Holocaust. The experiment showed that obedience to authority was the norm, not the exception.

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