Stanley Milgram did an experiment to test the obedience of people under the role of an authority figure. An authority figure in short terms, is someone who tells us what to do. Such as the boss, the government, teachers, and sometimes even parents. You know that feeling, when someone tells you to do something and you know that you have no choice but to do it? That is your brain being submissive to the person telling you what to do. In the Milgram experiment, the test subjects were told to deliver shocks to another human being when the person in the lab coat (authority figure) told them to. Most test subjects did, up to a 400 volt electric-shock. The test, of course was a set up and the electric shocks were fake, but Milgram’s study shows that when someone above us tells us to do something, we do it.
OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY
Another example of obedience is in the Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. A woman is sick. Mentally, but her husband insists that she is not sick. She is living in a room with a yellow wallpaper that she hates, but because her husband is a doctor, she must stay.She despises the room, and wishes for the room downstairs, but her husband says that they needed more room, and the yellow papered room is big enough. She is not allowed to work, to think about her condition, or to write, because her husband makes her rest. She isn’t allowed to visit people, for she must rest. No matter how strongly she feels about the room, her husband always has something to make her obey. Until the end, when she goes insane from the wallpaper and she escapes from her husband’s authority over her. Humans are dependent on one another, and follow each other. Especially if that someone is more powerful in society.
Gilman, C, (1892). The Yellow Wallpaper. Retrieved from: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1952/1952-h/1952-h.htm
Cherry, K. A. (2008). The Milgram obedience experiment. Retrieved from http://psychology.about.com/od/socialinfluence/fl/What-Is-Obedience.htm
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Photo From Psicólogo Alejandro
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