¶ … Perils of Obedience" and the "Stanford Prison Experiment"
Both "The Perils of Obedience" and the "Stanford Prison Experiment" essentially demonstrate the potential for 'evil' in ordinary citizens when placed in situations where stark authority is pitted against the individual's own moral imperatives (Milgram) or when deindividuated potential perpetrators are given total power over powerless victims (Zimbardo). Though the experiments differed vastly in design and methodology, the point of both experiments was to observe how far an individual would go in inflicting increasing pain on a victim.
There were several common ethical issues thrown up by both experiments. As Zimbardo says, "The line between Good and Evil lies in the center of every human heart...not in some abstract moral, celestial space..." (Sonoma State University Web site) Similarly, Milgram observes, "Conservative philosophers argue that the very fabric of society is threatened by disobedience, while humanists stress the primacy of the individual conscience." (Vanguard University Web site) Therefore, the same issue of ethics as in 'the individual conscience' is at the heart of both experiments on human psychology.
The use of the individual's conscience and power to discriminate and act on one's judgement of right and wrong is demonstrated by both experiments in the context of the use or misuse...
Since they were conducted, the American Psychological Association (APA) has established rules and strict guidelines for ethical experimentation that would not allow the kind of deception used at that time. In both experiments, the subjects experienced numerous after-effects including depression, anxiety, and tremendous guilt and they received psychological counselling afterwards. In the case of the Zimbardo experiment, it is understandable why the prisoners would have suffered from the experience, but
Meanwhile on the subject of obedience, an article in American Psychologist (written by the former research assistant to Milgram at Yale University) poses the following question: if Milgram's experiments / research were conducted today, in 2009, "would people still obey… " (Elms, 2009, p. 34). The answer given in most cases by Elms is that "…a current measure of obedience to destructive authority would find substantially less obedience than
Obedience in Jane Austen's Persuasion Is obedience a virtue or a vice? Actually, it can be either. As Shakespeare notes, "Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, / And vice sometime by action dignified" (2.3.21-22). This means that one can obey an unjust order and commit a sin, or one can disobey an unjust order be virtuous. The question of obedience in Austen's Persuasion is a serious one because what hinges
Obeying Authority Human beings are all born with free will and the ability to choose for ourselves which actions to undertake, however this ability has been modified over time as we are trained to obey figures who we perceive to have authority over us. This process begins in childhood when our first understood authority figures, namely our parents, inform us about what behaviors are appropriate within a given social context and
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