When faced with a difficult choice a person will think the multitude of different options over before making their final decision. Do they go with the choice that will benefit them or the choice that will benefit others? Many decisions are made on the circumstances of the situation a person is in. If a person is told in a time of war to participate in an act, that person will participate due to the fear of the consequences, even if that person does not know what the consequences are. In Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning the men of the battalion are faced with many options during their time in the battalion. Choices that include killing Jews in a firing squad to transporting Jews to Concentration Camps. Most of the men in the battalion were hesitant at first but soon gave in to the tasks they were given. Many of them were ordinary men with no record or thoughts of murder or criminal activity. These same circumstances were used in an experiment by Philip Zimbardo called the Stanford Prison Experiment. The results of his experiment and the actions of the Battalion are almost the exact same. Both occurrences had the same inner workings; order of authority, willingness to participate, and responsibilities of the actions. Each description playing an important part in the overall outcome.
“Our ability to selectively engage and disengage our moral standards…helps explain how people can be barbarically cruel in one moment and compassionate the next (The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, Philip Zimbardo pg18).” This quote by Albert Bandura is an accurate representation of the men in Police Battalion 101. They started their lives as regul...
... middle of paper ...
...d Prison Experiment’s actions were all done under orders and none of it was rebellion. There was rebellion in the prison experiment but there were more dishonest orders than dishonest rebellions. Any time a person is face with a hard decision they should base their decision off of the three characteristics of the two groups. Do they have the order so that nothing goes awry? Do they have the willingness to take action for the cause they fight for? Do they have the responsibility to take blame for anything that they have done? If so then the choice that is made is the best choice possible.
Works Cited
Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperPerennial, 1998. Print.
Zimbardo, Philip G. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House, 2007. Print.
The motion picture A Few Good Men challenges the question of why Marines obey their superiors’ orders without hesitation. The film illustrates a story about two Marines, Lance Corporal Harold W. Dawson and Private First Class Louden Downey charged for the murder of Private First Class William T. Santiago. Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, who is known to be lackadaisical and originally considers offering a plea bargain in order to curtail Dawson’s and Downey’s sentence, finds himself fighting for the freedom of the Marines; their argument: they simply followed the orders given for a “Code Red”. The question of why people follow any order given has attracted much speculation from the world of psychology. Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, conducted an experiment in which randomly selected students were asked to deliver “shocks” to an unknown subject when he or she answered a question wrong. In his article, “The Perils of Obedience”, Milgram concludes anyone will follow an order with the proviso that it is given by an authoritative figure. Two more psychologists that have been attracted to the question of obedience are Herbert C. Kelman, a professor at Harvard University, and V. Lee Hamilton, a professor at the University of Maryland. In their piece, Kelman and Hamilton discuss the possibilities of why the soldiers of Charlie Company slaughtered innocent old men, women, and children. The Marines from the film obeyed the ordered “Code Red” because of how they were trained, the circumstances that were presented in Guantanamo Bay, and they were simply performing their job.
The arguments of Christopher Browning and Daniel John Goldhagen contrast greatly based on the underlining meaning of the Holocaust to ordinary Germans. Why did ordinary citizens participate in the process of mass murder? Christopher Browning examines the history of a battalion of the Order Police who participated in mass shootings and deportations. He debunks the idea that these ordinary men were simply coerced to kill but stops short of Goldhagen's simplistic thesis. Browning uncovers the fact that Major Trapp offered at one time to excuse anyone from the task of killing who was "not up to it." Despite this offer, most of the men chose to kill anyway. Browning's traces how these murderers gradually became less "squeamish" about the killing process and delves into explanations of how and why people could behave in such a manner.
Fromm explains that humans obey orders because of “fear, hate, and greed”, which, in the end, harms humanity (Fromm 125). Agreeing with this idea, Zimbardo states that “self-aggrandizement” is accomplished by “self-deprecation” of others (Zimbardo 109). Christopher Shea’s experiment also backs up the claim that people act for themselves. Shea would concur with Fromm that humans behave greedily (Shea). In contrast, Shea would not believe that people behave to put others down, which is Zimbardo’s beliefs (Shea). Jessup wished to express his authority by giving orders and allowing himself to advance even higher. Jessup harmed Santiago to advance personally; in addition, Dawson and Downey obeyed orders to gain approval from Jessup. Fromm may argue that Dawson and Downey followed commands due to fear. Zimbardo would believe that they thought completing the order was the correct action to be taken. The article “Human Obedience: The Myth of Blind Conformity” also connects with Zimbardo’s viewpoint. The article explains why people become passive and eventually deem their actions as correct (Human Obedience: The Myth of Blind Conformity). Zimbardo would not consider humans to be passive just blind to the truth. “Human Obedience: The Myth of Blind Conformity” would reply that individuals need to rely on their mind and not listen to commands. Both authors believe the marines’ actions
Ordinary Men Christopher Browning describes how the Reserve Police Battalion 101, like the rest of German society, was immersed in a flood of racist and anti-Semitic propaganda. Browning describes how the Order Police provided indoctrination both in basic training and as an ongoing practice within each unit. Many of the members were not prepared for the killing of Jews. The author examines the reasons some of the police officers did not shoot. The physiological effect of isolation, rejection, and ostracism is examined in the context of being assigned to a foreign land with a hostile population.
Browning, Christoper R. (2001) Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (Penguin Books : London)
Lt. Daniel Kaffee uses his Harvard law education to represent two Marines who are being charged for murder in the movie A Few Good Men. Lt. Cdr. JoAnne Galloway and Lt. Sam Weinberg assist Kaffee on his investigation, thought to be a Code Red, a form of abusive peer discipline. While conversing with Jessep and his two senior officers in Cuba, Kaffee becomes suspicious about certain information given. In the end, Kaffee is triumphant over the case by proving Jessep’s guilt. Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, introduces his opinion on obedience in his article, “The Perils of Obedience,” while discussing the background to his experiment. An experimenter ordered the unaware teacher to give the learner agonizing shocks, not knowing that the learner was not truly hooked up to the voltage. The experimenter’s goal was to make sure that the teacher followed all orders, even if that meant supposedly harming the learner. Surprisingly, more people obeyed the experimenter rather than following the instinct to help the learner. Likewise, Erich Fromm, a psychoanalyst and philosopher, claims that obedience and disobedience both can have good and bad consequences. From...
...test, it is hard not to draw some parallels. Milgram noticed that if people did not have direct contact with the people they were inflicting pain on, two-thirds of the subjects inflicted what was considered extreme pain. If they had visual and voice feedback, only forty percent obeyed orders. The number fell to thirty percent if they were in direct contact with the person they were shocking. Browning also points out that the social pressures of conformity were quite apparent. "Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets the moral norms. If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?" (Browning, 189) In closing, these men, who appeared to be quite ordinary, became extraordinary in their brutality and killing, no matter what the reason. Decidedly, their contribution to the genocide was quite significant. It is a shame that many received little, or no punishment for the slaughter they participated in.
The Milgram experiment of the 1960s was designed to ascertain why so many Germans decided to support the Nazi cause. It sought to determine if people would be willing to contradict their conscience if they were commanded to do so by someone in authority. This was done with a psychologist commanding a teacher to administer an electric shock to a student each time a question was answered incorrectly. The results of the Milgram experiment help to explain why so many men in Nazi Germany were recruited to support the Nazi cause and serve as a warning against the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques by the United States government.
Christopher Browning, a professor of history at Pacific Lutheran University, wrote a book focusing on the Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland and named it Ordinary Men. Browning states the historical problems he hopes to solve with his book "the fundamental problem is to explain why ordinary men- shaped by a culture that had its own particularities but was nonetheless within the mainstream of western, Christian, and Enlightenment traditions - under specific circumstances willingly carried out the most extreme genocide in human history". Browning starts out with the approach of recognizing the background and organization of the Reserve Police Battalion 101. This gives the reader to allow time to build up knowledge without making any biased decision just yet to answer the problem given. The author then focuses on the development of brutality amongst the departments of the Order Police and provides the aftermath of the war and to what he believes to be the answer to the historical problem.
In his book, “Ordinary men,” Browning examines the police me who committed, or performed the killing. First he explain to the readers that this men just ordinary people, but coming to think of it, what made this ordinary people perform the first massacred. Browning explain to us that this men were not chosen individual, nor were they chosen because of a particular reason. The reserve police battalion were first assigned to massacre the Jews, but after that, they were assigned to clear the Jews ghettos and drive the residents onto trains that they would be transported to the extermination camps. But he made us understand that the police battalion who committed this massacre had the opportunity not to do it when Trapp, their commander said, “If any of you older men among them did not feel up to th...
It is only natural to dismiss the idea of our own personal flaws, for who with a healthy sense of self wanders in thoughts of their own insufficiency? The idea of hypocrisy is one that strikes a sensitive nerve to most, and being labeled a hypocrite is something we all strive to avoid. Philip Meyer takes this emotion to the extreme by examining a study done by a social psychologist, Stanley Milgram, involving the effects of discipline. In the essay, "If Hitler Asked You to Electrocute a Stranger, Would You? Probably", Meyer takes a look at Milgram's study that mimics the execution of the Jews (among others) during World War II by placing a series of subjects under similar conditions of stress, authority, and obedience. The main theme of this experiment is giving subjects the impression that they are shocking an individual for incorrectly answering a list of questions, but perhaps more interesting is the results that occur from both ends of the research. Meyer's skill in this essay is using both the logical appeal of facts and statistics as well as the pathetic appeal to emotion to get inside the reader's mind in order to inform and dissuade us about our own unscrupulous actions.
When put into an authoritative position over others, is it possible to claim that with this new power individual(s) would be fair and ethical or could it be said that ones true colors would show? A group of researchers, headed by Stanford University psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo, designed and executed an unusual experiment that used a mock prison setting, with college students role-playing either as prisoners or guards to test the power of the social situation to determine psychological effects and behavior (1971). The experiment simulated a real life scenario of William Golding’s novel, “Lord of the Flies” showing a decay and failure of traditional rules and morals; distracting exactly how people should behave toward one another. This research, known more commonly now as the Stanford prison experiment, has become a classic demonstration of situational power to influence individualistic perspectives, ethics, and behavior. Later it is discovered that the results presented from the research became so extreme, instantaneous and unanticipated were the transformations of character in many of the subjects that this study, planned originally to last two-weeks, had to be discontinued by the sixth day. The results of this experiment were far more cataclysmic and startling than anyone involved could have imagined. The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast the discoveries from Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment and of Burrhus Frederic “B.F.” Skinner’s study regarding the importance of environment.
When people realize that good and evil are just points of view that are placed on other people and actions, it is possible to transcend these superficial roles. Since it is people who create the meaning of evil, it cannot be said that people are evil, or are born evil, because not only is that a perspective that is assumed onto others, which will change with different cultures, societies, and eras, but the very same acts may appear to be both good and evil, depending on the perspective in which the acts are seen. Ultimately, it is the individual’s responsibility to decide for himself the effects of his actions on himself and others.
Obedience is a widely debated topic today with many different standpoints from various brilliant psychologists. Studying obedience is still important today to attempt to understand why atrocities like the Holocaust or the My Lai Massacre happened so society can learn from them and not repeat history. There are many factors that contribute to obedience including situation and authority. The film A Few Good Men, through a military court case, shows how anyone can fall under the influence of authority and become completely obedient to conform to the roles that they have been assigned. A Few Good Men demonstrates how authority figures can control others and influence them into persuading them to perform a task considered immoral or unethical.
...ion people based on the orders of Adolf Hitler and his henchmen. In reference to the two situations, one participant of the study said that “anybody can be a guard, but not every one becomes sadistic.” This saying can be applied to real life situations, especially that of the New Jersey incident.