The Wave (2008) is a film based on the true story of a social experiment, “The Third Wave”, which took place in a high school in California in 1969. The film takes place in modern Germany and explains the origins of fascism. After watching the film, you realise how anything is possible in an unstable environment. The story is about a school teacher, Rainer Wegner, who teaches autocracy for the school’s project week. Initially, students seem disinterested in the topic, lacking the motivation to learn more about The Third Reich and Nazism. Wenger asks his students, if a dictatorship like Hitler’s would be conceivable in modern Germany. Most of his students believed it was impossible. Therefore, instead of explaining and having students read Therefore, it can cause people to disregard their personal conscience and abide by the rules. Research has demonstrated the power of authority and the alarming extent to which people comply even when it conflicts with their own values and morals. In Milgram’s (1963) study of obedience, the experimenter asked participants to administer an electric shock, which gradually increased in voltage every time the learner got an answer wrong. Participants were unaware that the learner was, in fact, a confederate. The results of the study are displayed in Table 2 below, showing that 65% of participants were willing to administer the highest shock Students were completely devoted to his experiment, suggesting additional rules they should follow to form part of The Wave. They established a uniform to eliminate class distinction, as well as, a salute and symbol to further unite as a group. Whereas in ordinary circumstances many students would have rejected these new social norms, under group pressure they decided to accept the majority’s judgement. This provides an example of conformity, whereby individuals adjust their beliefs, attitudes and behaviours in ways that are consistent with the norms of the group (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). One of the main reasons people conform is because they have the desire to be accepted by the majority (Deutsch & Gerard, 1995). This is demonstrated in Asch’s (1955) study where participants were asked to decide which of the three lines had the same length as the standard line. All members of the group except one were confederates and were instructed beforehand to give wrong answers in most trials (Asch, 1955). The results show that when individuals perform this task independently they tend to be accurate almost all the time. Whereas in the presence of the group people conform on average one third of the time with the majority’s decision (Asch, 1955). Similarly, students conform to the social norms of The Wave, despite their beliefs, attitudes and behaviours being obviously wrong. Many of these students were
In "The Perils of Obedience," Stanley Milgram conducted a study that tests the conflict between obedience to authority and one's own conscience. Through the experiments, Milgram discovered that the majority of people would go against their own decisions of right and wrong to appease the requests of an authority figure. The study was set up as a "blind experiment" to capture if and when a person will stop inflicting pain on another as they are explicitly commanded to continue. The participants of this experiment included two willing individuals: a teacher and a learner. The teacher is the real subject and the learner is merely an actor.
In this article “The Pearls of Obedience”, Stanley Milgram asserts that obedience to authority is a common response for many people in today’s society, often diminishing an individuals beliefs or ideals. Stanley Milgram designs an experiment to understand how strong a person’s tendency to obey authority is, even though it is amoral or destructive. Stanley Milgram bases his experiment on three people: a learner, teacher, and experimenter. The experimenter is simply an overseer of the experiment, and is concerned with the outcome of punishing the learner. The teacher, who is the subject of the experiment, is made to believe the electrical shocks are real; he is responsible for obeying the experimenter and punishing the learner for incorrect answers by electrocuting him from an electric shock panel that increases from 15 to 450 volts.
Which is depicted when the initial harmless goals are lost and new intentions arise unrecognised. In the beginning, Ben Ross, a teacher with good intentions, was just trying to teach his students about why citizens of Germany followed corrupt orders. This later on turned into The Wave, which was a school experiment created by Ben Ross, to give his students a better understanding by giving them "a sampling, a taste of what life in Nazi Germany might have been like" (Todd Strasser, 2005, The Wave, pp. 81-82). The experiment was a success, probably too much of a success, as the students who were a part of it, took it very seriously and unknowingly created a dangerous cult like following throughout their school. This power created by the students easily drove them from their main goal which they started with: equality, to fascism. They become exposed to other desired outcomes which resultantly changed their fundamental goal. This is shown in The Wave, when the original goal of equality is diminished and students who were not a part of The Wave were treated very
A former Yale psychologist, Stanley Milgram, administered an experiment to test the obedience of "ordinary" people as explained in his article, "The Perils of Obedience". An unexpected outcome came from this experiment by watching the teacher administer shocks to the learner for not remembering sets of words. By executing greater shocks for every wrong answer created tremendous stress and a low comfort levels within the "teacher", the one being observed unknowingly, uncomfortable and feel the need to stop. However, with Milgram having the experimenter insisting that they must continue for the experiments purpose, many continued to shock the learner with much higher voltages.The participants were unaware of many objects of the experiment until
If a person of authority ordered you to inflict a 15 to 400 volt electrical shock on another innocent human being, would you follow your direct orders? That is the question that Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, tested in the 1960’s. Most people would answer “no,” to imposing pain on innocent human beings, but Milgram wanted to go further with his study. Writing and Reading across the Curriculum holds a shortened edition of Stanley Milgram’s “The Perils of Obedience,” where he displays an eye-opening experiment that tests the true obedience of people under authority figures.
Obedience to authority and willingness to obey an authority against one’s morals has been a topic of debate for decades. Stanley Milgrim, a Yale psychologist, conducted a study in which his subjects were commanded by a person in authority to initiate lethal shocks to a learner; his experiment is discussed in detail in the article “The Perils of Obedience” (Milgrim 77). Milgrim’s studies are said to be the most “influential and controversial studies of modern psychology” (Levine).While the leaner did not actually receive fatal shocks, an actor pretended to be in extreme pain, and 60 percent of the subjects were fully obedient, despite evidence displaying they believed what they were doing was harming another human being (Milgrim 80). Likewise, in Dr. Zimbardo, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, conducted an experiment, explained in his article “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” in which ten guards were required to keep the prisoners from
Why so many people obey when they feel coerced? Social psychologist Stanley Milgram made an experiment to find the effect of authority on obedience. He concluded that people obey either out of fear or out of a desire to cooperate with the authority, even when acting against their own better judgment and desires. Milgram’s experiment illustrates that people's reluctance to confront those who abuse power. The point of the experiment was to see how far a person will proceed in a concrete and measurable situation in which he is ordered to inflict increasing pain on a protesting victim, at what point will the subject refuse to obey the experimenter. One main question of the experiment was that how far the participant will comply with the experimenter’s instructions before refusing to carry out the actions required of him?
The Wave, by Todd Strasser, illustrates how easily one can plummet into autocratic behaviors. In the book, Strasser depicts an experiment conducted by a history teacher. The experiment was conducted in order to enlighten the students on the Holocaust (Strasser 26). During the Holocaust, the German dictator, Adolf Hitler, was lured in by the power that an autocratic society provides. He and his group, the Nazi Party, captured and executed millions of Jews in order to benefit Germany with ethnic cleansing.
Obedience is described as a compliance with an order, request, or law or submission to another’s authority. The majority of the world would say when pushed to a certain extreme that would lead to the harming of other people, humans would be not obedient to such a request because of our morals. Dr. Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, set up an experiment to prove this theory wrong. Dr. Milgram devised this experiment to focus on the conflict between obedience of the every day normal guy to the authority and personal conscience of their superiors.
The astute reader may notice that this review does not include any papers that did not find a false consensus effect. The reason for this is not that this paper is not representative of the literature, but rather, that it is. The uniformity of the literature suggests that the phenomenon is fairly common. Some interesting arguments as to why this is are motivational or cognitive in nature. The motivational premise is based in the idea that people are motivated to believe that they have a place in their social environment. This argument is a based in self-justification, in that if many people share a given belief or behavior, it makes it easier to justify that this attitude or behavior is either right, or not as bad as it might seem.
Summary of the Experiment In Stanley Milgram’s ‘The Perils of Obedience’, Milgram conducted experiments with the objective of knowing “how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist" (Milgram 317). In the experiments, two participants would go into a warehouse where the experiments were being conducted and inside the warehouse, the subjects would be marked as either a teacher or a learner. A learner would be hooked up to a kind of electric chair and would be expected to do as he is being told by the teacher and do it right because whenever the learner said the wrong word, the intensity of the electric shocks increased. Similar procedure was undertaken on the teacher and the results of the experiments showed conclusively that a large number of people would go against their personal conscience in obedience to authority (Milgram 848).... ...
The most basic concept in social psychology is conformity. Conformity is the idea that behaviour or a belief is changed in order to follow, or conform, to what is considered the “norm.” One of the oldest experiments to support this notion was conducted in 1935 by Muzafer Sherif (Song, Ma, Wu, Li, 2012 p. 1366). There are two different types of
In 1951, Solomon Asch carried out several experiments on conformity. The aim of these studies was to investigate conformity in a group environment situation. The purpose of these experiments was to see if an individual would be swayed by public pressure to go along with the incorrect answer. Asch believed that conformity reflects on relatively rational process in which people are pressured to change their behaviour. Asch designed experiments to measure the pressure of a group situation upon an individual judgment. Asch wanted to prove that conformity can really play a big role in disbelieving our own senses.
... instead of following the majority. The issue of peer pressure can relate to teens, as they are in constant pressure to be ‘cool’ or to be in the ‘in’ group. It does not really promote individualism, so people cannot develop their own ideas but rather follow the leader of their group.
This not only relates to the overall idea of the individual’s actions based on group influence but also alludes to the sub idea of the group of the classroom and how the individual does not want to be seen as lesser by giving a wrong answer. In doing this the group influences the individual to go along with the main idea of the group. In this experiment when given three lines to decide which one is more closely related to the original line it was found that the individual, that was part of the experimental group, would often pick the wrong answer to go along with the group (Baron, 2012). The influence stems from the group all choosing the wrong answer then the individual begins to believe that there is something wrong with the answer they had originally chosen due to the fact that the group overall has made a majority answer. The group itself can present tangible influence when they look to the individual to answer. That moment when the group looks toward the individual is where the influence becomes more concrete and the individual’s own beliefs begin to waiver because they believe that perhaps they are wrong and the group is correct