In Doris Lessing’s article, “Group Minds”, Lessing presents a troubling question: “If we know that individuals will violate their own good common sense and moral codes in order to become accepted members of a group, why then can’t we put this knowledge to use and teach people to be wary of group pressures?” (595). A fundamental conflict that Lessing presents is that persons of the Western world celebrate their individualism, but are ignorant in seeing how groups diminish their individuality. Lessing begins the article stating that people living in the West, or the “free world”, all believe that they make their own individual choices, which then leaves those individuals helpless against an array of pressures that force them to conform in many ways. She continues, explaining how we all live our lives in groups such as family, work groups, social, religious, and political groups. In fact, most people are constantly seeking …show more content…
Asch conducted simple experiments on the influence that group pressures held over an individual. Asch discovered that many individuals could be influenced by groups to deny what their own senses indicated, as shown with this excerpt from the article: “At one extreme, about one quarter of the subjects were completely independent and never agreed with the erroneous judgments of the majority. At the other extreme, some individuals went with the majority nearly all the time. The performances of individuals in this experiment tend to be highly consistent.” (599). Both Lessing and Asch agree that group mentality strongly influences what one thinks and does. Saul McLeod, author of “The Milgram Experiment”, would be likely to agree with Lessing and Asch. McLeod states in his article “Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being. Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up.”
In July of 1961, Stanley Milgram began his experiment of obedience. He first published an article, Behavioral Study of Obedience, in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in 1963. This article, Behavioral Study of Obedience, is what this paper will be critiquing. He then wrote a book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, in 1974 discussing his results in more detail. Milgram’s inspiration was the World War II and Adolf Hitler. During World War II, millions of innocent people were killed in a very organized manor. Milgram (1963) compares the organization and accuracy of the deaths, to the “efficiency as the manufacture of appliances” (p. 371). Milgram (1963) defines obedience as “the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose” (p. 371). Milgram acknowledges that it may only take one person to come up with an idea, such as Hitler coming up with a way to eradicate the Jews, but would take an
... More people followed their direct orders and continued shocking the learners to the very highest voltage. Stanley Milgram’s experiment shows societies that more people abide by the rules of an authority figure under any circumstances rather than follow their own natural instincts. With the use of his well-organized article that appeals to the general public, direct quotes and real world examples, Milgram’s idea is very well-supported. The results of the experiment were in Milgram’s favor and show that people are obedient to authority figures.
We live in a society where each individual has their own set of thoughts and beliefs. Occasionally one will modify their beliefs and behavior to coincide with a group. This is an example of social influence. Social influence has three main components; conformity, compliance and obedience. The concept of compliance is similar to conformity, however there is a slight difference. Compliance only requires a person to perform a task. The person does not have to agree or disagree with the assignment, just simply complete it. Conformity requires the person being influenced to change their attitudes and or beliefs. An example of this aspect of social psychology is the holocaust in World War II. Adolph Eichmann was a Nazi officer responsible for filling up death camps in Germany. After the war he went on trial in Jerusalem for crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. On May 31, 1962, he was sentenced to death for the horrible crimes he committed. His defense was "Why me? Why not the local policemen, thousands of them? They would have been shot if they had refused to round up the Jews for the death camps. Why not hang them for not wanting to be shot? Why me? Everybody killed the Jews". A few months after the start of Eichmann’s trial, Stanley Milgram instituted an experiment testing ones obedience to authority. He wanted to find out if good people could do atrocious things if they were just obeying authority. Was Eichmann and millions of others in Nazi Germany decent people who were just following orders? Some other famous experiments that have taken place to test the waters of social psychology are Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment and Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments, all ...
(Hart) Stanley Milgram’s experiment in the way people respond to obedience is one of the most important experiments ever administered. The goal of Milgram’s experiment was to find the desire of the participants to shock a learner in a controlled situation. When the volunteer would be ordered to shock the wrong answers of the victims, Milgram was truly judging and studying how people respond to authority. Milgram discovered something both troubling and awe inspiring about the human race. “Since they were first published in 1963, MIlgram’s sensational findings have been offered as an explanation for mass genocide during the Holocaust and events such as the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam and the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison”(Perry 223-224). The way Milgram was able to control the experiment shows how the human race can crack under pressure and obey orders, no matter the consequence. Although, not everything was as it seems when it came to the results of the findings. As Milgram used actors to portray the “victims” in the experiment, so no one was truly being tortured. Milgram wanted to show that pressure can get to anyone, in any situation.
Groupthink relates to the movie The Ghost of Abu Ghraib because Military Intelligence were a cohesive group, so what one did they all did. Even though most of the Military Police didn’t believe what they were doing to the detainees were humanely correct, they did it anyways because their higher rank told them to do it. If they were telling them to do these violent acts, then they must have been okay in doing. Intelligence wanted the information quickly and this was one of the reason why they interrogated the detainees. The military police were angry and everyone wanted answers. The higher ranked intelligence guys thought abuse was the way to get the answers they needed and quickly. The textbook, ORGB, mentions illusions of invulnerability, which is when group members feel that they are above criticism, leading to risk taking. One of the top intelligence guys, Corporal Graner, was hungry for the power. Abusing the detainees made he feel powerful, so he did it more and
During World War 2, Hitler is able to gain popularity by manipulating the German people's’ minds and using mod mentality so the German people “know what their eyes are telling them, [but] they choose to ignore it, and go along with the group to belong to the group,” (ABC News 23). People choose to ignore what they see and go with the crowd because they believe that the crowd is always right. This is not always the case because when the Germans follow Hitler, it ensues in chaos. When people become part of a group, they worry about the groups needs and not the individuals. They also can tend to all think alike causing them to lose their independent thoughts. In virtue of this, individuals can become violent and rowdy because a single member of the group is, making everyone else feel that it's okay. Similar to both sources, herd behavior can have a negative affect, even if the victims are not involved directly. Comparably in the story “A Very Old Man with Enormous WIngs” written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, an angel falls
Asch and Milgram’s experiment was unethical in their methods of not informing the participant of the details surrounding the experiment and the unwarranted stress; their experiment portrayed the circumstances of real life situation surrounding the issues of obedience to authority and social influence. In life, we are not given the courtesy of knowledge when we are being manipulated or influenced to act or think a certain way, let us be honest here because if we did know people were watching and judging us most of us would do exactly as society sees moral, while that may sound good in ensuring that we always do the right thing that would not be true to the ways of our reality. Therefore, by not telling the participants the details of the experiment and inflicting unwarranted stress, Asch and Milgram’s replicated the reality of life. In “Options and Social Pressure” Solomon E. Asch conducts an experiment to show the power of social influence, by using the lengths of sticks that the participants had to match up with the best fit, Asch then developed different scenarios to see how great the power of influence is, but what he discovered is that people always conformed to the majority regardless of how big or small the error was the individual always gave in to the power of the majority.
Stanley Milgram was a social psychologist, studying various aspects of society. Milgram focused on many important social issues, one of them was obedience. Perhaps his most famous experiment, Milgram tested the extent of authoritative power and how obediences can influence a person’s action . To test his theory on obedience, Milgram had asked a subject, known as the teacher, to shock a “learner” if they fail to remember a set of phrases. The shock was increased every time the learner made an error.
“Individualistic cultures, in the western-hemisphere, [such as the United States,] emphasize… personal identity and self-determination. Conformity is far less pervasive in individualistic societies because democratic choices and laissez-faire viewpoints are somewhat considered.”
In 1951, Solomon Asch set out to update an experiment previously performed by Muzafer Sherif in 1935. Sherif’s experiment attempted to explore peer pressure to conform by seeing if groups of subjects would give the same incorrect answers as the carefully instructed confederates in their group. Asch felt that because there had been no correct answer to Sherif’s experiment, it could not be considered legitimate since there could be no gauge as to what the right or wrong answer was. In his updating of this experiment, he created what is now considered “a classic experiment in Social Psychology” (simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity, 2008) and “the procedure became the standard for hundreds of later experiments” (Social Psychology David G. Myers,
Group Pressure In 1951, Solomon Asch fulfilled a very famous experiment in the psychology world. Asch conducted an experiment in group pressure to achieve conformity, Stark’s quoted “Can group pressure cause us to deny the obvious, even physical evidence?”. Do we believe that we are able to hold on our opinions when everyone else are disagreeing with us?. Solomon Asch answered all these questions in his experiment.
34). Adams and Balfour (2009) cite social psychologist Stanley Milgram researched; Milgram studied the effect of authority on obedience. He concluded that people obey, against their own better judgment, out of fear or out of a desire to appear cooperative. Individuals may see themselves responsible for their own actions, however, an “argentic shift” may occur, in which they no longer see themselves as responsible for their actions, but merely as an agent, carrying out the instructions of another person. (Adams & Balfour, 2009, p. 36).
An authority figure plays a big role on how others acts and why they act that way. Stanley Milgram is a social psychologist who started an experiment in 1960. Stanley Milgram gathered Germans to prove if they different when it comes to following authority after the destruction
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.
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