Obedience and Disobedience

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Recommended: Behavioral Study Of Obedience Stanley Milgram

In 1963 Stanley Milgram conducted one of the most influent and famous social psychology studies that in subsequent decades would affect an enormous amount of political, sociological and philosophical studies. In this essay I will analyze the rationale of this study, his interpretation and how other authors confute and proposed alternative explanations. In 1945, few months after the end of World War II, Allies court started the first legal processes to the principal Nazi criminals in Nuremberg, but in later years, one of the most famous trial of the history took place in Jerusalem, in 1962 : the Eichmann Process.
Adolf Eichmann was the Nazi officer most directly responsible for the logistics and planning of Hitler’s “Final Solution” , coordinating the exile of Jews before out of Austria, then their transfer to concentration camp. Hannah Arendt followed the process as correspondent for The New Yorker and then published her report and impressions in the book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”. Arendt was immediately struck by the Eichmann’s way of communicating : he spoke with an structured and full of clichés speech, taken from a bureaucratic lexicon, describing himself as a common citizen, dutiful, faithful and obedient to law and to his superior’s orders. ...

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...oximity of the victim : when the learner could not be seen or heard all of the participants arrived at the end of the experiment , while when the teacher had to lower the victim's hand on the electrode to administrate the shock, obedience reached 30%. In the end even the process of social influence plays a key-role : the presence of two dissident participants reduced conformance, on the other hand when they obedient, total obedience raised to 92.5 %.
Milgram replicated the experimental paradigm in individuals of different age, sex, social and economic conditions and from different countries : the degree of obedience ranged from more than 90% between Spain and the Netherlands, more than 80% of Italians, Germans and Austrians, demonstrating a high level of external validity.

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