The Controversial Issues of Obedience

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Individuals think differently when it comes to obedience. One might think of how we train dogs to be obedient, another might relate obedience to punishing a child for breaking a rule, or even others think about Hitler's Regime in Germany. When it comes to obedience, there are several sides. Stanley Milgram's article, "Obedience to Authority," expresses his view of obedience as an intensely embedded behavioral tendency to obey where a potent impulse can override training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct. On the other hand, in the article "Review of Milgram's Experiments on Obedience," Diana Baumrind represents her view that contradicts Milgram's. Baumrind believes that obedient attitudes vary according to what is appropriate for the context.

Many different questions have been debated among authors over the years that connect to the issue of obedience since Milgram's landmark experiment. Three key issues that are discussed within the original articles are authority to subordinate relationships, environment, and ethics. On these issues, Baumrind raises many valid points that prove Milgram's experiment to be oversimplified.

In Milgram's experiment, he had volunteers come to a psychology laboratory to take part in a study about memory and learning. He then designated them into two different roles for the volunteers, one a "teacher" and the other a "learner." From here the study varies slightly by location of the learner to the teacher. The learner is taken into the same room or a different room, depending upon the variation of the study, where he is connected to an electrode that is attached to his wrist. The experimenter explains that the learner will be quizzed on his ability to remember word pairs. Then th...

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...ilgram might have wished. I believe that Milgram could have followed up on his subjects to make sure that they were okay after the experiment and make sure no long-term effects were occurring.

Obedience is a widely-discussed issue that has many different views. Some of the issues about obedience that authors Milgram and Baumrind differ on are authority to subordinate relationship, environment, and ethics. On one side there is the view such as Stanley Milgram's which states that obedience occurs as a result of a behavioral tendency that when called upon can cause a person to disregard one's ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct. On the other hand, there is the view like Diana Baumrind's that explains that obedient attitudes vary according to what is appropriate for that certain situation. Obedience will always be a controversial issue with more than one side.

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