Does your personality predict how obedient one will be in extreme situations? A study done by Begue, Beauvois, Courbet, Oberle and Duke (2015) looked at Milgram’s experiment with electric shocks a bit differently with the added component of personality. The authors looked at how agreeableness and conscientiousness can contribute to destructive obedience. Studying the influences that drive individual responses to obey authority in important as it helps us to understand how obedience can either unite society or lead to tragic circumstances. Harmful obedience can be the consequence of complex social forces arising from situational influences. Studies based on Milgram’s results have linked obedience with right wing authoritarianism, trustfulness, involuntary subordination, social concern and other traits. These varied connections can help explain behavioral differences in his studies (Begue, et al., 2015). This study used the Five-Factor model to look at the personality variation in people. In previous studies agreeableness has seen to be related to conformity due to agreeable people not wanting to go against the societal norm of those around them. Agreeableness also can lead to being influenced by others. Conscientiousness also predicts …show more content…
About 8 months after the experiment the authors re-interviewed the subjects without the subjects knowing about the connection to the initial experiment. The questions were to gauge personality and political ideology. The results showed that conscientiousness and agreeableness predicted the intensity of the shocks, left-wing political ideology was seen with people who showed decreased obedience, and that women who were willing to be participate in political rebellion, such as strikes, gave lower shocks. (Begue, et al.,
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.
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.
Comparative Analysis 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, 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 escape and under control.
Pursuing a personal desire and choosing to conform to societal expectations is a challenging decision to make. A person must decide if their personal desire is worth risking the shame and judgment of others or is conforming the route to take because it is easier. When pursuing a personal desire one must ask itself if it is worth the hardship to accomplish one's desire or if it is best left alone and repressed, in hopes of finding comfort in conformity. John Laroche from The Orchid Thief expresses his personal desire without a care for conformity or societal expectations. Nevertheless, Laroche never stopped being strange as he grew up with fascinations of many objects such as orchids, turtles, old mirrors and fish tanks.
In society, it's difficult to go against the norm. Individuals are compelled to act a specific way, or look a specific way in order to be accepted. For instance, teenagers may encounter pressure from their peers to partake in specific exercises that may not be moral, since they feel the need to fit in. This weight of conformity isn't just present in reality; it can be found in literature as well. The story "St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised by Wolves" by Karen Russell depicts that in order to conform to society, individuals abandon their selflessness and compassion and become selfish and apathetic.
Hitler and Mussolini were both individuals that used social influences throughout history . Each of these evil villains used authority and social pressure to persuade and manipulate people into performing acts that they wouldn’t normally do . Hitler and Mussolini legitimized their authority through immoral actions and fear and abused their authority. This is important because authority and social pressures are one of the most dangerous combinations there are. The use of these two socially accepted tools have resulted in the deaths of more people, and lead to atrocities such as more genocides than any other social force. . In the 1950s a psychologist Solomon Asch at Rutgers University decided to test group and individuals against in peer pressure. Later on 1963 Ache’s student a Yale psychologist named Stanley Milgram studied social obedience. Each particular study which was 13 years apart would reveal the same answers and types of results. Solomon Asch and Stanley Milgram recognized these events and decided to do their own experiments in social influences and authority. Each one of their studies is equally important, because they reinforce each other in characteristics and results.
In the 1960’s the Milgram obedience experiment tested whether a person would obey an order from authority even if there were deadly consequences. If a person gave a wrong answer, or didn’t give an answer then the participant would have to give the other an electric shock. The electric current could be set off at a deadly electricity level if they had given a wrong answer too many times. It may seem as if the participants would object to such an act but “65% of the participants in Milgram’s study delivered the maximum shocks” (Cherry, pg. 2). This shows that people have been reinforced from a young age to obey orders from authority even if there are horrible consequences to such actions. Adolph “Eichmann’s defense that he was merely following instructions when he ordered the deaths of millions of Jews” (Cherry, pg. 1). He
Obedience is when you do something you have been asked or ordered to do by someone in authority. As little kids we are taught to follow the rules of authority, weather it is a positive or negative effect. Stanley Milgram, the author of “The perils of Obedience” writes his experiment about how people follow the direction of an authority figure, and how it could be a threat. On the other hand Diana Baumrind article “Review of Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience,” is about how Milgram’s experiment was inhumane and how it is not valid. While both authors address how people obey an authority figure, Milgram focuses more on how his experiment was successful while Baumrind seems more concerned more with how Milgram’s experiment was flawed and
...g factors such as fear of consequences for not obeying, human nature’s willingness to conform, perceived stature of authority and geographical locations. I also believe that due to most individual’s upbringings they will trust and obey anyone in an authoritative position even at the expense of their own moral judgment. I strongly believe that Stanley Milgram’s experiments were a turning point for the field of social psychology and they remind us that “ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process”. Despite these findings it is important to point out it is human nature to be empathetic, kind and good to our fellow human beings. The shock experiments reveal not blind obedience but rather contradictory ethical inclinations that lie deep inside human beings.
pp. 371-377, 2008. Benjamin Jr., Ludy T. & Simpson, Jeffrey A. The Power of the Situation: The Impact of Milgram’s Obedience Studies on Personality and Social Psychology. From an American Psychologist.
Personality is massive part of an individual’s identity. Our personalities dictate our patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. An individual’s personality exposes them to predispositions and habits that influence their actions and lives. Early on, personality assessments consisted of physical features ranging from head shape and facial characteristics to body type. In today’s world, personality assessments are mainly based around traits. Traits are simply descriptions of one’s habitual patterns of behavior, thought and emotion. The most popular personality assessment is the Five-Factor Model, also known as The Big Five. This model allows us to describe people based on the five main traits/dimensions. These traits are extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. Each of these five traits measures a different aspect of one’s personality. Extraversion is based on one’s level of engagement with the world,
A person’s personality has been the subject of psychological scrutiny for many years. Psychologists have drawn up several theories in an attempt to accurately predict and determine one’s personality. Foremost amongst these, is the “Big Five Trait Theory” which stemmed from Raymond B. Cattell’s theory.
The five-factor model includes five broad domains or dimensions of personality that are used to describe human personality. The five factors are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. While these five traits should be sufficient on their own to describe all facets of a personality, there also should be no correlation between the main factors. The Five Factor Model is now perhaps the most widely use trait theory of personality and has achieved the closest thing to a consensus in personality research. The advantage of this theory is that there have been multiple research studies conducted on this theory. Results suggest that this theory is effective in describing and determining personality. However, this theory is very categorical and does not allow for much flexibility. It also looks at the person personality at that time and now how it developed.
Friedman, H. S., & Schustack, M. W. (2012). Personality: Classic theories and modern research (5th ed). Boston , MA, USA: Pearson
The Five-Factor Model of Personality is a system used in order to describe an individual’s personality traits. By requiring said individual to answer a series of questions, this test is able to decipher the traits that are most likely evident within their life. The Five-Factor Model of Personality test gives the test subject a series of situational options. Using the subject’s responses, psychologist match the answers to the personality in which best relates. A highly accurate description of ones’ personality can be easily configured by using the Five-Factor Model of Personality by testing either high or low in the following areas; openness to experience, extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism.