Obedience And Disobedience Essay

The concepts of obedience and disobedience are evident from the beginning of one 's life. Young children are born with the tendency to do things that are against what they are told or what they know they should do. They don 't have to learn how to disobey; it is an innate behavior. This struggle between obedience and disobedience carries on throughout our lives. There are three major factors that can cause obedience and disobedience; authority, social pressure, and situations. Each of these vastly impact an individual 's behavior and cause them to act in ways they would normally not. In order to understand the phenomena of obedience and disobedience, it is essential to understand the causes of these behaviors. The first and arguably the most

This experiment gathered twenty-one young men and assigned half of them to be “prisoners” and the other half to be “guards”. Simply put, the point of the experiment was to simulate a prison and observe how the setting and the given roles affected the behavior of the young men. The men who were given the roles of guard were given a position of authority and acted accordingly. This alone strongly influenced the behavior of both the guards and the prisoners. The guards had a sense of entitlement, control, and power, while the prisoners had a feeling of resentment and rebellion. Social pressure also played a crucial role in the experiment. Many of the guards began to exploit their power by abusing, brutalizing, and dehumanizing the prisoners. Some of the other guards felt wrong about this abuse, but did nothing to put an end to it. Finally, the situation and setting of the experiment immensely altered the conduct of both the prisoners and guards. The setting of being in a prison caused many of the volunteers to act in ways that they may have normally not. Even though the setting of being in a prison was essentially pretend, the volunteers accepted the roles they were given and acted as if it was all a reality. The prisoners genuinely behaved as if they were indeed real prisoners, and the guards treated them likewise. The situation these volunteers

Many of the causes of obedience or disobedience are shared; meaning that social pressure, for example, could cause obedience or disobedience. The concepts of obedience and disobedience are closely related, they “have a complementary function.” Since both of these behaviors are very similar, it is important to understand that neither one is necessarily positive or negative. Naturally, we tend to think that obedience is a positive behavior and disobedience is a negative behavior; however, this is not always the case. In the Milgram Experiment, the teachers were obedient and continued to shock the learners, so in this case, obedience would be considered to be negative (Maura). Obedience is a behavior that we may not ever fully understand. While we know many of the causes behind obedience and disobedience, the reason behind these causes is still intriguing and makes obedience and disobedience very unique