Reaction Under Pressure

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Recommended: Merits and demerits of peer pressure

In the three essays; The Perils of Obedience by Stanley Milgram, Group Minds by Doris Lessing, and Opinions and Social Pressure by Solomon E. Asch, the mutual question is how people act when pressure is being put on them. From experiments of obedience with authority to experiments with pressure in group situations, they cover human reactions. The main points are how someone acts under the pressure of obedience when the authority is in the room, the obedience when the authority is on the phone and also the pressure being put on in group situations. The argument being how people can alter their beliefs or answers when put under pressure.
Altering beliefs comes into play in Stanley Milgram`s essay. He talks about an experiment done at Yale University where they took an actor and put him in a room with a fake electric chair, calling him the learner, and then picking random people to be the teachers, obviously they did not know the learner was an actor. The experimenter told the teachers to read off words and if the learner got them wrong the teacher was supposed to give them an electric shock, going up in voltage every wrong answer (632). For most of the teachers brought into the experiment they protested giving the learner a shock after hearing the pain that the learner was going through, but in the end they fell in line with obedience and finished the experiment, even when they didn’t want to. Milgram gives an example of Fred Prozi who is an unemployed and ordinary man in his fifty`s. Prozi expressed that he did not want to keep going on with the experiment, multiple times, but still continues to up the voltage, even when the learner stops answering (637). He also mentions a teacher named Gretchen Brandt who is originally from Ger...

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... peer pressure. In the essay Group Minds by Doris Lessing she put it perfectly by saying “When we`re in a group, we tend to think as that group does: we may even have joined the group to find “like-minded” people” (652).

Works Cited

Asch, Solomon E. “Opinions and Social Pressure.” Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Ed. Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. 12th ed. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey; Pearson Education, 2013. 655-659. Print.
Lessing, Doris. “Group minds.” Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Ed. Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. 12th ed. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey; Pearson Education, 2013. 652-654. Print.
Milgram, Stanley. “The Perils of Obedience.” Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Ed. Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. 12th ed. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey; Pearson Education, 2013. 630-643. Print.

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