Obedience
...uirement of all communal living.” I believe that in a way Stanley’s beliefs on authority is defenitaly reasonable, considering the fact that without authority we wouldn’t have a well developed society. In “Group Minds” by Doris Lessing, a typical test involving a group of people whom were separated with a couple of recipants left in the dark examining what seemed to be different sized objects, were bombared by their fellow cohorts on insisting that the objects were indeed the same size. The results clearly showed that the majority of the individuals who were pressured to believe their fellow peers went along with the group, while only a few took time to really examine and make their own judgemental guess. It’s quite clear that people often fall under the mechanism of obedience to the group rather than a single party. Similarly Doris describes that when there is a group involved we the people tend to think as the group even though we might have our own view points toward something. The fact that the group is constricted with the majority of the people, it is very difficult for that one individual to single themselves out, therefore holding back on oneselfs true perception or ideas of something. However, this experiment was quite mild as far as the level of anxiety the subject was faced with when compared to a more extreme situation in which Stanley Milgrim’s experiment developed. Milgrim a well educated psychologist with a eager devotion in the subject matter of obedience sought to go one step further then Doris Lessing, in creating an experiment which really had a cause and effect and a very serious outcome that fell into the hands of the particapant. Unlike Doris’s experiment, Milgrim focused on using the ideology of having a single authoritive figure rather than a group, to give orders to the participant who would then be obligated to send electrical impulses toward a complete stranger knowing the full curcumstance that are involved. The point as noted my Milgrim in “The Perils of Obedience,” is to see the extent a person will go in which he is ordered to inflict increasing pain on its victim. Though the individual that is supposedly being shocked by the participant is actually a hoax, it didn’t seem to matter as the results showed that out of forty particapants in the first experiment, twenty five obeyed the orders of the experimenter to the end. Although throughout the shock procedures some subjects showed concern as the hoax showed signs of discomfort, however the pressure of the “teacher” overheld every moral judgement of the participant as they continued with the experiment till the end. I believe that because the particapants weren’t obligated to l...