Obedience

4 Pages 1116 Words

Rewards and Punishments Through Obedience and Conformity

Throughout history, mankind has been acutely aware of the innate response that comes in the form of obedience. From the impetuous child who acquiesces to the power of an austere mother, to the lackadaisical indifference that Hitler’s SS soldiers exhibited while participating in the massacre of an entire town, obedience strikes in forms that can be as trivial as cleaning one’s room after a stern scolding—to as horrific as following the command to decapitate a Jewish infant. In the essays, “Opinions and Social Pressure”, by Solomon Asch, and “The Perils of Obedience”, by Stanley Milgram, two psychologists from separate institutions and times carry out a series of experiments that test obedience and conformity. The results of these experiments proved that while these levels of obedience and conformity vary from one individual to the next, obedience and conformity are directly correlated with Carl Roger’s Humanistic Perspective of rewards and punishment.
In a lifetime, an individual will often come across a group that opposes his/her views strongly. Sometimes, this individual will conform to the group’s beliefs—despite whether or not he/she believes in them. Such conformity is an unconscious display of obedience to society, in order to gain approval as a form of reward. In “Opinions and Social Pressure”, Solomon Asch, a social psychologist at Rutgers University, explains the series of experiments that he conducted in order to test an individual’s ability—or in some cases—inability to conform to contrasting beliefs of a group. In his experiment, a group of seven to nine young men attend what they think is an experiment in visual judgment. They are shown two cards—card A has one long line on it, and card B has the same line paired with two extremely contrasting lines. This group is then told to tell the experimenter which line on card B is the same a...