Friday 11 July 2014

Reflection 70 (obedience to authority)

Obedience to authority

There is a real shocking experiment that was conducted in the sixties regarding obedience to authority. A summary of the experiment is found here. It was Milgram, a psychologist at Yale university conducting the experiment.

Not only was the methodology shocking but much more shocking still were the results. A majority of normal 'good hearted' persons could be brought to do amazingly cruel things to an innocent person in a teacher-student situation, just because they were authoritatively ordered to do so.

It is at the same time eye-opening and scary how malleable our behavior may be in the presence of authority. ~This  may not only be the authority of professionals but also simply the perception of group and peer opinion. So much of the groups of students bullying others consist of students who may feel very uncomfortable doing these things but giving in to the authority of the group and hunger group-peer approval is often so much stronger than their own values and principles.

When we teach our children obedience and respect, we have to incorporate a sense of value and really incorporate and teach them that obedience and respect is second to the important values and principles of life such as integrity, honesty, kindness, caingness, empathy....


Note: the above mentioned experiment is scary in the way that it may explain how Hitler could have risen to such great heights of authority and high number of followers, with the possibility of history to recur. On the other hand, we may hope that in the future we are able find leaders using their authority to REALLY make the world a better place.

Let us hope and pray for the latter and try to lead whenever we have the opportunity in such a way 

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