Obedience and Social Control
Why do people obey others, even when doing so leads people to do things that they would not imagine that they could do, like inflict serious harm on another person? This is the question that Stanley Milgrim was trying to answer in his “Obedience” experiment. Watch this film depicting Milgrim’s study. Having seen footage of the experiment write a short discussion paper exploring how obedience was created in this experiment by drawing on concepts from class discussion.
How do these concepts help us understand (1) why people followed the orders of the experimenter and, (2) what the Milgrim experiment can teach us about relations of authority more generally in modern society.
