Back in school, and now a blog...
Well, as the title suggests, I'm now attending school at UC Irvine. My first week has just ended, and it was quite full of interesting classes and thought provoking questions and ideas. I just finished my first real writing assignment for Writing 39B: Critical Reading and Rhetoric, which was to write a journal response to the following prompt:
Prompt: Describe the role obedience plays in your life. Think about the various methods authority figures use to get you to do what they want you to do. What motivates these authority figures? What motivates you to obey? Why is that guy dripping water on my forehead one drop at a time?
In your life, what constitutes authority? That is, what makes it seem like someone has authority over you? Is it that necktie choking Mr. Herrmann? Is it Mom and her discretion over your checking account? Think of Milgram’s experiment. Did the experimenter have any power to punish his subjects? Why did they obey him?
I’m asking the same basic question six different ways here. How is your experience with authority similar to and different from Milgram’s subjects’ experiences with the experimenter? Don’t neglect the differences. Be very specific. Details! Without ‘em, we’re all just Human XX or XY.
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I've decided my response was interesting enough to share with you here. And yes, I know I don't think I ever adressed this "Did the experimenter have any power to punish his subjects?"point addequately, but I'll see what you think...
Also, I ran out of time before I could go on to discuss motives after my last thoughts, but the publish date for the journal/blog was supposed to be midnight, so oh well...
Obedience and Milgram
It seems to me that obedience plays a key but largely unconscious role in my life. I think that by now I am fairly well conditioned to respond to authority though less incentive may be given. For example, it seems to me that when we were younger incentives for obedience were a fairly even mix of rewards and punishments. For being good, or performing well I might get candy, or a reward might be used to prevent a normal part of life from being associated with punishment. Here I am referring to the dreaded shots, those doctor visits that loomed large in the imagination of all young children. My mom would always reward my quiet cooperation and bravery (which translates roughly to obedience) with a stop at the nearby Target and a small box of Legos. Though I would probably have been cooperative and obedient regardless, such a system insured that any rebellious thoughts (and they did exist, I sometimes daydreamed of fleeing the pediatricians office in the style of Harrison Ford in the Fugitive) would never be acted upon.
However, though rewards do exist in adult and near adult life, obedience seems to be instilled through a mix of hefty punishments and reliance on early childhood conditioning. In this world the safety nets and training wheels have been removed, and that simple fact alone often insures careful obedience. I rush to get to work at Subway on time on the days I am scheduled to work, perhaps because I fear being fired, but the actual motive is a bit more complex. I know that with my employer, there is very little chance to none of me actually being fired. So why am I hurrying? Well, it seems that there are several reasons. First of all, it’s never fun to lose the respect of those you work with or live with. I obey my time schedule in order to be accepted by my co-workers and employers as a good employee. Also, I am careful to obey all my employers’ rules because I wish to be seen as a good worker so that in the future I can get a better job with no faults on my record.
So perhaps much of my inspiration for obedience is indeed mostly from my own mind, like the subjects in Milgram’s experiment. Not all of my coworkers hold direct influence over me – I often comply with the requests of non-mangers, but I still hold their demands to the same standard because I wish for respect. This is one reason I see both physical authority and respect to be equal motivation for obedience. I see it as working both ways- if I wish to be respected by someone in authority, I will obey them, and if I respect someone regardless of their actual authority I will obey them and place them in a mental position of authority.
Finally, wisely wielded authority inspires respect, and with both physical authority and respect combined in one figure the strongest bond of obedience can be formed. This may be seen in figures such as parents and teachers. I both respect my mom and dad for where they have been and what they have done but I am also aware of the authority they hold over me and control based off of monetary funding, ect. Though I may sometimes be reluctant to obey, the push to obey is very strong, and I rarely go against it.
It seems that my experiences correspond fairly well with Milgram’s results, but only to a limited extent. While it is true that those in authority, or those who seem to have authority in my mind (I described the criteria above) have a great deal of control over me, and I will often obey, the control is not complete. I believe that at a certain point, which I think and hope to be sooner than most of the people involved in Milgram’s experiment my moral sense will override and I will refuse to obey. Unfortunately, I cannot think of a good example where this has happened, the authorities that I interact with daily don’t tend to put me in compromising situations.
I can, however, think of one situation where I wrongly obeyed apparent authority despite reservations. It was a long time ago, in a state park far, far away. I was very young, very naïve, and had never been the target of a practical joke before, let alone a bad one. My family was camping out together with one of my dad’s friends, whom I knew only as Fireman Frank.
I remember it clearly, my dad spent a great deal of time trying to get the built in barbecue’s fire going, piling on briquettes and nursing a tiny fire for about 15 minutes before it really got going nicely. He then left to prepare the chicken for cooking, and somewhere around this time Frank pulled me aside. I had this little bucket, you see, and he told me to go over to the tap and fill it up with water and come back. He somberly instructed me to sit and watch the fire carefully to make sure it couldn’t get out of control, and if it got too large to put it out. Well, in those days, I held firefighters in the highest regard, as the noblest and bravest of all professions, for out of control fires are scary. Therefore, I awarded Frank the fireman’s words with all the authority and respect of those of a good fireman.
Of course, it wasn’t long before the flames got big and scary, shooting up from the confines of the barbeque. I decided that it was dangerous and out of control and emptied my little bucket into it, and not long after my dad discovered what had happened. I soon felt as quenched as the flames I had extinguished, and worse I had no idea that sometimes an authority can tell you the wrong thing, so I felt spitefully and wrongfully accused for simply doing my duty. I had weighed my need to eat with disobedience and the possibility of vague fire-related danger and put my discomfort and needs aside for the sake of obedience. Though this simple example is far removed from the scale of manipulation in Milgram’s experiment, or the far more real atrocities committed throughout history in the name of duty and obedience, my experience still followed the same principle.
I also agree with his idea that obedience has less strong of a pull with distance and the immediate removal of authority. The most apparent example of this would be driving, where people will often exceed the speed limit unless a police officer is present in the nearby vicinity, in which case they tend to slow down to clearly legal speeds. I tend to drive close to the speed limit but even I’ll still cap off my speed at usually 2-5 miles per hour above the posted limit. However, this also partly disagrees with Milgram’s results because though authority is plainly known, and the laws and punishments are very real, people often break road laws, repeatedly and frequently, defying authority daily.
posted by swim against gravity at 12:40 AM
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