Conformity and Obedience the Thrust Research Proposal

Meanwhile on the subject of obedience, an article in American Psychologist (written by the former research assistant to Milgram at Yale University) poses the following question: if Milgram's experiments / research were conducted today, in 2009, "would people still obey… " (Elms, 2009, p. 34). The answer given in most cases by Elms is that "…a current measure of obedience to destructive authority would find substantially less obedience than Milgram did" (Elms, p. 35). Elms backs up his assertion by pointing to the "important lessons" that "a large portion of our populace should have learned" by now (Elms, p. 35). Those lessons include the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King and the wisdom "other social activists" (i.e., the "group" that has influence on the "self") who have raised legitimate issues like racial prejudice, government deception and corruption, and domestic violence. These leaders that Elms alludes to should be, Elms goes on (p. 35), instrumental in aiding contemporary citizens to eschew "unthinking obedience" to "destructive edicts." What Elms is saying, albeit idealistic and perhaps unrealistic, is that society is 35 years removed from the time during which Milgram conducted his research, and hence there have been so many vital lessons learned (King, et al.) about justice and fairness, the average individual should be influenced not to be blindly obedient.

FIVE (e): Individual and societal influences that lead to deviance from dominant group norms. Thomas Blass explores the individual "mediating mechanisms" that Milgram identified as influences moving a person away from dominant group norms.Writing in the American Psychologist Blass (2009, p. 40) explains that when people accept the legitimacy of any authority -- when they believe "that the person in charge has the right to prescribe their behavior, and they, in turn, feel an obligation to submit to that authority" -- there are internal adjustments occurring. The initial change that makes "destructive obedience possible" Blass describes (p. 40) as the acceptance that the authority's (whomever it may be) definition of the reality of the situation. In other words, if a young football player on the Tigers believes that his coach is the ultimate judge of proper ethical sporting conduct, and the coach tells the player to gouge his fingernails into the eyes of an opponent player when that player is down, the Tigers' player likely will be obedient. Blass invokes Milgram's "agentic state" theory: once that football player accepts his orders, he then shifts responsibility to the coach (p. 41). Obedience to malevolent orders, Blass asserts, "is predicated on the individual's shedding of responsibility" from dominant group norms, and in turn "handing it over to the authority in charge" -- in this case, the football coach.

Works Cited

Blass, Thomas. (2009). From New Haven to Santa Clara: A Historical Perspective on the Milgram Obedience Experiments. American Psychologist, 64(1), 37-45.

Cavazza, Nicoletta, and Mucchi-faina, Angelica. (2008). Me, us, or them: who is more

Conformist? Perception of conformity and political orientation. The Journal of Social

Psychology, 148(3), 335-346.

Elms, Alan C. (2009)......