Hi Everyone,
I enjoyed reading your replies to quiz 7. Most of you said that you were somewhere in between a conformist and a non-conformist. Your background, culture, and personality all play a big role here. You also listed the following as your authority figures: parents, other family members, spouses (mostly husbands), God, employers, professors, police, the law.
You made some powerful comparisons between the Milgram obedience study and the Donna Summers/ Luise Ogborn incident. Just to clarify, in the Milgram experiment, the “student” receiving electric shocks is pretending/ playing a role of a student receiving electric shocks. So we are focusing on those administering the shocks, and how far they will go to obey the authority figure. In the restaurant incident, the prank caller also demonstrates that blind obedience is or can be a part of human nature. Many of you were shocked that the manager and the female employee obeyed the caller. I was shocked too. But the point of Milgram’s experiment was to place people in one such impossible position, to see what they would really do. It’s one thing to say, hypothetically, that one wouldn’t do this or that. It’s another thing to have to decide, under pressure, with an authority figure hovering over. That said, having a wide range of critical thinking tools at your disposal may save us!
Thanks to those of you who tackled the Wolff piece. The main argument here was that authority and autonomy will always be in conflict with one another, and that our challenge is to be as autonomous as we can and choose to be while also managing to live in a society based on rules and laws. How can this be done?
Prof. Barnes
