Obedience2

Obedience Training in Children

To understand how pervasive our desire to obey authority is in our culture, it is necessary to

examine how we teach children what authority is. Many educators and child practictioners, especially

in past generations, have told parents that the best way to raise their children is to let them know who

is in charge at home. Disobedience has been linked with problems with friends, lowered chances of

success in shcool and difficulties dealing with emotions (Adams, Ryan, Ketsetzis & Keating, 2000).

Each of the problems outlined in their research has certain citizen components with the assumption

being that if a child learns to obey he or she will be a more productive and happy member of society.

One study concluded that noncompliance most often led to deception in young children and so was

bad for the child and parent on several levels (Polak & Harris, 1999). One researcher (Ritchie, 1999)

goes on to differentiate between single acts of disobedience and the power bouts that can stem from

uncontrolled noncompliance. She says:

Family cohesion, as a characteristic of the overall pattern of relationshop among all family members, represents the degree of commitment by all family members to each other, a readiness to participate jointly in family activies, and a tendency for all family members to sustain an interest in family objectives and goals and to maintain an emotional solidatiry across the whole family. Prior evidence has linked this family climate variable with rule compliance (Kurdek & Sinclair, 1988).

To this day, most people wonder how Hitler was able to carry out his plans of mass

extermination. How could ordinary people carry out his orders to kill millions of innocent people?

Some make the claim that it was out of fear of the consequences of disobedience. However, Stanley

Milgram's scientific studies of obedience in situations in which people had nothing to lose by

disobeying makes that a less compelling argument. As Milgram said about his own research:

With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under [to] the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. (Milgram, 1965).

One of the reasons that Milgram's work has been so pervasive and compelling through the years is

that he did such extensive work. Over the course of his work, he conducted at least twenty-one

variations of his original paradigm, testing thousands of participants. His work is also distinctive

because his results were so counter-intuitive. His results were breathtaking: out of a sample of

average adult American men, 65% were willing to shock another human being to the maximum volts

of 450 volts when ordered to do so by an experimenter. This was true even though the experimenter

had no way ot enforcing his orders, nor would the participant lose anything by stopping at any point

in the experiment. Before conducting his experiments, Milgram asked both Yale seniors and a group

of psychiatrists to predict the levels of obedience. Neither group was even close. The seniors

predicted 1.2% and the psychiatrists predicted .125%. As with studies on conformity, helping,

deception and others, Milgram found results that few people expected and even less liked to hear.

Milgram's work has also been kept alive with the intensity of the debates which have surrounded

it. Much like Zimbardo's prison simulation, Milgram's work ahs made for much heated debate over

the ethics of research, the social psychology of the psychology experiment, and the role-playing

versus deception debate (Blass, 1991). Milgram's work is also noteworthy for its relevance to fields

outside of psychology. This research has had an impact on studies in communication research,

Holocaust studies, political science, philosophy, and education. Milgram's research is far-reaching in

its implications for the fundamental basis of human nature and the apparent influence of situation

determinants to override personal dispositions.