Importance Of Obedience To Authority

Obedience to authority is the fundamental aspect of achieving social harmony and eliminating criminality and anarchy. Universally, the distinctive social organization has been based on that sole human behavior regardless of the divergence of factors causing it. Moreover, obedience in all its varying forms whether it is directed to authority, a higher being in religious contexts, or directed towards parental figures, has always been identified as a virtue whereas disobedience is commonly viewed as a vice. Although that statement is highly debatable and dependent on an individual’s moral values and social dynamics, it is a fairly generalizable underlying belief amongst most cultures. In 1963, a social psychologist named Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment that uncovered vital facts about obedience to authority and contributed to the understanding of human behavior in the presence of a person with a stronger hierarchal power. According to Milgram, obedience is a form of compliance in which an individual accedes to the demands of an authority figure (Blass, 1999). Moreover, his study’s main aim was to determine whether normal people could commit atrocities to obey an authority figure and going against their own personal conscience. In this experiment, a researcher gathered participants and instructed them to administer electric shocks to a fake test subject if he responded incorrectly. Furthermore, the subjects administering shocks were made to believe each shock was higher in voltage than the one prior. The study’s findings demonstrated that 65% of the participants were obedient to the figure of authority and conformed to their pressure despite the conflicting moral dilemmas they had endured (Russel, 2011). Milgram’s contributions have inspired a respectable number of social psychologists to replicate the study to resolve the most obvious limitation, which was the homogeneity of the sample. As a result, those researchers helped explore the effects of other important variables such as culture and social groups in shaping a person’s behavior. Undoubtedly, culture is the dominant force in addition to personal beliefs in influencing an individual’s decision in obeying, or disobeying those deemed higher in power. In consequence, eastern societies, being tight cultures, exhibit higher rates of obedience in comparison to western societies due to cultural discrepancies and having explicit social norms, and low tolerance of deviant behavior. The remainder of this paper will compare and contrast various patterns of obedience across different cultures and determine the validity of that statement.

One of the most prominent factors influencing obedience is a country’s power distance. To clarify, power distance has been identified as the extent to which individuals at the lower level of the social and political hierarchy are receptive to the dissimilar distribution of power (Blass, 2012). Firstly, if Jordan, a middle eastern country, was taken into account to investigate the legitimacy of exhibiting higher rates of obedience, Hofstede’s power distance ranks it at a high level of 70. (Shanab, 1978). Correspondingly, it is considered a hierarchal country with little to no place of justification for the gap between social classes. The tremendous gap between those of authority and the rest of society sets both overt and hidden social rules of blind obedience to avoid punishment. Additionally, another motive of the general Jordanian public to obey figures of authority would be the collectivistic nature of society. The need for social harmony and the pronounced encouragement of working towards the bigger general interest of the group drives people to obey figures of authority. On a specific note, obedience is also encouraged in the Jordanian household. Women in Jordan are highly expected to be obedient to their spouses since they are the breadwinners, thus making them at a higher power by default. Moreover, Jordanian legislation and culture collectively suggest that men have the ability to determine whether they approve of allowing women or preventing them from contributing to the workforce and women generally oblige to avoid conflict. In 1987, a few experimental studies have been replicated in Amman using Milgram’s paradigm to resolve previous limitations and examine obedience on a contrasting cultural group. The results of the study have proven that regardless of sex, the percentage of over-obedience was 62.5%, indicating that obedience was established in compliance with the orders provided by an authority figure (Shanab, 1978). Furthermore, although this study did not introduce strikingly different results from the initial obedience experiment conducted by Milgram, it proved that obedience is intrinsically occurring in Jordanian culture.