Casey Williams
The Power of Situational Obedience: Connections Essay
The beginning of the Second world war brought many different feelings, some of these feelings consisted of fear, depression, hate, and obedience. I understand that obedience is not the first thought that comes to mind when somebody thinks about World War II. When obedience and World war II are mentioned the thoughts may immediately run to German Nazi guards or Japanese banzai runners, but these are only two examples of obedience. Some of the other examples of obedience are infantry soldiers following their Sargent, Paul Tibbets dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima, and the Soviet and Allied forces cooperating with each other while they were attacking the Nazi's. Those three examples show that not all obedience is damaging to human rights. Obedience needs to be maintained in order to preserve progress in any community through uniformed authority figures, group pressure, situational pressure, and if necessary, fear.
First, uniformed authority can be used to maintain obedience in modern society. These people are already in position to help out the community they are more commonly known as police officers. The uniforms they wear ensure that they are easily noticeable in all situations. The uniform also gives them the power to protect the community they work for and gives the officer the ability to make most people obey without question. The uniform and some personalities may cause the power of the uniform to get out of control. “The Stanford Prison Experiment”, conducted by Phillip G. Zimbardo, showed how easily power can be abused. When the experiment concluded, one of the prison guards said he was delighted in the new found power and control they exercised and sorry to see it relinquished at the end of the study (Zimbardo 7). Even the man running the experiment, Phillip Zimbardo, started to feel the {text:soft-page-break} power and how good it felt. One of the biggest problems with power...