Thursday, December 12, 2013
Obedience
We talked about the way Hitler came to power and how people just listened to him because he was an authority figure. We also talked about some experiments like the Blue v. Brown eyed experiment and the Stanford prison experiment. Last year i was a part of something similar to those experiments. I was with a group of 60 people and we became really close friends. one day the man in charge separated us into groups based off of our ethnicity and we had to sat with our group we couldn't talked to anybody else and we had to stay with our group. Everyone followed the rules and nobody would even look at the other groups of people. The man would make fun of some groups while praising other groups. In my group people hated this and would fight to try to hang out with their friends. Finally one of the guys in my group got up and told everyone that it was wrong that we couldn't hang out with the people we wanted to. Everyone got up and sat next to their friends. Why would most people be ok with being separated? Why would people actually listen to a man that we hardly new just because he said he was in charge? why where people so hesitant to speak up?
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Being separated for some people can be okay because that's good for them, meeting new people, even within the same group. The need to take direction, to have someone to look up to, even if it's a stranger is a necessity for some as well. Moreover, people didn't speak up because they probably thought they would be criticized for saying something. It plays back into the Diffusion of Responsibilty as well as the Obedience we witnessed in such things as the Milgrim Experiments.
ReplyDeleteI think this happened simply because people are afraid to stand out. Nobody else is doing anything. Since none of the other groups have come to talk to your group, you do not want to be the one to go and talk to them. 60 might be a perfect number for this effect. It's large enough of a crowd where most people would be afraid to stand out, but not so large that you are guaranteed to have a black sheep in there somewhere. The more people you have, the higher your chances are of having a weirdo in the group. The smaller the number, the more comfortable people would be with speaking out.
ReplyDeleteFlashback to camp! This activity brought out a lot of our true colors, I think. Some of us choosing not to speak at all, some making brief, awkward, eye contact with other groups, and one standing up for what is right. I think that, as bystanders, we were all afraid to talk back to this man, who had asserted himself as the authority. We diffused our responsibility to everyone else, and expected them to speak up and voice that what was going on was indeed wrong. For some of the groups it brought almost a sense of power. He was telling them that they were basically part of the “Arian Race”, in Holocaust terms. Although they knew that everything the man said negatively towards the others was untrue, he was putting them on a pedestal, so why would they give that sense of greatness up (however untrue it was)? I think that it takes a special kind of awareness to pull yourself out of the situation that you are in, and analyze what actually is going on. Obviously, because of the 1-59 ratio, that is not easily done for most of us.
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