Why do we obey authority psychology

Charismatic leaders use their referent power to motivate, uplift, and inspire others. Transactional leaders are the more regular leaders who work with their subordinates to help them understand what is required of them and to get the job done.

Transformational leaders , on the other hand, are more like charismatic leaders—they have a vision of where the group is going and attempt to stimulate and inspire their workers to move beyond their present status and to create a new and better future. Even though there appears to be at least some personality traits that relate to leadership ability, the most important approaches to understanding leadership take into consideration both the personality characteristics of the leader and the situation in which the leader is operating.

In some cases, the situation itself is important. However, against the backdrop of the threat posed by Nazi Germany, his defiant and stubborn nature provided just the inspiration many sought.

In other cases, however, both the situation and the person are critical. The contingency model of leadership effectiveness is a model of leadership effectiveness that focuses on both person variables and situational variables.

Fielder conceptualized the leadership style of the individual as a relatively stable personality variable and measured it by having people consider all the people they had ever worked with and describe the person that they least liked to work with their least preferred coworker. Those who indicated that they only somewhat disliked their least preferred coworker were classified as relationship-oriented types of people, who were motivated to have close personal relationships with others.

However, those who indicated that they did not like this coworker very much were classified as task-oriented types, who were motivated primarily by getting the job done.

Specifically, as shown in Figure 6. Furthermore, Fielder believed that these factors were ordered in terms of their importance, with leader-member relationships being more important than task structure, which was in turn more important than position power.

The most favorable relationship involves good relationships, a structured task, and strong power for the leader, whereas the least favorable relationship involves poor relationships, an unstructured task, and weak leader power.

The contingency model is interactionist because it proposes that individuals with different leadership styles will differ in effectiveness in different group situations.

Task-oriented leaders are expected to be most effective in situations in which the group situation is very favorable because this gives the leader the ability to move the group forward, or in situations in which the group situation is very unfavorable and in which the extreme problems of the situation require the leader to engage in decisive action.

However, in the situations of moderate favorableness, which occur when there is a lack of support for the leader or when the problem to be solved is very difficult or unclear, the more relationship-oriented leader is expected to be more effective. Still another approach to understanding leadership is based on the extent to which a group member embodies the norms of the group. Anderson, C.

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During the s, a psychologist Stanley Milgram became intrigued with the conformity experiments performed by Solomon Asch. Asch's work had demonstrated that people could easily be swayed to conform to group pressure, but Milgram wanted to see just how far people would be willing to go. Throughout the trial, Eichmann suggested that he was simply following orders and that he felt no guilt for his role in the mass murders because he had only been doing what his superiors requested and that he had played no role in the decision to exterminate the captives.

Milgram had set out to explore the question "are Germans different? Milgram wanted to know—would people really harm another person if they were ordered to by an authority figure? Just how powerful is the pressure to obey? Unbeknownst to the participant, the person supposedly receiving the shocks was actually in on the experiment and was merely acting out responses to imaginary shocks.

During the early s, social psychologist Philip Zimbardo staged an exploration into the study of prisoners and prison life. He set up a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford University psychology department and assigned his participants to play the roles of either prisoners or guards, with Zimbardo himself acting as the prison warden.

The study had to be discontinued after a mere 6 days even though it was originally slated to last 2 weeks. Why did the researchers end the experiment so early? Because the participants had become so involved in their roles, with the guards utilizing authoritarian techniques to gain the obedience of the prisoners. In some cases, the guards even subjected the prisoners to psychological abuse, harassment, and physical torture.

The results of the Stanford Prison Experiment are often used to demonstrate how easily people are influenced by characteristics of the roles and situations they are cast in, but Zimbardo also suggested that environmental factors play a role in how prone people are to obey authority.

Milgram's experiments set the stage for future investigations into obedience, and the subject quickly became a hot topic within social psychology. But what exactly do psychologists mean when they talk about obedience? The same basic result in consistently obtained: many people readily accept the influence of an authority, even when that means causing potential harm to another person. One interesting application of this concept has been to the nurse-physician relationship.

Several studies have shown that nurses will often carry out the orders of a physician even when there is a good reason to believe that potential harm could come to the patient. Social Psychology Quiz Review Questions. Summary Obedience and Authority. Factors That Increase Obedience Milgram found that subjects were more likely to obey in some circumstances than others. Obedience was highest when: Commands were given by an authority figure rather than another volunteer The experiments were done at a prestigious institution The authority figure was present in the room with the subject The learner was in another room The subject did not see other subjects disobeying commands In everyday situations, people obey orders because they want to get rewards, because they want to avoid the negative consequences of disobeying, and because they believe an authority is legitimate.

Researchers think several factors cause people to carry obedience to extremes: People justify their behavior by assigning responsibility to the authority rather than themselves.

People obey easy commands first and then feel compelled to obey more and more difficult commands. This process is called entrapment, and it illustrates the foot-in-the-door phenomenon.

In his jail diary Eichmann wrote 'The orders were, for me, the highest thing in my life and I had to obey them without question' extract quoted in The Guardian, 12 August, , p. Eichmann was declared sane by six psychiatrists, he had a normal family life and observers at his trial described him as very average.

Given that there appears to be nothing particularly unusual about Eichmann, we must face the uncomfortable possibility that his behavior was the product of the social situation in which he found himself, and that under the right circumstances we may all be capable of monstrous acts.

Following the Second World War - and in particular the Holocaust - psychologists set out to investigate the phenomenon of human obedience. Early attempts to explain the Holocaust had focused on the idea that there was something distinctive about German culture that had allowed the Holocaust to take place. Stanley Milgram set out to test the research question 'are Germans different?

In one of the most famous series of experiments in psychology Milgram demonstrated that most participants would give a helpless victim fatal electric shocks when ordered to.