Obedience
Obedience, or submissive compliance, is the act of obeying orders from others. This differs from compliance, which is behavior influenced by peers. This is in turn different from conformity, which is behavior intended to match that of the majority.
Some animals can easily be trained to be obedient by employing operant conditioning, which places the human being in the role of a dominant animal. Obedience schools exist to condition dogs into obeying the orders of human owners.
Obedience training seems to be particularly effective on social animals including human beings.
Humans have been shown to be surprisingly obedient in the presence of perceived legitimate authority figures, as demonstrated by the Milgram experiment (see below) in the 1960s. Stanley Milgram carried out his experiments to discover how the Nazis had managed to get ordinary people to take part in the mass murder of the Holocaust. The experiment showed that compliance with authority was the norm, not the exception. A similar effect was found in the Stanford prison experiment.
The Milgram experiment
The Milgram experiment, first carried out in 1961, was one of the first experiments used to look into the power of authority figures as well as the lengths which participants would go as a result of their influence. Milgram's results showed that, contrary to expectations, a majority of civilian volunteers would obey orders to (apparently) apply electric shocks to another person until they were (apparently) unconscious or dead. Prior to the experiment, most of Milgram's colleagues had predicted that only sadists would be willing to follow the experiment to its conclusion.
In studies which predated the Milgram experiment, very little emphasis was put upon the participants' responses to authority and was more focused upon general fields of human behavior. Despite the fact that there was relatively little work which had been done directly in terms of obedience, there had already been several previous pieces of work done by Milgram himself, which had already shown trends of obedience increase due to the prestige of the authority figure -- in their case, an undergraduate research assistant posing as a Yale professor whom had a much greater influence someone of lesser status, regardless of prestige of the institution in which the study was based.
The Milgram experiment was one of the first experiments used to study the power of authority figures and the extent to which we obey these figures within social situations. Despite the fact that the study showed revealing information, the study was thought to be in breach of newly formed ethics, in which the rule of abdication was removed.
The Stanford prison experiment
Unlike the Milgram experiment, which studied the obedience of individuals, the 1971 Stanford prison experiment studied the behavior of people in groups, and in particular the willingness of people to obey orders and adopt abusive roles in a situation where they were placed in the position of being submissive or dominant by a higher authority. In the experiment, a group of volunteers was divided into two groups and placed in a "prison", with one group in the position of playing prison guards, and other group in the position of "prisoners".
In this case, the experimenters acted as authority figures at the start of the experiment, but then delegated responsibility to the "guards", who enthusiastically followed the experimenters' instructions, and in turn assumed the roles of abusive authority figures, eventually going far beyond the experimenters' original instruction in their efforts to dominate and brutalize the "prisoners". At the same time, the prisoners adopted a submissive role with regard to their tormentors, in spite of the knowledge that they were in an experiment, and that their "captors" were other volunteers, with no other authority other than that being role-played in the experiment. The Stanford experiment demonstrated not only obedience (of the "guards" to the experimenters, and the "prisoners" to both the guards and experimenters), but also high levels of compliance and conformity.
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