Dissonant Obedience

IN THE the right situations, disobedience to the order of an otherwise evil authority demands more courage than mindlessly following the order in the name of authority and obedience. Psychologically speaking, it becomes a healthy way to proceed as it provides no internal dissonance to the doer.

“Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues,” according to George Bernard Shaw, “is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.”

In 1963, a study demonstrated that “an average 65 percent of people had been willing to administer apparently painful and dangerous electric shocks to an innocent victim when ordered to do so by a seemingly legitimate authority.” Researcher S. Milgram published the report in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology.

In this study of 19 separate experiments involving thousands of ordinary Americans, researchers found that... [Read more.]

This article appears in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 30 March 2011.

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