obedience to authority

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a social psychological concept describing the tendency of individuals to comply with instructions from figures perceived as legitimate authorities, even when those instructions involve actions that conflict with the individual's personal values or ethical beliefs; Stanley Milgram's landmark obedience experiments conducted at Yale in the early 1960s demonstrated that ordinary people would administer what they believed to be severe and potentially lethal electric shocks to another person simply because an authority figure in a lab coat instructed them to continue; approximately 65 percent of participants in the basic paradigm delivered the maximum shock level, a finding that shocked the scientific community and public alike by suggesting that destructive obedience was far more common than previously assumed; Milgram's research was interpreted as providing a social psychological explanation for how ordinary people could participate in atrocities including the Holocaust, and generated lasting debate about the ethics of deception in psychological research, the limits of authority, and the conditions that support or undermine moral autonomy