To what extent can findings from obedience research be applied beyond the research setting?
Obedience can be defined as complying with the wishes of an authortive figure, thus limiting their levels of responsibility. This can be shown on many levels, from something as everyday as a child obeying it's parents, to more shocking levels of obedience, such as the horrific destruction of millions of Jews in the Second World War.
It had been said after the Second World War that Germans have a basic character defect, which allowed them to obey the demands of Hitler when he was at his most powerful. This was called the Fascism Scale (F Scale), and said that obedience was abnormal. It was to do with a person's disposition, to whether they would be obedient or not. A psychologist called Milgram (1974) set out to prove this theory wrong, using one of the most controversial experiments in the last fifty years, where a participant was required to believe that he had 'killed' another living person.
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