Why Do People Obey?
Ask yourself; why do people obey authority? As times goes by, there have been a lot of dictators and rulers who have had the authority to control huge groups of individuals, even entire countries. The ultimate demonstration of this was Adolf Hitler because he was able to bring large groups of individuals under his control. Another dictator that has showed great authority and power was Benito Mussolini. He had authority over the entire nation and people were more than willing to obey him and his rules, even if that meant death.
Comprehending precisely why people comply with authority cannot be obtained with a right understanding of conformity. This word has been depicted as the chameleon influence, or the inclination to replicate other people around them. This can be formed by a need to adapt into what society described as a social norm. People obey some authority since they want to belong to something. This can easily be done, especially with young children and teenagers. It can be influenced by social pressure and it has been proven over and over again that the effects of social pressure could be extremely powerful to make people conform to the social norm even though this is obviously wrong.
Teenagers in particular want to conform to their friends and the society around them. They want to be accepted so that they can feel some kind of power and authority. On the whole, there are three main factors to consider which have a straight manipulation on whether a person will submit or not to the demands of a certain group of people. With these main factors you can easily understand why people obey authority. The factors are the mass of the majority, the amount of the inconsistency between the right answer and the majority position, and the presence of an associate who has opposed the majority. It has been proven that if somebody normally sides with a common majority of at least three individuals, they would actually refuse when they were facing a single or two individuals only. Since there were three people, they would conform to them although at the back of their mind, they did not like the idea.
It is not actually true that evil prowls into the minds of wicked people, and that evil people are very different from people that the society regard as ‘good’ people. A person should ask himself if he has been pressured by his peers into doing something that he would not usually do. Of course, it is not guaranteed that the answer is always yes. There are several different reasons why people obey authority and those people in control, but that sad reality about this is that they just do it because everyone else does it.
