When I read the article The Perils of Obedience and watched videos about social conformity, it makes me think about people's behavior and their discipline conected to society. I realize that people sometimes are almost always following the crowd and I belive it is a sign of low self-esteem and self-confidence. We should be spontaneous and unique about ourselves!
The Perils of Obedience tells us about interesting and terrible examples of why and how people accomplish orders from inmoral people in authority. In the article there was an experiment where people electrocuted someone else as a command of the experiment's manager. It sounds awful to torture anyone in this kind of experimen, doesn't it? But people did it.
Concerning the videos; one of them was the Conformity Experiment of which a person was selected to join a group and the members of the group were trained to confuse the subject and to encourage him or her to agree with their false answers. If you see this video, you would think they were blind to agree with the wrong answers, however this is the power of conformity. The other video is called Face the Rear and it is about how a person's stance is important in a elevator. It's ironic but the real thing is that some people care about how others look and act in order to be secure to themselves.They think it is fashionable or something normal.
From these videos, they seem to be very funny and even disgusting. The truth is that we should know what's best for ourselves, and fight for that. People don't have to be in a group if they don't want too and do everything they do to be accepted in the community. On the one hand, they need to be independent from other people's ideas or thoughts and not to be under social influence. There are people who motivate you to have inappropriate manners. On the other hand, it is important to be a moral example and be respectful, and prudent in your own acts.
In summary, those in authority and those who conform to authority role play in a kind of double edged sword everyday in different cultures around the world.
