Obedience

Obedience is the willingness to follow the will of others.

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Obedience is often associated with social dominance and submission.

Related Topics:
Social dominance - Submission

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Some animals can easily be trained to be obedient by employing operant conditioning that places the human being in the role of a dominant animal. Other animals do not respond well to such training. Obedience schools exist to condition dogs into obeying the orders of human owners.

Related Topics:
Operant conditioning - Obedience school - Dog

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Humans have been shown to be surprisingly obedient in the presence of perceived legitimate authority figures, as demonstrated by the Milgram experiment in the 1960s. Milgram carried out his experiments to discover how the Nazis had managed to get ordinary people to take part in the mass murder of the Holocaust. The experiment showed that compliance to authority was the norm, not the exception. A similar effect was found in the Stanford prison experiment.

Related Topics:
Authority - Milgram experiment - 1960s - Holocaust - Stanford prison experiment

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Extensive training is given in armies to make soldiers capable of obeying orders in situations where an untrained person would not be willing to follow orders. Soldiers are initially ordered to do seemingly trivial things, such as picking up the sergeant's hat off the floor, marching in just the right position, or aligning themselves directly. The orders gradually become more demanding, until a general's order to the soldiers to place themselves into the midst of gunfire gets a knee-jerk obedient response.

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Obedience can also include:

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• obedience to laws
• obedience to God
• obedience to a dominant
• obedience to self-imposed constraints, such as a vow of chastity

In Christian weddings, obedience was formerly included along with honor and love as part of a conventional bride's (but not the bridegroom's) wedding vow. This came under attack with women's suffrage and the feminist movement. Today its inclusion in the wedding vow has fallen out of favor.

Related Topics:
Wedding - Honor - Love - Wedding vow - Women's suffrage - Feminist

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Obedience: See also ►