Studying Obedience to Authority: Different Genders Facing Prestige and Dominance Authorities

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-062-6_99How to use a DOI?

Keywords

obedience; gender differences; prestige; dominance

Abstract

It is commonly known that the Milgram’s obedience experiment has been challenged on ethical grounds because of the potential psychological distress they might cause participants. Therefore, we are wondering how we can study obedience in an ethical fashion that minimizes distress and we make this investigation. Besides replacing the method to reduce psychological distress, we are also curious about whether people will show different levels of obedience when facing different kinds of authorities. Whether there will be significant results in gender differences of obedience is also one of our emphasis. To conclude, this paper investigates the differences in obedience between the male and females in the presence of different authorities, prestige and dominance. Because of limited resources, we did not really execute our designed experiment and we made assumptions according to some existing articles, which means we reasonably inferred our results. Our analysis indicates that there are literally gender differences in the obedience to different authorities. Horizontally, we summarize that women will obey dominance more than prestige and men will obey prestige more than dominance. Longitudinally, we conclude that women obey dominance more than men and men obey prestige more than women. We hope that our study can add more information on gender differences in obedience and increase people’s awareness of the impact of the types of authority in experiments.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Sifan Yun
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/07/11
TI  - Studying Obedience to Authority: Different Genders Facing Prestige and Dominance Authorities
BT  - Proceedings of the 2023 2nd International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities and Arts (SSHA 2023)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 766
EP  - 771
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-062-6_99
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-062-6_99
ID  - Yun2023
ER  -