Study: Encouraging Obedience Considered Harmful

MBlume

A while back I did a couple of posts on the care and feeding of young rationalists. Though it is not new, I recently found a truly excellent post on this topic, in Dale Mcgowan's blog, The Meming of Life. The post details a survey carried out on ordinary citizens of Hitler's Germany, searching for correlations between style of upbringing, and adult moral decisions.

Everyday Germans of the Nazi period are the focus of a fascinating study discussed in the PBB seminars and in the Ethics chapter of Raising Freethinkers. For their book The Altruistic Personality, researchers Samuel and Pearl Oliner conducted over 700 interviews with survivors of Nazi-occupied Europe. Included were both “rescuers” (those who actively rescued victims of persecution) and “non-rescuers” (those who were either passive in the face of the persecution or actively involved in it). The study revealed interesting differences in the upbringing of the two groups — specifically the language and practices that parents used to teach their values.

Non-rescuers were 21 times more likely than rescuers to have been raised in families that emphasized obedience—being given rules that were to be followed without question—while rescuers were over three times more likely than non-rescuers to identify “reasoning” as an element of their moral education. “Explained,” the authors said, is the single most common word used by rescuers in describing their parents’ ways of talking about rules and ethical ideas.

Not Just Because I Said So

For anyone interested in rational and ethical upbringing, I really cannot recommend Meming of Life strongly enough.

Everyday Germans of the Nazi period are the focus of a fascinating study discussed in the PBB seminars and in the Ethics chapter of Raising Freethinkers. For their book The Altruistic Personality, researchers Samuel and Pearl Oliner conducted over 700 interviews with survivors of Nazi-occupied Europe. Included were both “rescuers” (those who actively rescued victims of persecution) and “non-rescuers” (those who were either passive in the face of the persecution or actively involved in it). The study revealed interesting differences in the upbringing of the two groups — specifically the language and practices that parents used to teach their values.

Non-rescuers were 21 times more likely than rescuers to have been raised in families that emphasized obedience—being given rules that were to be followed without question—while rescuers were over three times more likely than non-rescuers to identify “reasoning” as an element of their moral education. “Explained,” the authors said, is the single most common word used by rescuers in describing their parents’ ways of talking about rules and ethical ideas.

Not Just Because I Said So

For anyone interested in rational and ethical upbringing, I really cannot recommend Meming of Life strongly enough.

Thanks, interesting pointer. Provides some nice counter weight to all those lamenting the lack of obedience in today's kids (still I'd say they have a point as well)

The study cited (about the German jugend) is interesting, but also a bit unsatisfying: that is, many, many years after the fact, self-reporting about something where all kinds of feelings of guilt, pride etc., are involved. Also, care should be taken to apply the lessons of a quite different, authoritarian society to today's much more open, cosmopolitan world.

It'd be great if they did some thorough survey of the people that participate in some of today's 'Stanford prison experiment' re-enactments.

Provides some nice counter weight to all those lamenting the lack of obedience in today's kids (still I'd say they have a point as well)

I think such lamentations rarely take the form of "my children always want to know why they should do as I say! I wish they'd just blindly obey". More like "my children blindly dismiss everything I say! I wish they'd just blindly obey" :P.

On the other side, I'd be extremely surprised if one could find evidence of a generation in which parents didn't complain about their children's misbehaviour.

7JoshuaZ16y

The prison experiment is generally not reenacted. It was hideously poorly designed to start with and the results weren't even clearly interpretable in a useful fashion. Milgram type fake electric shock experiments can still be done (although some people have argued that they are unethical). I don't know if this sort of thing has been tested for in those experiments, but I'd predict that you would actually not get a substantial result of this sort. The reasoning behind my prediction is that child rearing has become less obedience driven in the US in the last few years but the breakdown of proportions willing to shock people to (and to what extent) has remained roughly constant since Milgram's initial experiments. If parenting forms matter we'd expect to see a decline in the fraction of people willing to severely shock in Milgram set-ups. Edit: Thinking about this slightly more. We'd need to be careful about the exact experimental setup since going through with a Milgram electric shock experiment might make people answer questions about morality and upbringing differently than if they had not. But there's also the problem that asking people such questions before hand might alter behavior as well. So there really should be three groups tested: A standard Milgram set-up, a set where they are asked the relevant questions before hand, and a set where they are asked afterwords. If we see a lot of difference in how the two groups asked about their moral upbringings respond then that would suggest that the Oliner study isn't reliable.

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Study: Encouraging Obedience Considered Harmful

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