22.9: What Could Explain Such Behavior?
- Page ID
- 95233
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Obedience Training
Children are taught to obey. This is unavoidable. Eight-month-old infants don’t have the language or concepts to understand our reasons for forbidding them to do certain things like pulling the dog’s tail. As children mature, we can give some explanations (“How would you like it if someone did that to you?”), but it isn’t possible to engage in a subtle and detailed argument with a four-year-old. Someone at this age can, of course, generate an endless series of “why questions,” but at some point, the exasperated reply will be, “Because I said so.”
If people, with their diverse beliefs and goals, are to live together in anything approaching harmony, society must have certain rules, and we are trained to obey them. In some cases, the need for rules is dramatic; in war time, for example, it is necessary for people to work together in a coordinated way, and this requires authorities who others will obey. But society also requires such things as laws and taxes to function smoothly. Of course, many parents, and many societies, greatly overdo things, but the basic point here is that authority has its place, and we have been trained to recognize that. The key is for us to think about whether we should obey an authority in a given situation.