Obedience Training of Human Beings
Some animals can easily be trained to be obedient by employing operant conditioning, for example obedience schools exist to condition dogs into obeying the orders of human owners. Obedience training seems to be particularly effective on social animals, a category that includes human beings; other animals do not respond well to such training.
Learning to obey adult rules is a major part of the socialization process in childhood, and many techniques are used by adults to modify the behavior of children. Additionally, 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 marching and standing in formation. The orders gradually become more demanding, until an order to the soldiers to place themselves into the midst of gunfire gets an instinctively obedient response.
Read more about this topic: Obedience (human Behavior)
Famous quotes containing the words human beings, obedience, training, human and/or beings:
“Human beings are the only creatures on earth that allow their children to come back home.”
—Bill Cosby (20th century)
“The farmers crowd to the fair today in obedience to the same ancient law,... as naturally as bees swarm and follow their queen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“An educational method that shall have liberty as its basis must intervene to help the child to a conquest of liberty. That is to say, his training must be such as shall help him to diminish as much as possible the social bonds which limit his activity.”
—Maria Montessori (1870–1952)
“What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons—reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.”
—Terry Eagleton (b. 1943)
“All of the valuable qualities ... like helping in the development of others—will not get you to the top at General Motors, were that path open to women.... The characteristics most highly developed in women and perhaps most essential to human beings are the very characteristics that are specifically dysfunctional for success in the world as it is.... They may, however, be the important ones for making the world different.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)