Discussion of the results - Italy

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“Obedience to authority is channelled through a hierarchical structure in which the actor accepts the principle that the person above him has the right to prescribe his behaviour. Conformism regulates the behaviour between people of the same status; obedience binds a status to another” (p. 107).

Furthermore, in the first periphery, although less frequently, the term voluntary

emphasized the presence of a view opposed to the idea of the agentic state. Obedience evoked a subjective choice of compliance.

In the elements of contrast, there were terms associated with the representation of authority, which are intended as real or abstract figure, from which the laws derive: country, society, family, and work. These elements qualified the nucleus, as if to say that obedience is necessarily linked to these figures, or represents the expression of a minority.

1.9.2 Disobedience

Some aspects evoked by the thematic analysis were also highlighted by the structure analysis (in the nucleus and in the first periphery). There were in particular four basic common components: (a) disobedience as lack of respect of rules and social norms; (b) authorities identified both as physical individuals and as institutions; (c) a context dependent aspect; and (d) the need to reflect on the situation, to activate oneself promptly and to be responsible.

Hence, the thematic analysis highlighted disobedience as the infraction of (a) social rules or (b) laws formally imposed by an authority.

In addition, disobedience evoked different forms of authority: individuals, institutions, and society. The latter term has a central role in the representation of disobedience. Indeed, society was intended as both: (a) a synonym of State, as a guarantor of the social order and norms and (b) the social context, inductor of disobedience. Interestingly, parents were identified as the principal authority to disobey²⁰. The adjective civil was a nuclear element strictly linked to the evocation of the social context. It is linked to the idea of change of an unfair status quo.

Awareness and responsibility are causal components and requirements of disobedience.

The association between disobedience and responsibility goes back to Fromm's considerations (1981) in which Fromm categorized our historical post-modernist context as the era of the organized man. This era was described as a time in which individuals are trained to

20 The age of the participants probably had an influence on the references to the parents as authority figures.

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conformity by institutions such as school and family. Individuals cultivate the illusion of acting voluntarily, meanwhile they unconsciously devote their time to obeying impersonal and anonymous powers. Under these circumstances the disobedient should carry the burden of being responsible for the intellectual awakening of those who are “asleep” (p. 49).

In this regard, reflections on the dialectical relationship between obedience and disobedience and the role of responsibility, taken by the sociological tradition and political psychology by Passini and Morselli (2010c), are coherent and interesting: disobedience can play a key role in curbing the possible “degeneration of the authority relationship into an authoritarian

relationship” (p. 10). With that in mind, the nuclear concept of freedom is relevant, and can be interpreted as the effect or the context either towards which disobedience tends, or in which it is evoked.

The disobedient subject is considered to be active, responsible, and also aware, that is, being able to critically reflect on the situation, identifying and neutralizing the forces directing behaviour (Kelman & Hamilton, 1989).

Nouns related to the transgression of orders and rules dictated by an authority, such as rebellion, rejection, and protest, are central elements in the representation of disobedience.

Protest is a concrete behaviour aimed towards creating alternative scenarios to the existing status quo (Rattner, Agil, & Sega, 2003). Thus, the term disobedience evokes primarily a behaviour, the taking of a conscious and responsible stance. Recalling Maslach's reflections during her interruption of the famous Stanford prison experiment (Zimbardo, 2007): “The disobedience of individuals should be translated as systemic disobedience that forces change in the situation or the organization itself and not just in some operating conditions” (p. 459).

Often, however, civil protest flows into a deviance and ends up being confused with it.

This confusion was originally settled by Arendt (1972):

“Over, the common lawbreaker, even if he belongs to a criminal organization, acts for his own benefit alone; he refuses to be overpowered by the consent of all others and will yield only to the violence of the lawenforcement agencies. The civil disobedient, though he is usually dissenting from amajority, acts in the name and for the sake of a group” (p.79).

Punishment is a possible consequence of the transgression of rules and laws (Buttle, 1985). Disobeyers and deviants differ from each other by the way they face legal punishment after their transgression: only the former accept arrest and punishment because the arrest is considered useful as it enhances the media attention to the cause for which they have

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disobeyed (Passini &Morselli, 2010b; Thoreau, 1849). Therefore, disobeying can result in high costs, mainly of two types: (a) Stigmatization and possible consequent exclusion from the social group (Kelman & Hamilton, 1989; Zimbardo, 2007); and (b) sanctions incurred for disobeying to laws or social norms (Passini & Morselli, 2010b).

1.9.3 Comparison between obedience and disobedience

Regarding the content, the two representations showed almost the same basic composition: authority and laws (or norms) were central factors in both representations.

Many subjects defined disobedience using the negation adverb “not” in front of terms usually evoked by obedience, as for example, “respect”. This process showed how the two terms - obedience and disobedience - are related, have a complementary function, and complete the meaning of the concept relationship with authority.

The main difference between the two representations in question was that the nucleus of the term disobedience is richer in contents. Terms - including refusal, society, protest and freedom - indicated a precise process of contextualized rebellion and need to be integrated with the adjective civil. In both representations, individuals, institutions and social groups, with their own specific social norms, are evoked as authority figures. Moreover, obedience and disobedience always evoked formalized laws or implied social norms.

Neither representations was considered essentially positive or negative, but require contextualization in order to be evaluated (Darley, 1995). Therefore, obedience can be destructive as Milgram's noted (1963), but so can be constructive as theorized by Darley (1995) and by Passini and Morselli (2009). Darley (1995) defined constructive obedience, or creative disobedience, when an obedient person deviates from the orders of the authority to achieve the purpose determined by his/her role but in a morally acceptable way, while Passini and Morselli (2009) defined constructive obedience as an act performed by individuals who take responsibility for their conduct having once evaluated the legitimate request of the authority.

The two representations were almost specular regarding the content, if it weren't for one significant difference: the degree of activation of the subjects. Obedience sometimes can be a behaviour resulting from a condition of submission that cancels the individual autonomy.

Disobedience instead requires an extra step and is considered an action resulting from a cognitive effort that the individual performs in order to analyze the situation and not to follow uncritically the requests from the outside (Suen et al., 2014). Indeed, if obedience recalled a

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polysemic definition, disobedience directly evoked acts which recall the feeling of rejection and protest.

Both representations were entirely composed of elements not referring to dispositional variables, confirming Milgram's findings about the influence of situational variables

on individual behaviour. The representation of disobedience is “context dependent”.

This means that disobedience recalled the idea that individuals critically evaluate the legitimacy of the law (to be disobeyed) considering the broader context in which it occurs.

According to the results, the research questions can be asnwered defining obedience as both: (a) the respect for social norms (or formalized laws) given by an institutional authority and (b) the compliance with orders or requests given by a physical authority. Obedience is neither positive nor negative in itself but it is constantly assessed considering the request and the outcome of the act of obedience. Obedience always evokes a binding force or a constraint that often is accepted passively and unconditionally by the actor in the authority relationship.

Disobedience is intended as a lack of respect of (a) laws and rules that may be imposed by a physical authority or (b) for social norms imposed by social group.

Authority is multiform: it can be a person, an institution or the society.

The assessment of a disobedient act depends on the context in which it is implemented and on the outcomes. The peculiarity of disobedience is the subject's awareness. Those who disobey recognize the illegitimacy of a request or the injustice of a rule in a specific situation and they oppose it consciously.

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