Authority Figure

An authority figure is anyone who is in charge of others and responsible for people underneath them. There are many different types of authority figures. Parents are authority figures to their children, bosses are authority figures to their employees, and teachers are authority figures to their students. Stanley Milgram did a famous psychological study on obedience to authority figures in which most participants were willing to obey an authority figure even when they were being instructed to do something that they believed was morally wrong and harmful. The participants frequently went against their moral judgement when encouraged to do so by the authority figures in the experiments. The Milgram experiment was groundbreaking in its revelations of how authority figures can influence their subordinates into doing things they normally wouldn't do on their own.