From a critical standpoint, the podcast highlights the effect people have on others because it shows how receptive individuals are to influence. Take the dynamic of the experiment host and the teacher who administered the shocks. When you look at the situation from the perspective of evaluating dominance hierarchies and the impact that power dynamic has you can get an understanding of why the teacher  didn’t stop shocking. The people at the top of the dominance hierarchy dictate the trends that go within interpersonal relationships and cause them to act without thought at times. This was shown when the administrator in a dominant tone stated that the teacher should continue the experiment and the teacher continued because of an innate proclivity to obey orders from individuals of authority. One might ask shouldn’t ethics play a larger role in one’s decisions? It should but it doesn’t, what society defines as ethics comes from the culture and circumstance one has been subjected to. That’s why the Nazis committed such atrocities, we as individuals don’t understand our capacity for malevolence. Malevolence can be brought out through the influence of others which is truly a scary thing to think about. The argument the podcast makes is that the “insecurities” and “anxieties” we have as individuals cloud our judgment. I agree with that argument because our insecurities stem from social norms and how we fit into them.

I’ve experienced that same influence countless times in the sense of being impacted by people of authority and even peers. One instance that that was the case was when I was younger about 11 years old I had this constant habit of being clumsy with soda, tripping and falling, etc. One time I was walking towards the room to pass my uncle’s orange soda and I dropped it all over his brand new white sheets. That was when he yelled angrily at me saying “clumsy, you can’t do anything right”. Although one might say that a young kid wouldn’t be influenced so drastically by a small event such as that. But I grew up trying to be competent at everything I do because of that one small event amongst others that follow up with that. Which highlights the effects small comments can have on people. In my personal experience when it comes from the perspective of my influence on others. I’ve only ever seen it in sports and my actions of getting past adversity or efforts at practice made others want to push harder as well. For example, I was in a rugby game and we were playing against one of the bigger teams in the league. It was our last game to go undefeated in the tournament, so I already had the mindset to leave it all on the field. We are running through one of our defensive plays and the opposing teams’ coach yells the name of one of his biggest players and tells him to “go” That 6 foot 5 inch mammoth of a man came and charged right through our defense. Then I decided that I wasn’t going to let him get through and I slid past him and threw my entire body weight at his hips and fell with him. I had to get subbed out because I was bleeding heavily from the impact. That was one of the best moments because I could see that since they saw me take a hit like that nobody was afraid of taking hits the rest of the game.