elevator shame essay

• Ways to Give

• Cost and Financial Aid
• School Counselors
• Admissions Staff
• Undergraduate
• International
• College Credit in High School
• Request Information
• Accepted Students
• Student Stories
• Majors and Minors
• Graduate Programs
• Academic Catalog
• Academic Calendar
• Academic Departments
• Academic Services
• Academic Resources
• Faculty Directory
• View All Programs
• Business Administration
• Media Arts Major
• Clinical Mental Health Counseling
• Student Link Hub
• Student Activities
• Student Guidebook
• Residential Life
• Spiritual Life
• Art, Music, & Theatre
• Athletics & Intramurals
• Clubs and Organizations
• Clay Target
• Speech and Debate
• View All Services
• Business Office
• Counseling Services
• Dining Services
• Health Services
• Student Affairs
• Technology Services
• Student Art Show
• Art Exhibits
• Graphic Design Department
• Media Arts Department
• Studio Art Department
• Performances and Recitals
• Choral Music
• Instrumental Music
• Music Tours
• Music Department
• Theatre Physics
• Spring Play
• Past Productions
• Theatre Department
• Athletic Events
• Rosters & Coaches
• Stats & News
• Be Recruited
• Intramural Sports
• Cross Country
• Track and Field
• Sports Camps
• Campus Maps
• Bookstore/Spirit Store
• Career Development
• Christ in Media Institute
• Christian Apologetics
• Events Calendar
• Bethany Magazine
• Media Gallery
• Bethany Jobs
• President and Leadership
• Mission and History

Bethany’s elevator experiment a case of backward research

Social conformity is everywhere. The clothes we wear. The rules we follow. The social roles we play. “Conformity is all around us,” said Jennifer Wosmek, a psychology instructor at Bethany Lutheran College. “But it’s hard to get at systematically.”

But Wosmek’s students found a way — and they used an elevator.

The idea to research social conformity in elevators came from a Candid Camera stunt in which a group of individuals are facing the back of an elevator when a new rider enters. Some follow suit, even though the notion of facing the back of a moving elevator is completely at odds with normal circumstances.

The video is sometimes cited in psychology textbooks and has become staple viewing in social psychology courses (yes, there’s a clip on YouTube). Bethany students, however, were unable to find even one research study that attempted to replicate the results.

So, the six students in Wosmek’s testing and measurements course crafted their own study and spent weeks gathering data at a large mall in the Twin Cities. (Wosmek said she does not have permission to use the mall’s name.) “This project gave us a chance to see what conformity really looks like,” senior Hayley Whitcomb said.

In one case, a man and woman immediately conformed when the elevator doors opened. They remained backward for the duration of the one-floor ride — and then backed out of the elevator when it stopped. In other cases, confused riders would turn backward and then ask if, perhaps, a second door existed that was going to open somewhere else.

Some riders turned only partially backward in an apparent effort to satisfy both their everyday sensibilities and their urge to conform.

“During our baseline testing, no one stood backward,” senior Courtney Nelson said. “But when we implemented (the experiment), it was interesting to see that people would actually do this.”

As they found, however, some are more likely to conform than others.

Age, for instance, predicts conformity.

The youngest conform most often (more than 40 percent of the time) while the oldest are least likely to conform (between 14 and 24 percent depending on if they are a middle-aged adult or lateaged adult, respectively).

Men are more likely to conform fully while women demonstrated higher levels of partial conformity. Study participants were also more likely to conform if there were a larger number of people facing backward.

“This project was really hands- on,” senior Shamaryah Miller said. “We were able to take what we learned in a book and really apply it.”

And that, students said, was the real lesson learned.

Conducting thought experiments on conformity is one thing, but devising an experiment that is procedurally sound is another. To that end, Wosmek’s students spent several weeks developing procedures and protocols to ensure their study was airtight.

They recruited dozens of campus volunteers to serve as “prompts” — the people who would stand backward in the elevator. Those volunteers were told to dress in different clothing styles, to avoid laughing or showing expression during the trials and to exit the elevator in separate directions so that onlookers wouldn’t get suspicious.

Each student was given different variables for their trials and made sure to record data secretly. Even before taking their experiment into the field, they ran several practice sessions in elevators downtown and at Minnesota State University.

The result, Wosmek said, was a “solid piece of research.” She said she’s even hoping to replicate the experiment next year with a university in China.

“This kind of experience turns students on to research,” Wosmek said. “It gets them involved in that role and seeing themselves as psychologists.”

December 20, 2011

This article originally appeared in the December 12 edition of the Free Press , Mankato. It was authored by Tanner Kent, Free Press staff writer.

Learn more about studying psychology at Bethany.

Elevator Groupthink: An Ingenious 1962 Psychology Experiment in Conformity

By maria popova.

The psychology of conformity is something we’ve previously explored, but its study dates back to the 1950s, when Gestalt scholar and social psychology pioneer Solomon Asch , known today as the Asch conformity experiments . Among them is this famous elevator experiment, originally conducted as a part of a 1962 Candid Camera episode titled “Face the Rear.”

Ultimately, diversity contributes not just by adding different perspectives to the group but also by making it easier for individuals to say what they really think. […] Independence of opinion is both a crucial ingredient in collectively wise decisions and one of the hardest things to keep intact. Because diversity helps preserve that independence, it’s hard to have a collectively wise group without it.”

Perhaps the role of the global Occupy movement and other expressions of contemporary civic activism is that of a cultural confederate, spurring others — citizens, politicians, CEOs — to face the front of the elevator at last.

Complement with How To Be a Nonconformist , a satirical masterpiece from the same era, written and illustrated by a teenage girl.

HT Not Exactly Rocket Science

— Published January 13, 2012 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/01/13/asch-elevator-experiment/ —

www.themarginalian.org

PRINT ARTICLE

Email article, filed under, activism history knowledge politics psychology vintage, view full site.

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy . (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)

• Free Samples
• Premium Essays
• Editing Services Editing Proofreading Rewriting
• Extra Tools Essay Topic Generator Thesis Generator Citation Generator GPA Calculator Study Guides Donate Paper
• Essay Writing Help
• About Us About Us Testimonials FAQ
• Studentshare
• Elevator Experiment

Elevator Experiment - Essay Example

• Subject: Sociology
• Type: Essay
• Level: Undergraduate
• Pages: 2 (500 words)
• Downloads: 2
• Author: beattycollin

Extract of sample "Elevator Experiment"

ELEVATOR EXPERIMENT The American society has a lot of formal and informal norms and assumptions for ridding in an elevator. The norms that are described as informal form the majority and they are the types that are not found in any books or constitution but are expected to be followed to the latter. Examples of these norms, some of which are verbal and others non-verbal include not starting a conversation that will last for over 15 seconds, facing the same direction as others and normally the front direction, not talking aloud in the elevator, not making eye contacts and exiting in order of who is closest to the door.

These norms could be tagged as Emic distinctions rather than Etic because they have to do with the very people within the American culture (Lett, 2009) . I found myself in this Emic experience when I got onboard an elevator and would not face the front door and without talking to anyone or answering any questions. Mt experimentation was both participatory and observatory as I could clearly notice that the people in the elevator with me saw me as someone who was breaking basic rules of life. Reasons as to why Americans have rules regarding the riding of elevators are unstated.

However these could be associated to the need to respect social existence. As much we are all individual beings and are entitled to personal and individual freedoms as to how we should behave and conduct ourselves (in a way that do not break criminal laws), we are also regarded as social beings, we must be able to live with the larger society in an easy and more accommodating way. Day in and out, we meet people and we must be able to be lived with and be able to live with so that the social environment can be described as friendly to all.

In order to do this well, there is the need to be rules because when they are rules, there is sure to be an orderly manner of doing things. The rules regarding the use of elevators reflect the values of courtesy and civility of the American society. There is the saying that in the absence of rules, there is anarchy. The American society therefore has rules for almost everything – including using the elevator so that their values for courtesy, civility and peace can be displayed. To a very large extent, there was a Relativistic view of the people towards me rather than ethnocentrism.

Velasquez et al (2010) hold the view that “ethical relativism is the theory that holds that morality is relative to the norms of one's culture.” To this effect, the people in the elevator, though proving with their gestures that they saw everything wrong with my attitude were respectful, not gory, not sacrilegious and normal. Whenever I stole a glance behind me, I noticed people were looking at me in awkward manner. There was not any instance that in my two experiments, anyway questioned me or insulted me or mocked me openly.

There were only some few kids who drew their parents’ attention to me by pointing finger at me but made no verbal comment or sound. The reaction of the kids certainly made other people aware that the American culture was very particular about basic rules such as elevator rules and therefore expected them to behave appropriately. My response to all this was a feeling of uneasiness because I had a strong feeling that I was really serving as a social nuisance to the people in the elevator. To generalize my findings, I would say that America is highly principled society.

There is thought to be so much freedom in America as far as the outside world is concerned. However, there are certain basic things that not everyone has the freedom to do – you do them and you attract all the eyes! Apart from the elevator experience, I have had experiences with table manners before. There was a time that I went to the school canteen to have lunch. That day I intentionally decided not to use the fork and knife for the usual purposes they are used for. I rather used my bare hands in eating.

I was shocked when all the two of the three people on the table with me stood up from the table. I was quite embarrassed but it was a personal experiment. Though most of the rules are conventional rather than stated, they help in maintaining a well rehearsed social order. They can get boring at times when you feel that your basic freedom to act in a certain way is suppressed but they help in maintaining a socially balanced society. At least these rules help in maintaining very high levels of discipline.

For all we know, conforming to these basic rules help in shaping us in conforming to legal rules of the land that to do with crime. If we are not able to abide by rules like elevator and table rules, we may find it very difficult to conform to rules at home and in school. REFERENCE LIST Lett J. Emic/Etic Distinctions. 2009. Web. September 18, 2011 from Velasquez, M. Andre, C. Shanks, T. S.J., and Meyer M. J. Ethical Relativism 2010. Web. September 17, 2011

• Cited: 1 times
• Copy Citation Citation is copied Copy Citation Citation is copied Copy Citation Citation is copied

CHECK THESE SAMPLES OF Elevator Experiment

Design of renewable energy system, cancer signalling pathway, epidermal growth factor receptor, newton's second law for an elevator accelerating upwards, usefulness of quantitative methods for describing intimacy, heavy metal lead (pb) and cadmium (cd) cytotoxicity assessment in newborn rats, effectiveness of an aspiration risk-reduction protocol, smoke movement in high rise building, wind effect on smoke movement in compartments.

• TERMS & CONDITIONS
• PRIVACY POLICY
• COOKIES POLICY

Customer Reviews

Deadlines can be scary while writing assignments, but with us, you are sure to feel more confident about both the quality of the draft as well as that of meeting the deadline while we write for you.

Get access to the final draft

You will be notified once the essay is done. You will be sent a mail on your registered mail id about the details of the final draft and how to get it.

Business Enquiries

Customer Reviews

Charita Davis

Estelle Gallagher

We use cookies. By browsing the site, you agree to it. Read more »

Finished Papers

Our Team of Professional Essay Writers

As we are an honest and well-paying essay writer service, writers come flying our way. Nonetheless, in the writers' community, we are known for our strict selection process. You as a client can be sure that you will be working with the best paper writer in the game no matter your subject or the difficulty of the task as all our writers go through testing and have their degrees checked. Only 3% of all applicants are accepted to work with us and even these 3% have a training program and a two-month trial period ahead. We value our reputation and only hire true experts with years of experience in academic writing behind their backs. Nonetheless, being a professional writers service has its challenges. For example, as our employer expectations are high, not all writers can handle the challenge of creating zero-plagiarism essay writing content in a short time frame, so as leading writing services we must keep everything in control.

• Admission/Application Essay
• Annotated Bibliography
• Argumentative Essay
• Book Report Review
• Dissertation

Customer Reviews

Orders of are accepted for more complex assignment types only (e.g. Dissertation, Thesis, Term paper, etc.). Special conditions are applied to such orders. That is why please kindly choose a proper type of your assignment.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Definitely! It's not a matter of "yes you can", but a matter of "yes, you should". Chatting with professional paper writers through a one-on-one encrypted chat allows them to express their views on how the assignment should turn out and share their feedback. Be on the same page with your writer!

You may be worried that your teacher will know that you took an expert's assistance to write my essay for me, but we assure you that nothing like that will happen with our write essay service. Taking assistance to write from PenMyPaper is both safe and private. We respect your privacy and thus do not ask for credentials like your name, college, location, or your phone number. To pay for the essay writing, you can either use your debit or credit cards to pay via PayPal or use your wallet balance from our website. All we would need is your card details and your email-id. This is our responsibility that your information will be kept all safe. This is what makes our service the best essay writing service to write with.

Customer Reviews

How safe will my data be with you?

We use cookies to make your user experience better. By staying on our website, you fully accept it. Learn more .

Finished Papers

• History Category
• Psychology Category
• Informative Category
• Analysis Category
• Business Category
• Economics Category
• Health Category
• Literature Category
• Review Category
• Sociology Category
• Technology Category

EssayService strives to deliver high-quality work that satisfies each and every customer, yet at times miscommunications happen and the work needs revisions. Therefore to assure full customer satisfaction we have a 30-day free revisions policy.

Final Paper

Charita Davis

Customer Reviews

Reset password

Email not found, is essay writing service legal.

Essay writing services are legal if the company has passed a number of necessary checks and is licensed. This area is well developed and regularly monitored by serious services. If a private person offers you his help for a monetary reward, then we would recommend you to refuse his offer. A reliable essay writing service will always include terms of service on their website. The terms of use describe the clauses that customers must agree to before using a product or service. The best online essay services have large groups of authors with diverse backgrounds. They can complete any type of homework or coursework, regardless of field of study, complexity, and urgency.

When you contact the company Essayswriting, the support service immediately explains the terms of cooperation to you. You can control the work of writers at all levels, so you don't have to worry about the result. To be sure of the correctness of the choice, the site contains reviews from those people who have already used the services.

Finished Papers

is a “rare breed” among custom essay writing services today

All the papers delivers are completely original as we check every single work for plagiarism via advanced plagiarism detection software. As a double check of the paper originality, you are free to order a full plagiarism PDF report while placing the order or afterwards by contacting our Customer Support Team.

Being tempted by low prices and promises of quick paper delivery, you may choose another paper writing service. The truth is that more often than not their words are hollow. While the main purpose of such doubtful companies is to cash in on credulity of their clients, the prime objective of is clients’ satisfaction. We do fulfill our guarantees, and if a customer believes that initial requirements were not met or there is plagiarism found and proved in paper, they can request revision or refund. However, a refund request is acceptable only within 14 days of the initial deadline.

Our paper writing service is the best choice for those who cannot handle writing assignments themselves for some reason. At , you can order custom written essays, book reviews, film reports, research papers, term papers, business plans, PHD dissertations and so forth. No matter what academic level or timeframe requested is – we will produce an excellent work for you!

Customers usually want to be informed about how the writer is progressing with their paper and we fully understand that – he who pays the piper calls the tune. Therefore, with you have a possibility to get in touch with your writer any time you have some concerns or want to give additional instructions. Our customer support staff is there for you 24/7 to answer all your questions and deal with any problems if necessary.

Of course, the best proof of the premium quality of our services is clients’ testimonials. Just take a few minutes to look through the customer feedback and you will see that what we offer is not taking a gamble.

is a company you can trust. Share the burden of academic writing with us. Your future will be in safe hands! Buy essays, buy term papers or buy research papers and economize your time, your energy and, of course, your money!

Diane M. Omalley

We suggest our customers use the original top-level work we provide as a study aid and not as final papers to be submitted in class. Order your custom work and get straight A's.

Alexander Freeman

Customer Reviews

Article Sample

• bee movie script
• hills like white elephants
• rosewood movie
• albert bandura
• young goodman brown

Finished Papers

• Newsletters
• Account Activating this button will toggle the display of additional content Account Sign out

It’s Weird Times to Be a Happy Mother

Some reasons why i’ll rarely admit this in public..

I recently published a book about caregiving that is, in part, a rigorously researched explanation of why I love motherhood, despite living in a country that gives parents so little support. One might imagine that constructing and then promoting my arguments as to why caring for others can be meaningful and emotionally enriching, even when it’s challenging, may have led me to feel comfortable saying I like being a mom in casual social settings. It hasn’t. When I am with friends or acquaintances, or connecting with others online, the admission gets stuck in my throat, where it remains with all the other things that are better left unsaid.

It’s a feeling that traces all the way back to the time when my first son was born. I became a mom in 2012, which I unscientifically suspect was right around the time negative messages about motherhood became more common than positive ones. Or at least it certainly felt like this, in the liberal, largely coastal circles I inhabited online and in real life. To voice any delight about my relationship with my son felt a mix of tone-deaf, out of style, and potentially alienating to others.

Over a decade into motherhood, I now see that there are concentric circles to my hesitation to voice positive feelings, layers of potential relational, political, and personal harm I would fear I would unleash if I came clean. I worry about making others who struggle with motherhood feel bad; I worry about undermining the fight to get mothers and other caregivers more systemic support; I worry about turning back the clock on feminism; and I worry about outing myself as sentimental, and therefore intellectually unserious and uncool. Making it all the harder is that this fear doesn’t feel like a product of my tendency to second-guess things, but rather pretty realistic.

When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others

By Elissa Straus. Simon & Schuster.

Slate receives a commission when you purchase items using the links on this page. Thank you for your support.

The relational piece is the most immediate. When a close friend admits to me that she is struggling with motherhood, the feeling tends to come coated with a heavy dose of physical and emotional exhaustion, shame, maybe even regret. For so long, motherhood was locked up in easy metaphors of goodliness and saintliness. To deviate from this one-note portrayal and refuse to meet unrealistic expectations, to not want to be endlessly giving and enthusiastic about it, was, in this formula, to be a bad person. Ambivalence about either one’s children, or about how motherhood changes the way one can experience the world, was not seen as a healthy part of a huge life undertaking, but a sign that one was not dedicated enough. Even though we have let go of these simplified and unrealistic definitions of a “good mom,” particularly in online discourse, those old-fashioned notions can still get under the skin for those having a hard time. To be in that state, and to hear that I am loving motherhood—a matter of personal disposition as much as it is luck in having children with milder temperaments—might, very understandably, only make things worse.

On a more public level, I fear that me, or anyone, saying I like motherhood, even though it can be tough, has the potential to undermine political efforts to get necessary and overdue support for parents from the government and workplaces. In our current system, moms are suffering because they are moms, which makes managing a job or affording a (not terribly indulgent!) life pretty difficult. For those in the laptop class, they may have scheduling flexibility at work, but that tends to come with an expectation to always be available. Or, for those who work onsite, there is often little flexibility and, too often, very little advance notice of weekly schedules, giving moms a tight 24 hours to figure out caregiving support for the week. We lack universal paid leave, we lack universal and affordable child care and elder care—a one-two punch for all those sandwich-generation parents out there. To say you are having a good time can feel like you are dismissing all the unnecessary suffering that moms experience in the United States because of a lack of societal support. Inversely, to complain about being emotionally spent has become a message of solidarity, a protest chant against everything that makes life so impossible for moms.

Cutting deeper than the threat to pro-mom activism is the threat to feminism. So much of late-20 th -century feminism—though, as I learned when researching my book, mostly white feminism—was about allowing women to have other identities outside of motherhood. To insist on motherhood as a path to meaning, purpose, let alone joy, can feel like I am doing the bidding of conservative forces in our culture, who don’t just advocate for embracing motherhood, but a return to a patriarchal domestic structure in which Dad is on top. What I’d like to do is see what embracing care could look like outside the patriarchy, to look inside the homes women like Betty Friedan encouraged us to escape, and see what is worth appreciating there. With the erosion of reproductive rights and the new popularity of tradwives on social media, pointing out all that is worth celebrating in motherhood can feel dangerous, for people with my politics. And yet, if we don’t do it, what vision of feminism are we promoting for the next generation? Another one in which care is sidelined, marginalized—left to underpaid working-class women, mostly women of color, while wealthier, mostly white women leave the home and do the big, important stuff? I don’t want that either—and yet, still, how to express this?

This disquiet lingers even in solitude, particularly when I am reading smart writing by a smart woman in which motherhood is presented as something that limits or subtracts. It’s not that I have a problem with them feeling that way, or writing about it. I don’t expect anyone to feel the same as I do about this relationship or any of my other relationships, including my relationship with my parents or my husband. The problem isn’t that I feel unseen, so much as I often detect an unspoken assessment that intelligence and motherhood are incompatible. Or, as is the case in many fictional portraits of maternal ambivalence, a feeling that being honest about one’s desires and seeking them out can’t happen in the context of caring for one’s kids. To like motherhood makes me dumb and repressed, I temporarily conclude, cheeks on fire even though nobody is watching.

Because, even when I believe loving motherhood makes me tragically unhip, or when I hesitate to discuss my experience with it with others, my affection for it never wavers. This is the point in the essay when I tell you why. I, like so many women, went into motherhood with a defensive posture. I had no ambivalence about becoming a mom, and am fortunate enough to have a pretty easy time connecting with my children. My big fear was not exactly the act of parenting itself, but how becoming a parent would stop me from living an otherwise interesting and meaningful life.

As it happened, my relationship with my kids has been as philosophically, spiritually, or intellectually vital as anything else I’ve done, leading to the kind of realizations we’ve long wanted to seek elsewhere, away from the home, away from the family. Through them, I’ve cultivated a healthy relationship with uncertainty, with attention, with  feeling closer to the source of life, whatever it is, with all its wonder and fragility—all moments of revelation that came by way of a mix of stress, rupture, wholeness, and ease. If I had let motherhood stay small, confined to the sidelines, then those stressful moments would have felt like forces holding me back on my way to an interesting and meaningful life. But by letting motherhood become big, those challenges—and yes, my kids annoy me sometimes, and yes, I appreciate working and other time I spend away from them—became part of a larger narrative arc.

I really do want to be able to say all this in the company of others—and not just in writing but during unscripted, person-to-person exchanges. While I am so glad moms feel liberated to talk about the hard parts of parenting, I worry that only talking about the hard parts make it so the experience of taking care of our children is kept small, devalued, something not worthy of our curiosity, nor our collective investment. I often long for a whole new language, a whole new vocabulary and even context for discussing motherhood, but I haven’t figured it out yet. Whereas once, we diminished motherhood by easy praise, we now often diminish it with easy complaint. Is there a way to think more expansively and holistically in our conversations about motherhood? To be open to the ways in which the good and the bad are not oppositional, but essential, inevitable parts of a rich, friction-filled experience we may not always like but can love and grow from? I’m still working on it.

John N. Williams

Estelle Gallagher

Customer Reviews

Finished Papers

Advertisement

Supported by

Army Officer Resigns in Protest of ‘Unqualified’ U.S. Support to Israel

While assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency, Maj. Harrison Mann said he was enabling policies that violated his conscience.

• Share full article

By John Ismay

Reporting from Washington

An Army officer assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency has resigned in protest over the United States’ support for Israel, which he said had “enabled and empowered” the killing of Palestinian civilians.

The officer, Maj. Harrison Mann, announced his resignation and explained his reasons for leaving the service in a post on the social media site LinkedIn on Monday. According to his biography on the site, he has specialized in the Middle East and Africa for about half of his 13-year career and previously served at the U.S. Embassy in Tunis.

“The policy that has never been far from my mind for the past six months is the nearly unqualified support for the government of Israel, which has enabled and empowered the killing and starvation of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians,” Major Mann wrote in the post, which noted that he had emailed his comments to co-workers on April 16. “This unconditional support also encourages reckless escalation that risks wider war.”

Reached by phone on Monday, Major Mann confirmed that he was the author of the post but declined to comment further, referring questions to the D.I.A.’s office of corporate communications.

It is unclear whether other military officers have resigned in protest of U.S. foreign policy since the deadly Hamas-led attacks in Israel in October ignited the war, but the resignation of an active-duty officer in protest of U.S. foreign policy is most likely uncommon — especially one in which the officer makes public the reasons for doing so.

A spokeswoman for the Army was not immediately able to confirm whether other officers had resigned for similar reasons since the war began.

As the death toll in Gaza has risen, the Biden administration has faced waves of internal dissent for supporting Israel in the war. In October, Josh Paul, a State Department official in the bureau that oversees arms transfers, resigned in protest of the administration’s decision to continue sending weapons to Israel.

Major Mann said that he had planned to leave the Army “at some point” but that the Gaza war led him to submit his resignation in November and leave his assignment at the D.I.A. early.

Lt. Col. Ruth Castro, an Army spokeswoman, said his request was approved on Jan. 8 and would become effective on June 3.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Major Mann became an infantry officer after receiving his commission in 2011, then studied at the Army’s John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center in North Carolina and qualified as a civil affairs officer in 2016. About three years later, his biography states, he became a foreign area officer specializing in the Middle East.

Regional specialists are often posted at American embassies and may serve as defense attachés, who act as high-level liaisons between the Pentagon and the host nation’s military. Attachés also are trained to evaluate requests for weapons and training from foreign powers and make recommendations to State Department officials as to whether providing such aid is necessary and in line with federal laws on protecting human rights.

In his note, Major Mann said he had continued to carry out his duties at the Defense Intelligence Agency without voicing his concerns, hoping that the war would soon be over.

“I told myself my individual contribution was minimal, and that if I didn’t do my job, someone else would, so why cause a stir for nothing?” he wrote.

“My work here — however administrative or marginal it appeared — has unquestionably contributed to that support,” his post said. “The past months have presented us with the most horrific and heartbreaking images imaginable — sometimes playing on the news in our own spaces — and I have been unable to ignore the connection between those images and my duties here. This caused me incredible shame and guilt.”

“At some point — whatever the justification — you’re either advancing a policy that enables the mass starvation of children, or you’re not,” he added.

“I know that I did, in my small way, wittingly advance that policy,” the major wrote. “And I want to clarify that as the descendant of European Jews, I was raised in a particularly unforgiving moral environment when it came to the topic of bearing responsibility for ethnic cleansing.”

John Ismay is a reporter covering the Pentagon for The Times. He served as an explosive ordnance disposal officer in the U.S. Navy. More about John Ismay

Our Coverage of the Israel-Hamas War

News and Analysis

The Biden administration has told Congress that it intends to move forward with a plan for the United States to sell more than $1 billion in new weapons to Israel .

Biden’s national security adviser said that Israel has still not provided the White House  with a plan for moving nearly a million Gazans safely out of Rafah before any invasion of the city.

Israelis gathered  across the country for the first national day of mourning since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks, with protesters disrupting several ceremonies .

A Key Weapon: When President Biden threatened to pause some weapons shipments to Israel if it invaded Rafah, the devastating effects of the 2,000-pound Mark 84 bomb  were of particular concern to him.

A Presidential Move: Ronald Reagan also used the power of American arms to influence  Israeli war policy. The comparison underscores how much the politics of Israel have changed in the United States since the 1980s.

Netanyahu’s Concerns: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, under pressure from all sides, is trying to reassure his many domestic, military and diplomatic critics. Here’s a look at what he is confronting .

Al Jazeera Shutdown: The influential Arab news network says it will continue reporting from Gaza and the West Bank, but its departure from Israel is a new low in its long-strained history with the country .