SPY - Conformity and Obedience Lesson

 

Conformity and Obedience

Our society influences us in incredible ways. We conform to those around us, obey authority figures, and behave differently due to those around us. Our style starts to mimic our friends. We do what the teacher says. Our opinions about the president gradually strengthen when we talk with people who agree with our general idea. Social influences are powerful and often unnoticed. 

Conformity

People tend to adjust their behavior in the presence of a group. To study conformity, in 1955 Solomon Asch performed a famous experiment. He brought an unsuspecting subject into a room with several confederates (actors who were pretending to be subjects in the experiment). Asch showed the group three vertical lines of different heights and asked them to identify which was the same length as a target line. Participants answered aloud, with the unsuspecting subject announcing his answer last every time. Asch wanted to know if the subject would go with the group's answer, even if it was wrong, or say the correct answer.

Asch found that subjects who answered alone were accurate 99% of the time. But when answering in a group, subjects went along with a wrong answer about a third of the time. What made these people say the wrong answer? They felt the need to conform to the group.

The effects of conformity are strengthened when these conditions are met:

• The group has at least three people
• The group is admired in some way
• The group is unanimous
• The subject knows the group will observe his behavior

Subjects conformed for two reasons: normative social influence and/or informational social influence. Sometimes subjects went along with the wrong answer because they didn't want to be rejected or stand out in a negative way; their conformity arose from normative social influence. They wanted to avoid sanctions, negative attention from people. They were afraid the others would make fun of them, so they called out an answer that they knew was wrong. Sometimes subjects went along with the wrong answer because they genuinely thought the others must be right since they all agreed; their conformity arose from informational social influence. They assumed that everyone must have heard a rule they missed or everyone must have better eyes than them. 

Obedience

One student of Asch, a social psychologist named Stanley Milgram, became interested in the atrocities performed by members of the Nazi party during WWII. He suggested that these people who sent Jews to death were no different than anyone else because people are very likely to obey orders from authority figures. He designed and performed an experiment at Yale University in 1974 to discover how people respond to commands given by authority figures.

In Milgram's obedience studies, subjects were told they were participating in a study on the effects of punishment on teaching and learning. Subjects were assigned to the role of teacher, not realizing that the learner in the experiment was actually an actor. As the teacher, the subject was shown a participant (who was actually an actor) in another room with their arms strapped to a chair and electrodes attached to them (these were actually just decorations, but the subject didn't realize this at the time). The teacher was instructed to sit in front of a panel box with buttons marked with volts beginning at 15 (marked as "mild shock"), increasing at 15-volt intervals through 150 volts (labeled as "strong shock"), all the way to 450 (marked as "xxx") and teach the participant in the other room a series of words, pushing buttons to deliver a higher shock every time the participant offered a wrong answer through the microphone.

The obedience part of the experience came in the form of an experimenter in a white lab coat, sitting at a desk next to the teacher. If the teacher showed hesitance in administering the next shock, the very authoritative experimenter would say, "please continue" or "it is important that you continue the experiment."

How far would participants go in the experiment? Milgram asked forty psychiatrists to estimate how much shock participants would deliver, and psychiatrists agreed that participants would stop delivering shocks as soon as the learner first hinted at any type of pain.

Psychiatrists were wrong though. Sixty-five percent of participants delivered shocks all the way to the highest voltage, 450 volts, even though it was marked as deadly and even though the learner (remember this was an actor pretending to be shocked) screamed and begged to be allowed out of the experiment halfway through and eventually stopped responding at all, as if unconscious or dead.

As they delivered what they thought were painful or even deadly shocks, the participants playing the role of teacher exhibited signs of distress, sweating, trembling, and biting their lips. So why did they deliver the shocks? They were obeying an authority figure, just like almost anyone would do.

Milgram found that obedience was highest when:

1. the authority figure was close to the participant
2. the authority figure was associated with a prestigious organization
3. the victim (learner) was out of eyesight
4. teachers did not see anyone else refuse to obey

Milgram's experiment showed that ordinary people will commit horrible, harmful acts against innocent people if commanded to do so by an authority figure. War atrocities make more sense when considered in light of Milgram's obedience studies. It wasn't that all the people in the Nazi party were totally evil; these people obeyed their authority figures like most people would do, doing something evil because they were told to do so. They also fell under the trap of the foot-in-the-door phenomenon, obeyed a small command to deliver a tiny shock and gradually worked their way up to the highest shock, changing their attitudes toward shocking others through cognitive dissonance at each step along the way.

One interesting observation is that few people stopped the experiment toward the end. The 35 percent of people who didn't go all the way to the highest shock almost all stopped toward the beginning of the experiment. They were willing to say no to the authority figure and they didn't go through much foot-in-the-door phenomenon because they stopped it right away.

If you want to be a force for good, keep in mind that people were more likely to stop the experiment if they saw anyone else refuse to obey. In some versions of the experiment, another actor pretended to refuse to obey the experimenter. In those versions, very few participants went all the way to the highest shock. You can make a difference in the behavior of others by saying no for yourself.

It is important to note that Milgram's study was criticized for cruelty to participants. What person would want to find out that they were willing to go all the way to the highest shock? Some psychologists point out that few or no participants showed signs of distress in follow up studies, but others say the experiment was too dangerous and should not be replicated.

Complete the practice with conformity and obedience activity below:

 

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