Social Psychology: Conformity and Obedience

Introduction

• Conformity: widespread tendency to act and think like the people around us

Conformity

• Humans may possess an inherent tendency to imitate the actions of others
• We often mimic the gestures, body postures, language, talking speed, and many other behaviors of the people we interact with
• Mimicking increases the connection between people and allows our interactions to flow more smoothly
• 2 Primary Reasons for Conformity
  • Normative Influence
  • People go along with the crowd because they are concerned about what others think of them
  • More conformity is found in collectivist countries such as Japan and China than in individualistic countries such as USA
    • Compared with individualistic cultures, people who live in collectivist cultures place a higher value on the goals of the group than on individual preferences
    • More motivated to maintain harmony in their interpersonal relations
  • Informational Influence
  • We sometimes go along with the crowd is that people are often a source of information
  • Descriptive Norms
    • Not clear what society expects of us
    • We act the way most people like us to act
• We sometimes rely on a flawed notion of the norm when deciding how we should behave

Obedience

• Interested in how people react when given an order or command from someone in a position of authority
• Good Thing:
  • Obey parents, teachers, and police officers
  • Important to follow instructions from judges, firefighters, and lifeguards
  • Military would fail function if soldiers stopped obeyed orders from superiors
• Dark Side
  • People can violate ethical principles and break laws
  • Often is at the heart of the worst of human behavior – massacres, atrocities, and even genocide

Conformity

• A change in behavior or belief as the result of real or imagined group pressure
  • You just have to think that the pressure exists
• Collectivistic (POSITIVE): tolerance, self-control
• Individualistic (NEGATIVE): submission or compliance

Types of Conformity

• Compliance: conforming without believing in what we are doing
  • Reward or punishment
• Obedience: acting in accord with a direct order or command
• Acceptance: uniformity that involves acting and believing in accord with social pressure

Suggestibility

• Muzafer Sherif studied norm formation
  • Autokinetic Phenomenon: the suggestion that something would happen is all a person needed to see it happen
  • Conformity breeds acceptance
• Mass hysteria

Group Pressure

• Solomon Asch
  • 75% conformed at least once
  • 37% conformed every time
• No obvious pressure to conform

Authority vs Conscience

• Stanley Milgram
  • Survey of predictions
  • Self-serving bias
  • 65% shocked all the way
  • 63% shocked with heart condition known

Factors of Obedience

• Victim’s distance
• Closeness and legitimacy of authority
• Institutional authority
• Group influence as liberation

Value of Experiments

• Strength of social pressure
• Compliance over moral sense
• Sensitization to moral conflict
• Confirm link between behavior and attitude
• demonstrate power of the situation

Predicting Conformity

• Group size: 3-5 ideal
• Unanimity
• Cohesion: how close you are to the group
• Status: social class, racial group, political group
• Public Response
• Prior Commitment

Social Influence

• Normative Influence: conformity based on our desire to gain acceptance and meet expectations

• Informational Influence: conformity based on evidence about reality provided by others

Conformer Personality

• Internal factors can’t predict specifics, but can predict average behavior
• When social influences are weak, personality is more predictive
• Temporary moods

Conformer Roles

• Performance conformity
• Conformity breeds acceptance
• Role reversal can change conformity

Is Resistance Futile?

• Reactance -> choice
• Asserting uniqueness

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