Conformity and Obedience Notes
Chapter 5 Referencing Information
Western Sydney University Harvard Style
Reference list example:
Myers, DG & Louis, W 2016, ‘Conformity and obedience’, in T Griffin (ed.) 101557: the individual in society, 3rd edn, McGraw-Hill Australia, North Ryde, Australia, pp. 147-186.
In-text citation examples:
(Myers & Louis 2016).
Myers and Louis (2016).
APA Reference list
Myers, D. G. & Louis, W. (2016). Conformity and obedience. In T. Griffin (Ed.), 101557: The individual in society, (3rd ed., pp. 147-186). North Ryde, Australia: McGraw-Hill Australia.
In-text citation examples:
(Myers & Louis, 2016).
Myers and Louis (2016).
Chapter 6: Conformity and Obedience
Australian content by Winnifred Louis
Conformity and Obedience
Quotes:
John Stuart Mill: ‘Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called.’
Amitai Etzioni: ‘The social pressures community brings to bear are a mainstay of our moral values.’
Learning Objectives:
LO 6.1: Define conformity, compliance, acceptance, and obedience.
LO 6.2: Describe the classic studies by Sherif, Asch, and Milgram and link them to the appropriate type of social influence.
LO 6.3: Define group size, cohesion, status, unanimity, public responding, and prior commitment; explain their relation to conformity; and describe relevant research.
LO 6.4: Define normative influence, informational influence, and referent informational influence, as well as self-stereotyping and self-categorization. Explain how each type of influence differs in terms of the underlying motives or psychological processes that are thought to underpin it.
LO 6.5: Describe the importance of personality, culture, and social roles in explaining when people conform.
LO 6.6: Describe the difference between reactance and asserting uniqueness. How is each related to conformity? What is the difference between deviance and dissent? How do the motives for these types of nonconformity differ?
Chapter Outline:
What is conformity?
What are the classic conformity and obedience studies?
What predicts conformity?
Why conform?
Who conforms?
Do we ever want to be different?
Postscript: On being an individual within community
Introduction on Conformity:
The chapter explores why people often behave as social clones despite diversity, under what circumstances conformity is most likely, whether certain people are more likely to conform, who resists conformity pressure, and whether conformity is necessarily negative.
What is Conformity?
Conformity: Good or Bad?
The question of whether conformity is good or bad has no scientific answer.
Conformity can be bad (e.g., drink driving, racist behavior), good (e.g., preventing queue jumping), or inconsequential (e.g., tennis players wearing white).
In Western individualistic cultures, conformity often carries a negative connotation due to the emphasis on independence.
Different cultures (e.g., Indigenous Australians, Māori New Zealanders, Japanese) may value cooperation and social roles more highly.
Meanings of Conformity-Related Terms:
Conformity: Changing behavior or belief to accord with others, acting or thinking differently from how you would if alone.
Compliance: Insincere, outward conformity to an expectation or request without believing in what you are doing, primarily to reap a reward or avoid punishment; obedience is compliance to an explicit command.
Acceptance: Sincere, inward conformity, genuinely believing in what the group has persuaded you to do; attitudes follow behavior.
Definitions
Conformity: A change in behaviour or belief as the result of real or imagined group pressure.
Compliance: Conformity that involves publicly acting in accord with an implied or explicit request while privately disagreeing.
Obedience: Acting in accord with a direct order or command.
Acceptance: Conformity that involves both acting and believing in accord with social pressure.
What are the Classic Conformity and Obedience Studies?
Overview:
Researchers create miniature social worlds (laboratory microcultures) to study conformity and obedience.
Classic experiments have startling findings and have been widely replicated.
Three classic studies: Sherif, Asch, and Milgram.
Sherif's Studies of Norm Formation:
Muzafer Sherif (1935, 1937) studied the emergence of a social norm in the laboratory using the autokinetic phenomenon (optical illusion of a stationary light appearing to move in a dark room).
Participants initially made individual estimates of the light's movement, then came together as a group and converged on a common estimate (group norm).
Even when retested alone a year later, participants continued to support the group norm.
Jacobs and Campbell (1961) found that inflated illusions persisted across five generations of participants.
Lesson: Our views of reality are not ours alone.
Influence of Conformity
Suggestibility in everyday life: coughing, laughing, or yawning is contagious.
Comedy-show laugh tracks capitalize on suggestibility.
Mood linkage: being around happy people can make us happier (Totterdell et al., 1998).
Chameleon effect: unconsciously mimicking others' expressions, postures, and voice tones (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999).
Mimicry inclines others to like you (van Baaren et al., 2004).
The Autokinetic Phenomenon:
Self (auto) motion (kinetic): the apparent movement of a stationary point of light in the dark.
Congtagious Yawning
Robert Provine's Research:
Yawning is a fixed action pattern lasting about six seconds, involving a long inward breath and a shorter exhalation.
Yawning is equally common among men and women.
Why do we yawn?
Boredom: participants yawned more often when watching a TV test pattern compared to less boring music videos.
Tension: can also elicit yawning among paratroopers before their first jump, Olympic athletes before their event, and violinists waiting to go onstage.
Sleepiness: people yawn even more in the hour after walking than in the yawn-prone hour before sleeping.
Observing others: 55 percent of viewers yawned after watching a five-minute video of a man yawning repeatedly, compared to 21 percent after viewing a video of smiles.
Brain ‘mirror neurons’ suggest a biological mechanism that explains why our yawns so often mirror others' yawns—and why even dogs often yawn after observing a human yawn (Joly-Mascheroni et al., 2008).
Even thinking about yawning usually produces yawns, reports Provine
Mass Suggestibility
Examples:
Seattle windscreen pitting in 1954: Mass reporting of damage to car windscreens due to suggestibility.
Hijackings, UFO sightings, and suicides tend to come in waves.
Werther effect: Imitative suicidal behavior following the publication of Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Phillips' research on imitative suicides: Suicides increase after a highly publicized suicide.
Copycat suicides: Teenagers are most susceptible to copycat suicides
Mass Delusions:
Mass delusions are the spontaneous spreading of false beliefs, occasionally appearing as mass hysteria.
Examples:
In a 2000-student high school closed for two weeks after 170 students and staff sought emergency treatment for stomach ailments, dizziness, headaches and drowsiness for no apparent reason.
Groups of children at schools scattered across the United States started breaking out in itchy red rashes without any apparent cause in the weeks following 11 September 2001.
During the Middle Ages, European convents reportedly experienced outbreaks of imitative behaviors. In one large French convent, at a time when it was believed that humans could be possessed by animals, one nun began to meow like a cat. Eventually, ‘all the nuns meowed together every day at a certain time’ .
On 24 June 1947, Kenneth Arnold was piloting his private plane near Mount Rainier (Washington state, USA), when he spotted nine glittering objects in the sky. When the Associated Press then reported the sighting of ‘saucers’ in more than 150 newspapers, the term ‘flying saucers’ was created by headline writers, triggering a worldwide wave of flying saucer sightings.
Asch's Studies of Group Pressure
Asch recreated his boyhood experience in his laboratory.
Asch's Experiment:
Participants were asked to judge which of three lines matched a standard line.
In a control condition, participants answered alone and were correct more than 99 percent of the time.
When several others (confederates) gave identical wrong answers, three-quarters of participants conformed at least once.
Overall, 37 percent of responses were conforming.
Implications:
Asch's (1955) feelings about the conformity were as clear as the correct answers to his questions:
‘That reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct.’
Asch's procedure became the standard for hundreds of later experiments.
Those experiments lacked what Chapter 1 called the ‘mundane realism’ of everyday conformity, but they did have ‘experimental realism’.
Milgram's Obedience Experiments
Milgram's (1965, 1974) experiments tested what happens when the demands of authority clash with the demands of conscience.
Here is the scene staged by Milgram, a creative artist who wrote stories and stage plays:
Two men come to Yale University’s psychology laboratory to participate in a study of learning and memory.
A stern experimenter in a lab coat explains that this is a pioneering study of the effect of punishment on learning.
The experiment requires one of them to teach a list of word pairs to the other and to punish errors by delivering shocks of increasing intensity.
To assign the roles, they draw slips out of a hat. One of the men (a mild-mannered, 47-year-old accountant who is actually the experimenter’s confederate) says that his slip says ‘learner’ and is ushered into an adjacent room. The other man (a volunteer who has come in response to a newspaper ad) is assigned to the role of ‘teacher’.
He takes a mild sample shock and then looks on as the experimenter straps the learner into a chair and attaches an electrode to his wrist.
Teacher and experimenter then return to the main room, where the teacher takes his place before a ‘shock generator’ with switches ranging from 15 to 450 volts in 15-volt increments.
The switches are labelled ‘Slight Shock’, ‘Very Strong Shock’, ‘Danger: Severe Shock’, and so forth. Under the 435- and 450-volt switches appears ‘XXX’.
The experimenter tells the teacher to ‘move one level higher on the shock generator’ each time the learner gives a wrong answer.
With each flick of a switch, lights flash, relay switches click and an electric buzzer sounds.
If the participant complies with the experimenter’s requests, he hears the learner grunt at 75, 90 and 105 volts. At 120 volts the learner shouts that the shocks are painful. And at 150 volts he cries out, ‘Experimenter, get me out of here! I won’t be in the experiment anymore! I refuse to go on!’
By 270 volts his protests have become screams of agony, and he continues to insist to be let out. At 300 and 315 volts, he screams his refusal to answer.
After 330 volts he falls silent. In answer to the teacher’s inquiries and pleas to end the experiment, the experimenter states that the nonresponses should be treated as wrong answers.
To keep the participant going, he uses four verbal prods:
Prod 1: Please continue (or Please go on).
Prod 2: The experiment requires that you continue.
Prod 3: It is absolutely essential that you continue.
Prod 4: You have no other choice; you must go on.
Predictions and Results:
Milgram described the experiment to 110 psychiatrists, university students and middle-class adults. People in all three groups guessed that they would disobey by about 135 volts; none expected to go beyond 300 volts. Recognising that self-estimates may reflect self-serving bias, Milgram asked them how far they thought other people would go. Virtually no one expected anyone to proceed to XXX on the shock panel. (The psychiatrists guessed about one in a thousand.)
In Milgram's experiment, 65 percent of participants progressed all the way to 450 volts.
Jerry Burger (2009) replicated Milgram’s experiment—though only to the 150-volt point. At that point, 70 percent of participants were still obeying, a slight reduction from Milgram’s result. In Milgram’s experiment, most who were obedient to this point continued to the end.
Ethical note: Professional ethics usually dictate explaining the experiment afterwards (see Chapter 1). Imagine you were an experimenter who had just finished a session with a conforming participant. Could you explain the deception without making the person feel gullible and stupid?
Ethics of Milgram's Experiments
Disturbing aspects:
The 'learner' received no actual shocks.
Critics argued that Milgram stressed participants against their will.
Participants experienced agony, sweating, trembling, and nervous laughter.
Self-concepts may have been altered.
Milgram's Defense:
Important lessons were taught by his experiments.
Participants supported the research after the deception was revealed.
Most participants were glad to have participated and none were harmed.
What Breeds Obedience?
Milgram examined the conditions that breed obedience.
Four factors determined obedience:
The victim’s emotional distance (greatest obedience when learners could not be seen).
The authority’s closeness and legitimacy (commands given by telephone decreased obedience).
Whether or not the authority was part of a respected institution.
The liberating effects of a disobedient fellow participant (obedience plummeted when confederates defied the experimenter).
The Victim's Distance
Milgram’s participants acted with greatest obedience and least compassion when the ‘learners’ could not be seen (and could not see the participants).
When the victim was remote and the ‘teachers’ heard no complaints, nearly all obeyed calmly to the end. That situation minimized the learner’s influence relative to the experimenter’s.
When the learner was in the same room, ‘only’ 40 percent obeyed to 450 volts. Full compliance dropped to a still-astonishing 30 percent when teachers were required to force the learner’s hand into contact with a shock plate.
Kilham and Mann (1974) compared male and female participants assigned to deliver the electric shock directly themselves, with participants assigned to pass on the order to deliver the shock (‘transmitters’). The results were interesting. Overall only 40 percent of men and 16 percent of women fully obeyed the commands to shock directly, but transmitters were far more obedient than direct actors: 68 percent of men and 40 percent of women fully obeyed the command to transmit the harmful order.
Closeness and Legitimacy of the Authority
The physical presence of the experimenter also affected obedience.
Findings:
When Milgram’s experimenter gave the commands by telephone, full obedience dropped to 21 percent (although many lied and said they were obeying).
Given a light touch on the arm, people are more likely to lend money, sign a petition or sample a new pizza (Kleinke, 1977; Smith et al., 1982; Willis & Hamm, 1980).
The authority must be perceived as legitimate.
When confederate assumed command, teachers refused to comply fully.
Findings that participants obey only legitimate authorities are important. They remind us that conformity is not so much about losing all sense of moral compass, as it is about actively taking up the moral values and goals of the authority who commands you.In a series of studies, Reicher and colleagues (2012) have shown that the degree to which people identify with the authority predicts their obedience, while the degree to which people identify with the learner predicts their defiance (see also Smith & Haslam, 2012).
In pro-authority conditions, people identify with the authority and believe they have a duty (to science, to the study) to shock the vulnerable learner. In pro-learner conditions, people identify with the learner and believe they have a duty to protect their vulnerability. In this sense, obedience is not a passive surrender of self-will but rather an active choice of which social values and identities to act out.
Personalizing the Victims
Innocent victims trigger more compassion if personalized.
Personalizing the victims: Concerned that the projected death statistics of a nuclear war are impersonal to the point of being incomprehensible, international law professor Roger Fisher proposed a way to personalize the victims:
Other findings
A doctor ordered eardrops for a patient suffering infection in the right ear.
On the prescription, the doctor abbreviated ‘place in right ear’ as ‘place in R ear.’ Reading the order, the compliant nurse put the required drops in the compliant patient’s rectum.
The compliant nurse might empathise with the reported 70 fast-food restaurant managers in 30 US states who, between 1995 and 2006, complied with orders from a self-described authority, usually posing as a police officer.
Institutional Authority
The prestige of the authority is that important, then perhaps the institutional prestige of Yale University legitimised the Milgram experiment commands.
The obedience rate (48 percent) was still remarkably high in less prestigious Bridgeport, it was significantly lower than the 65 percent rate at Yale.
The Liberating Effects of Group Influence
The heroic firefighters who rushed into the flaming World Trade Center towers were ‘incredibly brave’, note social psychologists Susan Fiske, Lasana Harris and Amy Cuddy (2004), but they were also ‘partly obeying their superiors, partly conforming to extraordinary group loyalty’.
Milgram captured this liberating effect of conformity by placing the teacher with two confederates who were to help conduct the procedure. During the experiment, both confederates defied the experimenter, who then ordered the real participant to continue alone. Did he? No. Ninety percent liberated themselves by conforming to the defiant confederates.
Reflections on the Classic Studies
Common response to Milgram’s results is to note their counterparts in recent history:
the ‘I was only following orders’ defences of Adolf Eichmann in Nazi Germany;
of American Lieutenant William Calley, who in 1968 directed the unprovoked slaughter of hundreds of Vietnamese in the village of My Lai;
Soldiers are trained to obey superiors.
Stanley Milgram on Obedience
While working for Solomon E. Asch, I wondered whether his conformity experiments could be made more humanly significant.
Behaviour and Attitudes
In Chapter 4 we noted that attitudes fail to determine behaviour when external influences override inner convictions. These experiments vividly illustrate that principle.
Why were the participants unable to disengage themselves?
Imagine yourself as the teacher in yet another version of Milgram’s experiment (one he never conducted). Assume that when the learner gives the first wrong answer, the experimenter asks you to zap him with 330 volts. After flicking the switch, you hear the learner scream, complain of a heart disturbance and plead for mercy. Do you continue? I think not.
Once having acted against the victim, these subjects found it necessary to view him as an unworthy individual, whose punishment was made inevitable by his own deficiencies of intellect and character.
The Power of the Situation
The students in one university experiment found it surprisingly difficult to violate the norm of being ‘nice’ rather than confrontational.
These experiments demonstrate the power of normative pressures and how hard it is to predict behaviour, even our own behaviour.
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process’.
Under the sway of evil forces, even nice people are sometimes corrupted as they construct moral rationalisations for immoral behavior (Tsang, 2002).
To explain is not to excuse. To understand is not to forgive. You can forgive someone whose behavior you don’t understand, and you can understand someone whom you do not forgive.
Summary Questions
Sometimes people conform; sometimes they do not:
(1) When do they conform?
(2) Why do people conform? Why don’t they ignore the group and ‘to their own selves be true’?
(3) Is there a type of person who is likely to conform?
What Predicts Conformity?
Conformity grew if the judgments were difficult or if the participants felt incompetent.
Group attributes also matter.
Conformity is highest when…
the group has three or more people
the group is unanimous, cohesive and high in status
the response is public
there is no prior commitment
Group Size
Conformity increases with group size, but only up to a point.
Researchers agree that there is more conformity when the group is three to five people
Unanimity
Several experiments reveal that someone who punctures a group’s unanimity deflates its social power (Allen & Levine, 1969; Asch, 1955; Morris & Miller, 1975).
Observing someone else’s dissent—even when it is wrong—can increase our own independence.
*Observing someone else’s dissent—even when it is wrong—can increase our own independence.
It’s difficult to be a minority of one; few juries are hung because of one dissenting juror. And only 1 in 10 US Supreme Court decisions over the last half-century has had a lone dissenter; most have been unanimous or a 5–4 split (Granberg & Bartels, 2005).
Cohesion
A minority opinion from someone outside the groups we identify with sways us less than the same minority opinion from someone within our group (Clark, R. D., & Maass, 1988).
The more cohesive a group is, the more power it gains over its members.
Cohesiveness
A ‘we feeling’; the extent to which members of a group are bound together, such as by attraction to one another.
Status
Higher status people tend to have more impact (Driskell & Mullen, 1990).
Clothes seem to ‘make the person’ in Australia, too.
Public Response
Researchers sought to answer this: would people conform more in their public responses than in their private opinions?
Prior Commitment
Once having made a public commitment, they stick to it.
Making a public commitment makes people hesitant to back down.
Why Conform?
There are two possibilities: A person may bow to the group:
(a) to be accepted and avoid rejection
(b) to obtain important information.
*Normative influence
* Conformity based on a person’s desire to fulfil others’ expectations, often to gain acceptance.
Informational influence
*Conformity occurring when people accept evidence about reality provided by other people.
Normative Influence and Informational Influence
Normative influence is ‘going along with the crowd’ to avoid rejection, to stay in people’s good graces or to gain their approval.
Normative influence often sways us without our awareness.Informational influence, on the other hand, leads people to privately accept others’ influence.
Concern for social image produces normative influence. The desire to be correct produces informational influence. In day-to-day life, normative and informational influence often occur together.
Referent Informational Influence
There is one common underlying process—referent informational influence—that unites both social comparison and 'learning information', namely checking in with group members about what is real and what to do about it (Terry & Hogg, 1996).
Referent informational influence
*Conformity occurring when ‘normative’ and ‘informational’ influence are tied to each other and to self-perceptions.
According to self-categorisation theory’s radical vision, which self you ‘feel’ like and what that self contains change as you move through social contexts.
Self-categorisation
*Identifying oneself as a group member (a social identity, e.g. as a psychologist) or as an individual (a personal identity).
We may often feel a sense of coherence and permanence in the core aspects of who we are, but Turner argued that, in fact, these personal selves are multiple and often contradictory (Turner, J. C., 1982; Turner, J. C., et al., 1987, 1994; Turner, J. C., & Reynolds, 2001).
Self-stereotyping
**Unconscious changes in beliefs, emotions and actions to conform to group stereotypes after self-categorisation and identification as a group member.
Who Conforms?
Are some people generally more susceptible (or should I say, more open) to social influence?
*Researchers have focused on three predictors: personality, culture and social roles.
Personality
Personality also predicts behaviour better when social influences are weak.
Culture
Compared with people in individualistic countries, those in collectivist countries (where harmony is prized and connections help to define the self) are more responsive to others’ influence.
Cultural differences also exist within any country.
Social Roles
Role theorists assume social life is like acting on a theatrical stage (Shakespeare)
Social roles allow some freedom of interpretation to those who act them out, but some aspects of any role must be performed
Roles have powerful effects. In Chapter 4 we noted that we tend to absorb our roles.
ROLE REVERSAL
*Role playing can also be a positive force.
By intentionally playing a new role and conforming to its expectations, people sometimes change themselves or come to empathise with people whose roles differ from their own
Do We Ever Want to Be Different?
A motivation to protect or restore one’s sense of freedom.
Reactance arises when someone threatens our freedom of action.
Reactance may contribute to underage drinking
Asserting Uniqueness
Both social influence and the desire for uniqueness appear in popular baby names
Negative Deviance, Positive Deviance and Dissent
When we think about the motives to be different, it is also helpful to think about the difference between deviance and dissent
*Negative devianceNonconformity to group norms in the sense of not living up to standards or failing to follow the rules
*Positive devianceNonconformity to group norms in the sense of greatly exceeding standards; setting an example to others; being a role model
Dissent
Nonconformity to group norms motivated by a desire to change or challenge the norms.
Postscript: On Being an Individual within Community
Do your own thing. Question authority. If it feels good, do it. Follow your bliss. Don’t conform.Think for yourself. Be true to yourself. You owe it to yourself.
To maintain harmony, confrontation and dissent are muted. Communitarians remind us that we also are social creatures having a basic need to belong. Conformity is neither all bad nor all good. We therefore do well to balance our ‘me’ and our ‘we’, our needs for independence and for attachment, our individuality and our social identity.