Conformity and Obedience

One class of reasons why people tend to conform to examples set by others. If other people cross bridge A and avoid bridge B, they may know something about the bridges that we don’t know. One of the great advantages of social life lies in the sharing of information. We don’t all have to learn everything from scratch; rather, we can follow the examples of others and profit from trials and errors that may have occurred generations ago. Social influence that works through providing clues about the objective nature of an event or situation.

One class of reasons why people tend to conform to examples set by others. Social groups can exist only if some degree of behavioral coordination exists among the group members. Conformity allows a group to act as a coordinated unit rather than as a set of separate individuals. We tend to adopt the ideas, myths, and habits of our group because doing so generates a sense of closeness with others, promotes our acceptance by them, and enables the group to function as a unit. This kind of social influence, which works through the person’s desire to be part of a group or to be approved of by others.

refers to those cases of compliance in which the requester is perceived as an authority figure or leader and the request is perceived as an order. Obedience is often a good thing.

Of more than 100 subjects tested, 75% were swayed by the confederates on at least one of the 12 critical trials. A few of the subjects on every trial, others on only one or two, with most (95%) responding independently at least once. On average, subjects conformed on 37% of the critical trials. That is, on more than one-third of the trials on which the confederates gave a wrong answer, the subject also gave a wrong answer, usually the same wrong answer as the confederates had five.

In a typical rendition of this experiment, 65% (26 out of 40) of the subjects continued to the very end of the series. They did not find this easy to do. Many pleaded with the experimenter to let them stop, and almost all of them showed signs of great tensions, such as sweating and nervous tics, yet they went on.

     The volunteer comes to the lab as a product of a social world that effectively, and usually for beneficent reasons, trains people to obey legitimate authorities and to play by the rules. Social psychologists refer to this as the norm of obedience. An experimenter, especially one at such a reputable institution, must surely be a legitimate authority in the context of the lab, a context that the subject respects but doesn’t fully understand. Milgrim found that when he moved the experiment from Yale to a downtown office building, under the auspices of a fictitious organization called Research Associates of Bridgeport, the percentage who were fully obedient dropped somewhat – 65 to 48%. Presumably, it was easier to doubt the legitimacy of a researcher at this unknown office than a Yale scientist.

Obedience is predicated on the assumption that the person giving orders is in control and responsible and that your role is essentially that of a cog machine. The experimenter’s unruffled self-confidence during what seemed to be a time of crisis no doubt helped subjects to continue accepting the cog-in-machine role as the experiment progressed.

In Milgram’s original experiment, the experimenter was standing in the same room with the subject, while the student was in another room, out of sight. To test the importance of physical closeness, Milgram varied the placement of the experimenter or the student. In one variation, the experimenter left the room when the experiment began and communicated with the subject by telephone, using the same verbal prompts as in the original study; in this case, only 23% obeyed to the end, compared with the 65% in the original condition. Any change that moved the experimenter farther away from the subject, or the student closer to the subject, tended to tip the balance away from obedience.

            Milgram’s subjects were in a novel situation. Unlike the subjects in Asch’s experiments, they saw no other subjects who were in the same situation as them, so there were no examples of how to respond to the experimenter’s orders. In two variations, however, Milgram provided a model in the form of another ostensible subject (actually a confederate of the experimenter) who shared with the real subject the task of giving shocks. When the confederate refused to continue at a specific point and the experimenter asked the real subject to take over the whole job, only 10% of the real subjects obeyed to the end. When the confederate continued to the end, 93% of the real subjects did, too. In an unfamiliar and stressful situation, having a model to follow has a potent effect.

At the very beginning of the experiment, Milgram’s subjects had no compelling reason to quit. After all, the first few shocks were weak, and the subjects had no way of knowing how many errors the learner would make or how strong the shocks would become before the experiment ended. Although Milgram did not use the term, we might think of his method as a very effective version of the foot-in-the-door technique. Having complied with earlier, smaller requests, subjects found it hard to refuse new, larger requests. The technique was especially effective in this case because each shock was only a little stronger than the previous one. At no point were subjects instructed to do something radically different from what they had already done. To refuse the next shock would be to admit that it was probably also wrong to have given the previous shocks – a thought that would be dissonant with subjects’ knowledge that they indeed had given those shocks.