13.2: Social Influence: Conformity and Obedience

Almost everyone is prone to this error.

There is a choice context.

They may be more prone to see others' behavior as a stew of both dispositional and situational influences.

After reading newspaper descriptions of mass murderers, Chinese participants are less likely to invoke dispositional explanations for their behavior, and more likely to invoke situational explanations.

U.S. participants show a different pattern.
The cultural difference extends to objects.
Chinese students are more likely to say that the circle's movement is due to situational factors than to dispositional factors.
The opposite pattern is found among U.S. students.

For example, Protestants are more prone to make dispositional attributions than are Catholics, perhaps because they're more likely to believe in a soul, a spiritual entity within each of us that survives even after our deaths.

Determine the factors that make us conform to others.

Determine the factors that maximize or minimize disobedience to authority.

You're in good moods if that's the case.

This tendency was too far in one classic episode.

All of the staff Conformity: The Asch Studies turn to the right.

The classic study of conformity was conducted by Solomon Asch.
A bewildered person turns to the right.

Participants are lured in by a cover story that hides the true goal of the study.

The participants aren't aware of it.

In this chapter, we'll ask you to imagine yourself as a participant in classic social psy behavior as a result of group pressure chological studies.

Before we start with Asch's, we need to read the description in the box.

The study of perceptual judgments asks participants to compare a standard line with three other lines.

They are actually confederates.

A researcher tells you which of three lines matches the standard line.
The person across the table is where the researcher starts.

Adapted from Asch, S. E.

As the first few people cal out their answers, you listen intently.

Three people give the same answer.

"This study is going to be easy," you said to yourself.
In the second trial, the correct answer is clearly "2", just as easy to answer as the first one.
You listen while the participants answer questions.
You can't believe what you see.

If you're 75 percent of the original Asch study participants, you would follow the incorrect norm on at least one of the 12 trials.

Adapted from Asch.

Some of the social factors that influence how likely we are to conform were identified by Asch and later researchers.

The participant was more likely to conform if all confederates gave the same answer.

The level of conformity fell by three-fourths if one confederate gave the correct response.

The participant was less likely to conform.

The size of the majority did not make a difference.

Asch tried to exclude alternative hypotheses for his findings.

It was found that their answers were correct more than 99 percent of the time.

We shouldn't draw the wrong conclusions from Asch's findings.

His data shows that most of us conform to group pressure from time to time.

His data shows that many of us can resist the power of the 498 Chapter 13 group.

Group pressure can be powerful, but it's not irresistible.

Although Asch concluded that uncharacteristic behavior when they group norms affected only participants' observable behavior, brain-imaging data raises the possibility that social pressure may at times influence perception as well.

Gregory Berns and his colleagues put people in a fMRI scanner and showed them two figures.
Participants were asked if the figures were the same or different.
Participants were led to believe that four other people were making the same decisions as them, and that they were preprogrammed into a computer.

On some trials, the other participants gave correct answers, while on others they gave incorrect answers.

Participants went along with others' wrong answers 41 percent of the time.
Their conforming behavior was associated with activity in the amygdala, which can cause anxiety in response to danger cues.
The price tag of negative emotions, particularly anxiety, may be associated with conformity.
The areas of the brain responsible for visual perception were found to be associated with conformity.
This finding suggests that social pressure might affect how we perceive reality, although activity in these brain areas may have instead ruled out Rival Hypotheses.

People with low self-esteem are more prone to conforming.

In one study, researchers presented American and Asian participants with a bunch of orange and green pens that contained a majority of one color and a minority of the other.

Americans tended to pick minority colored pens, whereas Asians tended to pick majority colored pens.

When it comes to conformity, gender doesn't seem to matter.

Women were thought to be more likely to conform than men.
Because the experimenters were all male, the difference may have been caused by an alternative explanation: Perhaps Ruling Out Rival Hypotheses male experimenters had inadvertently provoked submissive Have important alternative behavior in female participants.

Group pressure can be powerful, but it's not irresistible.

When we're divided, we become more vulnerable to social influences, including the impact of social roles.

The advent of e-mail, text messaging, and other largely impersonal forms of group norms affected only participants' observable behavior, brain-imaging data raise the are stripped of their usual identities, in turn leading to a heightened risk of "flam."

Gregory Berns was sending insulting messages.
When people start working together, they often put participants in functional magnetic resonance scans and show them two figures.

The face painting of warriors and the masks donned by the Ku Klux Klan may make them want to join.

Participants were led to believe that four other people were doing the same thing.
In one study, children were asked to wear judgments along with them, and these judgments were preprogrammed into a computer.

The other participants in the trials gave the same answers.

Participants were more likely to cheat in a dimly lit study.
Berns and his team found high levels in a fully lit room.
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Apparently, even the illusion of anonymity can lead to paranoia.

Every day, we play multiple social roles: student, son, or daughter; roommate; and club that conformity was associated with activity in the parietal and occipital lobes, the areas of the member, to name but a few.

What happens when we lose our social brain?

Four decades ago, Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues first asked this question.

People knew about the dehumanizing conditions in prisons and wondered if the explanations for the findings were related to people's personality or the roles they're required to adopt.

People with low self-esteem are prisoner and guard, which are inherently antagonistic, and may carry such powerful expectations because they fear disapproval.

To 1996; S.H.

Oh, 2013), probably because most Asian cultures are more curious.

Many Asians are more concerned about peer opinion than Americans are.

They used a coin toss.

Asians tended to pick majority colored pens, while Americans tended to pick minority colored pens.

The basement of the psychology department in Palo was transformed by Zimbardo and his col aborators.

Women were more likely to be arrested by police officers at their homes than men were, according to early studies.

The prisoners and guards were not allowed to wear casual clothes.

Men who conform than men who don't.
Guards were told to only refer to prisoners by their numbers, not their genders, because the prison's "superintendent" acted as such.

Guards were forced to behave in female participants.

The studies were con hands.

They put bags over the prisoners' heads.

The guards quickly quashed the rebel ion that the prisoners mounted.

The sex difference in conformity largely vanished.
The guards became more cruel, using fire extinguishers.

Many prisoners began to show signs of depression, hopelessness, and anger.

Two prisoners were released from the study because they appeared to be on the verge of a breakdown.

A prisoner went on a hunger strike.

After some prodding from one of his former graduate students, Christina Maslach ended the study 8 days early.

The prisoners were relieved but some guards were disappointed.

When stripped of their usual identities, most of us find the results of the Stanford Prison Study startling.

The study has been the target of a lot of criticism in recent years.

This study was more of a demonstration than an experiment.
His prisoners and guards may have experienced demand characteristics to behave in accord with their assigned roles.
They may have assumed that the investigators wanted them to play the parts of prisoners and guards.
The demand characteristics may have been amplified by the researchers.
There is evidence that during the study, Zimbardo referred to himself and the prison guards as "we", and at times encouraged the guards to create a hostile atmosphere for the prisoners.

The effects of deindua can be duplicated in tion, but at least one attempt to replicate the study sponsored by the British Broadcasting Corporation was unsuccessful.

Researchers recruited potential participants with an advertisement that was almost identical to the one used by Zimbardo and his colleagues.

People who volunteered for the study had high scores on a number of measures of aggressiveness, manipulation, and dominance, as well as low scores on measures of altruism and empathy.
Maybe participants in the study weren't so average after all.
People's responses to deindividuation are shaped by their personality quirks.
Before reading on, you should walk through the description in the box.

The prison study was not an isolated event.

The similarities weren't lost on Zimbardo, who maintained that the Abu Ghraib fiasco was a product of situational forces.

The dehumanization of prisoners and prison guards made it likely that they would lose their social roles to which superiors assigned them.

The majority of U.S. prison guards did not engage in abuse during the Iraqi War.

The research on Asch's studies shows that personality plays a key role in conformity.
Several guards who perpetrated the Abu Ghraib abuses had a long history of irresponsible and even psychopathic behavior.
Both situations and people have a role to play in behavior.

It doesn't make us behave badly if we are more likely to conform to the situation.

A loss of identity makes people more likely to help others.

Being anonymous makes us more likely to help others.

When people can't be identified, they're more likely to help strangers by pointing out fashion gaffes that could hurt them, such as the fact that their zippers are open.
It makes us behave like a member of a group and less like an individual.

Crowd behavior is so unpredictable because it depends on whether others are acting prosocially or not.

Crowds are always more aggressive than individuals.
In the late 19th century, sociologist Gustav Le Bon argued that crowds were a recipe for irrational and even destructive behavior.

People in crowds are more likely to act on their impulses than are individuals.

Le Bon was correct in some cases.

A Walmart employee was trampled to death by a crowd of people after the doors opened for Black Friday shopping in Long Island, New York.

Social psychology was injured.

Emergency workers assisting the victims were run over by some shoppers who were eager to get good deals on discounted products.

Crowds are less aggressive than individuals.

Depending on prevailing social norms, we can either be more or less aggressive.
People in crowds tend to limit their social interactions.
People on crowded buses and elevators don't stare at one another.
People are less likely to say something that could offend someone.

Groups that have an estimated crowd size of more times become so intent on making everyone agree that they will lose a million people.

Group decisions can be poor, even terrible, when members' judgments aren't independent of each other.

When groups combine information from members, they rely on common knowledge rather than unique knowledge, resulting in no net gain in new information.
We've learned throughout the text that knowledge is sometimes incorrect.

Janis studied the reasoning behind the failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba.

1,400 Cuban immigrants plan to overthrow Cuba's dictator.

Almost all of the invaders were captured or killed.

The members of Kennedy's cabinet were stupid.

The Bay of Pigs invasion was not the last time groupthink led intelligent people to make bad decisions.

Critics have recently charged the discipline of social psychology, which spawned the concept of groupthink.

They argue that the social psychology field excludes politically conservative perspectives on controversial topics such as affirmative action, capital punishment, and abortion.
valuing a range of different perspectives is an antidote to groupthink.

Some of the "symptoms" identified by Janis are depicted in Table 13.1.

Some psychologists have pointed out that Janis's descriptions of groupthink are often flawed as sources of evidence.
Groupthink doesn't always lead to bad decisions.
Before all of the relevant evidence is available, seeking group consensus isn't always a bad idea.

Groupthink isn't inevitable.

The best way to avoid groupthink is to encourage dissent within the organization.
The devil's advocate is a person who is supposed to voice doubts about the wisdom of the group's decisions.
Studies show that including a devil's advocate in a group can result in better decisions.

Janis suggested having independent experts evaluate the group's decisions.

If a follow-up meeting is held to evaluate whether the decision reached in the first meeting still seems reasonable, it can serve as a check against errors in reasoning.
Increasing racial and cultural diversity can result in better decisions because it may lead to consideration of alternative perspectives, according to research.

If it leads to efficient decisions, group polarization can be helpful.

In some cases, it can be destructive, as when juries rush to unanimous decisions before they've to a single individual or cause considered all the evidence.

Groupthink more liberal, and right-leaning citizens are becoming more conservative.

Inter negative attitudes make it difficult for reasonable people of good faith to find common ground.

According to research, liberals and conservatives only read liberal and conservative books.

Few people on either extreme of the political spectrum expose themselves to information that challenges their views, which is a sign of self-censorship.

Following the cult's practices without question is part of cult membership.

Thousands of strangers were united in mass wedding ceremonies by Reverend Sun Yung Moon of the Unification Church.

The couples are determined by the photos of prospective brides and grooms.

They meet for the first time in the week leading up to the wedding day or on the day of the ceremony itself.

Although most cults aren't dangerous, they can occasionally produce disastrous consequences.

Heaven's Gate was founded in 1975 by Marshall Applewhite, a former patient.
Applewhite was thought to be a reincarnated version of Jesus Christ.
They were convinced that Applewhite would take them to a starship.
There were false reports that a spaceship was tailing a comet in 1997.
The Heaven's Gate members believed in their calling.
Most of the cult members committed suicide by drinking a poisoned cocktail.

We don't know much about cults because they are difficult to study.

According to evidence, cults promote groupthink in four ways: having a persuasive leader who fosters loyalty, isolating group members from the outside world, discouraging questioning of the group's assumptions, and establishing training practices that gradually indoctrinate members.

The fundamental error probably caused this mistaken belief.

In trying to explain why people join cults, we underestimate the role of personality and social influences.
We may make the same mistake when evaluating the personality traits of terrorists.
According to the evidence, most suicide bombers in the Middle East, including the September 11 hijackers and most Al-Qaeda and ISIS members, aren't seriously mentally disordered; in this respect, they appear to be similar to the majority of cult members.
Most suicide bombers are well off and educated.
Most of these people are normal people who have been influenced into a warped ideology.

During the Korean War, American troops were subjected to brainwashing.

The existence of brainwashing is controversial, although some psychologists have argued that many cults use it.
There isn't much evidence that brainwashing permanently alters victims' beliefs.
Brainwashing is not as effective as people think.
During the Korean War, few of the American political prisoners captured by the Chinese confessed to war crimes.

Less than 1 percent of the population showed any signs of adherence to Communism after returning to the United States.

There is reason to doubt if brainwashing is a unique way of changing people's behavior.

The persuasive techniques of brainwashing probably aren't that different from those used by effective political leaders and salespeople.

They'll be more resistant perspective might be correct and arguments against it will be more open in the future.

This approach is similar to a vaccine, which inoculates people against a virus by presenting them with a small dose of it.
If we want to convince someone to purchase a used car, we might list all of the reasons why buying this car seems like a bad idea and then point out why these reasons aren't as convincing as they seem.

We go along to get along.

The group influence springs from our leaders, not from our peers.

An authority figure tells us to do something.

Many groups, such as cults, get their influence from a combination of both conforming and being obedient.

Adherence is an essential ingredient in our daily lives.

Society couldn't run smoothly without it.
You're reading this text because your professor told you to, and you'll obey the traffic lights and stop signs because you know you're expected to.
Let's look at an example.

Calley was found to be a hideout for North Vietnamese soldiers.

Calley ordered soldiers to open fire on villagers, none of whom had initiated with a crime, despite the platoon locating no enemy.
They killed several old men with their rifles and then shot their fellow crew members who were praying, landing their children and women in the head.
The American platoon helicopter killed about 500 innocent Vietnamese ranging in age from 1 to 82.

Thompson was ordered to destroy the enemy.

The crew won the Soldier's medal that day.
That was the mission I was given.

In 1971, Calley was sentenced to life in military prison, but President Richard Nixon reduced his sentence.

Officer Hugh Thompson, Jr. tried to stop the massacre by landing his U.S. plane.

Thompson and his two crewmen risked their lives to stop the troops from shooting.

It's only one example of the perils of un thinking.

Stanley was a graduate student of Solomon Asch who wanted to understand irrational group behavior.

The profoundly troubling question of how the Holocaust could have occurred was the preoccupation of Social Psychology 505 during World War II.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, it was thought that the Holocaust was the result of twisted minds.
As he came to believe that the psychological processes that give rise to destructive obedience are surprisingly commonplace, he suspected that the truth was subtler and more frightening.

In the early 1960s, Milgram began to tinker with a laboratory paradigm that could provide a window into the causes of disobedience.

After a few years of pilot testing, Milgram finally hit on the paradigm he wanted, not knowing that it would become one of the most influential in the history of psychology.
Carefully read the description of the study in the box below if you want to find out more about it.

The ad states that participants will be paid $4.50 in the 1960s.

A man in a white lab coat greets you at the laboratory at Yale University.

The experimenter is Wil iams.

Mr. Wal ace is a middle-aged participant who is actually a confederate.
You and Mr. Wal will be participating in a study of punishment on learning, with one of you being the teacher and the other the learner.

You get a piece of paper that says "teacher" when you draw lots to see who plays which role.

You'll present Mr. Wallace with a task psychologists call a pair of associate tasks.

You'll read a long list of words, like strong-arm and black-curtain.
You'll give the learner the first word in each pair and ask him to pick the second word from a list of four words.

In order to evaluate the effects of punishment on learning, you'll have to deliver electric shocks to the learner.

You'll move up one step on a shock generator if you get the wrong answer.

You watch as Mr. Williams straps the learner's arm to a shock plate.

Mr. Williams says that the learner will push a button when he answers the first word in each pair.
His answer will light up the adjoining room where you are sitting.
You won't do anything for a correct answer.
You'll give the learner an electric shock if you make an incorrect answer.

At this point, the learner asks Mr. Williams how powerful the shocks will be.

You're seated in front of the shock generator after being led into the adjoining room.

The learner makes a few correct responses, but soon begins to make mistakes.
You don't know that the verbal statements of the learner have been pre recorded.
There's nothing but silence from 345 volts onward.
Mr. Williams tells you to keep administering shocks and to treat the nonresponses as incorrect answers.

40 psychiatrists at Yale University were asked to forecast the outcome when the study was first designed.

They predicted that most participants would break of at 150 volts.

They guessed that only 0.1 percent, representing a "pathological fringe", would go to 450 volts.
If you were a part of the study, you might want to ask yourself what you would have done.

In the original study, all participants were given shocks.

Half of the people went up to at least 150 volts, and another half went up to 450.
The psychiatrists at Yale were off by a factor of several hundred.

The results were shocking.

He was startled by them.
Most psychologists assumed that the majority of normal people would disobey cruel and outrageous orders.
They underestimated the impact of the situation on participants' behaviors.

There were more than one surprise.

Many participants showed uncontrollable tics and fits of laughter.

Those who complied were reluctant to give shocks or beg the experimenter to stop.

Most participants assume no responsibility for their actions despite the pleas of Mr. Wil.

One person claimed after the study was over that he stopped, but the experimenter made him go on.

Solomon Asch's mentor, Milgram, conducted a variety of follow-up studies to figure out situational factors that affected obedience and to rule out alternative explanations for his findings.

These studies show an important alternative to social psychological research.

The amount of feedback from the learner to the teacher and the physical proximity of the experimenter are some of the independent variables that affect the level of participants' obedientness.

Two key themes emerge from the table.

When the experimenter gave instructions by phone, compliance plummeted.

The percentage of participants who complied with the experimenter's commands at different shock levels is shown in the graph.

We can see that there was complete compliance.

The teacher heard the learner's complaints.

The experimenter cheated by giving less intense shocks.

All affiliation with Yale University was removed from Connecticut.

He ordered his soldiers to stop firing.

Thousands of European families risked their lives to offer safe haven to Jewish civilians in defiance of Nazi laws during the Holocaust.
Some people disobey authority figures who give unethical orders.
Some of the findings are similar to those of Asch, who found that some participants don't go along to get along.

Surprisingly, the participants were 888-609- 888-609- 888-609- 888-609- on most personality variables.

He found no evidence that participants who enjoyed doing so were more obedient than those who did not.

Researchers have identified a few predictors of obeying in the "touch proximity" condition paradigm.

More morally advanced participants are more willing to defy the experimenter.
If participants are told to hold the be more willing to violate rules than less moral people, they may view the rules as "Learner's hand on a shock plate".
A researcher found that people with high levels of personality fell out of favor.
People with high levels of authoritarianism think the world is a big hier.
They want authority figures to be respected, not questioned.
A study was conducted in France.

There were several surprising findings in the context of a televised game show.

The finding that there were no sex differences in obedientness has held up in later studies.

A researcher instructed undergraduates to deliver electric shocks to a small male dog.

Only 2 students refused, and the average voltage level delivered was more than 100 volts.

The power of authority figures is greater than anyone had thought, and that they don't usually result in sadism.

The research reminds us of the power of the fundamental error.

Civil disobedience during the Holocaust and My Lai is a topic that continues to be debated by psychologists.

Some concentration camp guards were fond of giving up her seat on a bus to a white man torturing innocent people when she refused to participate in the war.
Critics argue that it was required by law.
She probably requires more than an authority figure to be destructive on a grand scale.

Others have questioned if the participants and others who engage in destructive disobedience are truly mindless, blind followers.

Perhaps the obedient participants believe that authority figures are doing the right thing and are choosing to help them.

In recent years, scholars have raised a number of questions about the findings and conclusions.

A careful inspection of the archives at Yale University has revealed that the standardization of his experiments, long assumed to be exceedingly rigorous, sometimes left something to be desired.