3. Conformity and obedience

Question 1

Social influence

Answer 1

Acting, feeling, or thinking differently from the way you would act, feel, or think if you were alone.

Question 2

Conformity

Answer 2

Change in behaviour or belief as a result of real or imagined group pressure. Behaviour and beliefs are the same apart from the group.

Question 3

Compliance

Answer 3

Publicly acting in accord with an implied or explicit request even if privately disagreeing. Outward conformity as a result of implicit social influence.

Question 4

Obedience

Answer 4

Acting in accord with a direct order or command. A result of explicit social influence.

Question 5

Acceptance

Answer 5

Conformity that involves acting and believing in accord with social pressure. Inward conformity as a result of persuasion.

Question 6

Sherif autokinetic phenomenon

Answer 6

Norm formation experiments. Under arbitrary conditions where there are no established social norms, people’s reactions to ambiguous stimuli tend to converge. By influencing and conforming to others, people form and transform social norms for novel and unknown situations. Answers converged on the group average.

Question 7

Laughing tracks

Answer 7

Many studies show that laughing tracks lead people to think that a show is funnier than ones without it. Enhanced when you think the people on the laughing track share a group identity.

Question 8

Smiley people

Answer 8

People tend to feel more happy when they hang out with smiley people.

Question 9

Book The sorrows of Young Werther

Answer 9

Caused an epidemic where the main character wore yellow trousers and blue shirt and then more young men in Europe started to wear this. Ended up getting banned in a lot of countries as it also created an epidemic of suicides among young men as the main character commits suicide after he is rejected by his lover.

Question 10

Marilyn Monroe Suicide

Answer 10

After her suicide, suicide rates in America increased dramatically.

Question 11

Asch’s infamous line study

Answer 11

More than 99% of participants in the control condition (where they were alone) gave correct answers (less than 1% were wrong answers).
67% of participants in the experimental (where people before them gave the wrong answers) gave correct answers (33% were wrong).
1 of the 3 participants chose to conform to the group even though there was an obvious correct answer.

Question 12

Reasons the Sherif and Asch results are striking

Answer 12

They involved no obvious pressure to conform. No consequences for not conforming.
There were no rewards for conformity.
No punishment for individuality.

Question 13

Social psychology as situated in the times

Answer 13

Most classical social psychology research on conformity was conducted just after WWII when conformity was regarded as a “bad thing” and there was pessimistic view of social influence in a way to obedience, cruelty, and tyranny.

Question 14

Milgram’s experiment

Answer 14

40 men - a vocational mix of 20 to 50 year olds. 26 of them (65%) progressed all the way to 450 volts.
However, Milgram conducted more than two dozen studies with a diverse sample of more than 1,000 participants. Results were nuanced and obedience depended on various social psychological factors.
Results ranged from 0 to 93% fully obedient.

Question 15

What breeds obedience?

Answer 15

The victim’s distance, closeness and legitimacy of authority, institutional authority, agentic state theory.

Question 16

The victim’s distance

Answer 16

→ Greatest obedience and least compassion was when the learners (confederates) could not be seen (and could not see them). When the victim was remote and the teachers (participants) heard no complaints, nearly all obeyed calmly to the end.
→ When the learner (confederates) was in the same room, 40% obeyed to 450 volts. Full compliance dropped to 30% when teachers (participants) were required to force the learner’s hand into contact with the shock plate.
Anonymity and depersonalisation of victims in everyday life and history.

Question 17

Closeness and legitimacy of authority

Answer 17

• When the experimenter gave the commands by telephone, full obedience dropped to 21%.
  
  • When the commands were given by a random clerk, instead of the experimenter himself, 80% of participants refused to comply fully.
    Authority must be perceived as legitimate. Legitimacy is the crucial component of conformity and other forms of social influence.

Question 18

Institutional authority

Answer 18

The rate of fully compliant dropped to 48% when the experiment was conducted in a research associate building in Bridgeport, Connecticut, compared to the experiments conducted at Yale.
The prestige of (institutional) authority provides legitimacy for the authority itself and its demands.
Participants are driven by demand characteristics , wanting to give the experimenter what they think they want. Therefore, must consider the ecological validity of the laboratory experiments.

Question 19

Agentic state theory

Answer 19

▪ Milgram argued that obedience involved denial of responsibility of one’s actions and willingness to hand it over to authority. A person comes to view themselves as an instrument in carrying out somebody else’s wishes, and therefore no longer sees themselves as responsible for their own actions. This process is a shift from a state of autonomy to an agentic state.
▪ Nuremberg trials - we were only following orders defence. Placing the blame elsewhere.

Question 20

Structural atrocities

Answer 20

> Whole system or society can be responsible for atrocities.
> Compliance can take precedence over moral sense.
Apartheid in South Africa - came part of the official government ideology and brought lots of discriminatory laws, but also brought more resistance. Many white South Africans born into this society were brought up where this hostility is the norm.

Question 21

Step by step towards insensibility

Answer 21

The drift towards evil tends to come in small increments without any conscious intent to do evil.

Question 22

Foot-in-the-door phenomenon

Answer 22

Gradually increasing shocks, starting from harmless and moving slowly toward more severe punishment create a different psychological state than mere obedience to atrocities; if people are obedient to authority per se, Milgram could have started at 330 volts.

Question 23

Blame-the-victim

Answer 23

Contempt licenses cruelty, which when justified, leads to brutality, then killing, then to systematic killing.

Question 24

Power of the social situation

Answer 24

> Although we like to think of ourselves as independent in our thinking and actions, we are powerfully influenced by external situational forces: where we are, who we are with, what we are doing and sociocultural context has a huge influence on our behaviour.
Evil rarely results from a few bad apples or obedience to monsters -> evil situations produce evil behaviours; situations can induce ordinary people to capitulate to cruelty.

Question 25

Fundamental attribution error (correspondence bias)

Answer 25

FAE is a tendency to interpret others’ actions as expressing their disposition rather than the situation they are in -> bad people do bad things, good people do good things.
Moral rationalisations for immoral behaviour.

Question 26

5-step social identity model of the development of collective hate

Answer 26

→ Step 1: the creation of a cohesive ingroup through shared social identification.
→ Step 2: the exclusion of specific populations from the ingroup.
→ Step 3: the constitution of the outgroup as a threat to the existence of the ingroup.
→ Step 4: the representation of the ingroup as uniquely good and virtuous.
→ Step 5: the celebration of the outgroup annihilation as the defence of the ingroup (virtue).

Question 27

Infrahumanisation

Answer 27

▪ Tacit beliefs that the ingroup is more human than the outgroup.
▪ It arises when people view their ingroup and outgroup as essentially different and reserve the “human essence” for the ingroup.
Leyen’s et al., 2000 -> people attribute uniquely human emotions (love, regret, nostalgia) to the ingroup.

Question 28

Predictors of conformity

Answer 28

▪ Difficulty of the judgement
▪ Group size
▪ Unanimity - group cohesiveness
▪Group’s status

Question 29

Minority influence determinants

Answer 29

▪ Consistency
▪ Defection from the majority
▪ Commitment
▪ Self-confidence
▪ Flexibility
The existence of a confident and consistent minority produces ambivalence amongst the majority. Accepting or supporting the views of the minority reduces the uncomfortable feeling of ambivalence.