Module 75: Conformity and Obedience Flashcards
Norm
Understood rules for accepted and expected behavior
- prescribe “proper” behavior
Social Contagion
Tendency to go with their group, to thin and do what it does.
- Behavior is contagious
How does social contagion lead to empathy and fondness?
This natural mimicry enables us to empathize - to feel what others are feeling.
- empathic mimicking fosters fondness
How does social networking enable social contagion?
Social networks serve as contagious pathways for moods, such as happiness and loneliness, drug use, and even the behavior patterns that lead to obesity and sleep loss
On websites, positive ratings generate more positive ratings - a phenomenon called Positive herding
Note:
Knowing what others are doing and feeling what they are feeling may impact what we do and feel
Conformity
Adjusting our behavior or thinking to coincide with a group standard because of real or imagined pressure to fit in
Solomon Asch study
The line comparison study:
- subject and 5 confederates are to identify the lines that are the same length
- the confederates purposefully start answering the wrong answer
More than 1/3 of the time, these intelligent and well-meaning” college students were “willing to call white black” by going along with the group
Normative Social Influence
Influence resulting from a person’s desire to gain approval or avoid disapproval
- frequently we conform to avoid rejection or to gain social approval
Why do we strive to belong?
We are sensitive to social norms because the price we pay for being different can be severe
- we need to belong
Informational Social Influence
Influencing resulting from one’s willingness to accept others’ opinions about reality
- when we accept others; opinions about reality, as when reading online movie and restaurant reviews, we are responding to information social influence
Stanley Milgram
Social psychologist
- knew that people often give in to social pressures but wondered whether people would obey commands
Motivated because he wanted to understand why nazi soldiers followed orders to kill millions of Jewish people in the Holocaust
- shock experiment
What research did Milgram conduct on obedience?
- learners would attempt to remember a series of paired words.
- teachers would provide electric shocks to the learners when they incorrectly matched the pairs
- Milgram carefully walked the teacher and gave them a sample shock
- showed the teacher the learner was hooked up to the generator
- there was no electric shock actually given to the learner (they were in on it)
- to see just how far the subject would go in administering electric shock because he or she had been told to do so by an authority figure
- 60% complied fully to the highest voltage - similar results even when the learned complained of a slight heart condition
What were some variations on the initial research design? Milgram’s shock experiment
Milgram conducted many variations of his research design, modifying the research conditions in many ways.
For instance, in one trial, the “learner” was seated next to the teacher and the teacher had to lift the learner’s arm to place it on a shock plate
For Milgram’s experiment, when was obedience highest?
- when the person giving the orders was close at hand and was perceived to be a legitimate authority figure
- authority figure was supported by a prestigious institute (Yale vs Bridgeport)
- the victim was personalized or at a distance, even in another room
- there were no role models for defiance
How does evil reveal itself? (Milgrams)
- in any society, great evil often grows out of people’s compliance with lesser evils. Milgram, using the foot-in-the-door technique, began with a small level of shock, 15 volts, and escalated step by step
- in the minds of those throwing the switches the small action became justified, making the next act tolerable. So it happens when people succumb, gradually, to evil
