Case Study # 36: The Power Of Conformity

This article speaks on the issue of conformity vs. controversy, as a culture we tend to go towards the former. A group of psychologists performed an experiment where participants had to pick which line was most similar to the test line, now when the participants were alone they picked the right line ninety-nine percent of the time. They decided to add a kink into the experiment and make it into a group experiment. The psychologist Solomon Asch noticed this phenomena as stated in the article, “Yet when other participants answered as part of a group in which fake respondents had been coached to pick a particular incorrect line, almost three-quarters of the unknowing participants made at least one wrong choice and one-third of them conformed to the group choice half the time.” Why is that as people we can be so easily influenced by strangers that we will never see again?

The Milgram experiment was conducted in 1963 by Stanley Milgram in order to focus on the conflict between obedience to authority and to personal conscience. The experiment consisted of 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, and who’s jobs ranged from unskilled to professional. The roles of this experiment included a learner, teacher, and researcher. The participant was deemed the teacher and was in the same room as the researcher. The learner, who was also a paid actor, was put into the next room and strapped into an electric chair. The teacher administered a test to the learner, and for each question that was incorrect, the learner was to receive an electric shock by the teacher, increasing the level of shock each time. The shock generator ranged from

In 1951, Solomon Asch carried out several experiments on conformity. The aim of these studies was to investigate conformity in a group environment situation. The purpose of these experiments was to see if an individual would be swayed by public pressure to go along with the incorrect answer. Asch believed that conformity reflects on relatively rational process in which people are pressured to change their behaviour. Asch designed experiments to measure the pressure of a group situation upon an individual judgment. Asch wanted to prove that conformity can really play a big role in disbelieving our own senses.

If a person of authority ordered you inflict a 15 to 400 volt electrical shock on another innocent human being, would you follow your direct orders? That is the question that Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University tested in the 1960’s. Most people would answer “no,” to imposing pain on innocent human beings but Milgram wanted to go further with his study. Writing and Reading across the Curriculum holds a shortened edition of Stanley Milgram’s “The Perils of Obedience,” where he displays an eye-opening experiment that tests the true obedience of people under authority figures. He observes that most people go against their natural instinct to never harm innocent humans and obey the extreme and dangerous instructions of authority

The two studies being analyzed today are the Stanly Milgram experiment and the Slater experiment. The two similar experiments yielded information about obedience to authority that explains the correlation in society between authority, obedience, and morality. Despite the major ethical problems in the Milgram experiment, it is known in social psychology today that human beings will follow orders from authority figures even to the extent of inflicting harm on another. However, even with this fact, it is also known that there is limits to such obedience.

The Milgram Obedience Study was an experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1963 to observe how far people would obey instructions that resulted in harming another individual. The experiment consisted of a “learner” engaging in a memory task and a “teacher” testing the “learner” on the task, administering electrical shocks to the “learner” each time an incorrect answer was given; the electric shocks started out small from 15 volts, labeled as “SLIGHT SHOCK”, all the way to 450 volts, labeled as “X X X”—of course, that was what the participant was told. The true purpose of the experiment was not disclosed until after the experiment and the “random selection” of who would be the “teacher” or “learner” was rigged so that the participant was always the “teacher” and the “learner” was always an actor. The shocks, naturally, were never given to the “learner”, and the “learner” gave responses that were scripted, both in answers to the questions and in responses to the shocks.

In the article, “The Perils of Obedience,” Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, published the findings of his infamous human authority experiment. During this trial, human subjects were tested to discern how far one will go in order to obey the commands of an authority figure. The test subjects were fooled into believing someone was actually being shocked; however, the reality was the other person was simply an actor and never received any shocks. The results were astounding: sixty-five percent of the subjects continued the entire 450 volts, while the rest lasted until at least 300 volts. In response to the experiment, Diana Baumrind, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkley, examined the actions and moral issues executed by

Solomon Asch tested conformity at Swarthmore College in 1951 by putting a participant in a group of people whose task was to match line lengths. Each individual was expected to announce which of three lines was the closest in length to a reference line. But the participant was placed in a group of actors, who were all told to give the correct answer twice then switch to each saying the same incorrect answer. Asch wanted to see whether the participant would conform and start to give the wrong answer as well, knowing that he would otherwise be a single outlier.

In 1961, Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment on a group’s obedience to authority. This experiment has encountered intense scrutiny ever since its findings were first published in 1963; many people question the ethics and validity of the experiment. Multitudes of researchers have taken it upon themselves to determine the answers to the questions (McLeod). Based on new guidelines for ethics, Stanley Milgram’s experiment on the obedience to authority was neither ethical nor valid.

“Saul McLeod.” The Milgram Experiment, Saul Mcleod, 1 Jan. 1970, www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html. American Psychological Association, American Psychological Association, www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx?item=3. There were a lot of things wrong with The Milgram Experiment that needed to be changed to meet the APA's Code of Conduct. First “Principle E: Respect for People's Rights and Dignity” that something Milgram Experiment didn’t have, again when the participant wanted to quit the scientist wanted to continue with the experiment not caring to see if the subject was alright or alive. Participants were 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, there were 30 switches on the shock generator, as a result, each time when the subject makes a mistake, increasing the level of electric shock that can easily harm them. If the participants refused to administer a shock or can’t continue they were giving prods to ensure they continued. My conclusion The Milgram Experiment is that I understand people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even though of harming an innocent human being. People tend to obey orders whatever they are told too and believe whoever is telling them what to

Conformity is a situation of changing one’s behavior in order to match the actions of the society around the person. The social influence cause people to agree or even behave like the majority of the people in the specific group so that the group can perceive them as normal. Solomon Asch (1956) was interested to know the act of people in conformity pressure. Because of that, he created an experiment to investigate the process by asking college students in a group of eight to match the lengths of different lines. The experiment shows that 95% of the students correctly match 12 lines without pressure of group. Ash repeats the experiment by changing the situation. The students now need to hear answers of five other people who are actually confederates

There is a fundamental human need to belong to social groups especially if people were to live and work together, it is likely that they need to agree on common beliefs, values, attitudes and behaviours in order to get along and fit-in. Thus, we learnt to conform to rules of other people, the more people see others behaving in a particular way or making particular decisions, the more likely people will feel obliged to follow the suit. This is called conformity and can be defined in different ways, Aronson, Wilson & Akert (2014) stated it is the changing of one’s behavior due to the real or imagined influence of other people. According to Deutsch and Gerard (1955), social influence should be distinguished into two types, the informational social influence and normative social influence. The occurrence of social influence has implied to many real life events, which has drawn many researchers to attention. This has lead many researchers to design distinct experiments to try and understand the cause of the conformity, whether conformity is situation dependent, and whether we are able to resist social influences.

In pyschology conformity can be descibed as an indiviual’s tendency to follow the unspoken rules or behaviours of the social group to which he/she belongs to or wants to be apart of. Many psychologists including , Jenness (1932), Sherif (1935) both experimented in psychology, investigating conformity and group pressure. However, perhaps the most famous conformity experiment was done by Solomon Asch (1951) and his line judgment experiment. (McLeod 2007)

Stanley Milgram, a famous social psychologist, and student of Solomon Asch, conducted a controversial experiment in 1961, investigating obedience to authority (1974). The experiment was held to see if a subject would do something an authority figure tells them, even if it conflicts with their personal beliefs and morals. He even once said, "The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act (Cherry).” This essay will go over what Milgram’s intent was in this experiment and what it really did for society.

There are criticisms with this experiment though because people believe that "the research concentrates on the individual rather than the situation they are in. Also, the research invariably deals with very trivial tasks or judgments. For example, ` how long is the line?' Well who cares?" (Philip Banyard and Andrew Grayson, Introducing Psychological Research, p9). The study was also often done on students, of which are more likely to conform due to the fact that they do not want to be different than what they thought were other students in the group. It might have portrayed them as `stupid' and may even have thought if they gave the wrong answer (which was actually the correct answer but others said differently) thought the others may think they had a weakness in their intelligence if they didn't concur with them. The meaningless nature of the task, no emotional involvement and that they were all strangers to one another also affected the responses of the research participant. In fact, the results of the experiment may have shown conformity considerably higher than in a `real life' situation where people are more likely to put forward their own beliefs about