That is, we act the way most people—or most people like us—act. This is not an unreasonable strategy. Other people often have information that we do not, especially when we find ourselves in new situations. If you have ever been part of a conversation that went something like this,. A good example of how misperceived norms can lead to problems is found in research on binge drinking among college students.
Excessive drinking is a serious problem on many campuses Mita, There are many reasons why students binge drink, but one of the most important is their perception of the descriptive norm. They notice the boisterous heavy drinker at the party but fail to consider all the students not attending the party. Most students believe they consume significantly less alcohol than the norm, a miscalculation that creates a dangerous push toward more and more excessive alcohol consumption.
Researchers have demonstrated the power of descriptive norms in a number of areas. Undergraduates selected the healthy food option when led to believe that other students had made this choice Burger et al. Although we may be influenced by the people around us more than we recognize, whether we conform to the norm is up to us.
But sometimes decisions about how to act are not so easy. Sometimes we are directed by a more powerful person to do things we may not want to do. Researchers who study obedience are interested in how people react when given an order or command from someone in a position of authority.
In many situations, obedience is a good thing. We are taught at an early age to obey parents, teachers, and police officers. And a military would fail to function if soldiers stopped obeying orders from superiors. But, there is also a dark side to obedience. More disturbingly, obedience often is at the heart of some of the worst of human behavior—massacres, atrocities, and even genocide.
It was this unsettling side of obedience that led to some of the most famous and most controversial research in the history of psychology. Milgram , , wanted to know why so many otherwise decent German citizens went along with the brutality of the Nazi leaders during the Holocaust. To understand this obedience, Milgram conducted a series of laboratory investigations. In all but one variation of the basic procedure, participants were men recruited from the community surrounding Yale University, where the research was carried out.
These citizens signed up for what they believed to be an experiment on learning and memory. In particular, they were told the research concerned the effects of punishment on learning. Three people were involved in each session. One was the participant. Another was the experimenter. The third was a confederate who pretended to be another participant.
The experimenter explained that the study consisted of a memory test and that one of the men would be the teacher and the other the learner. The teacher watched as the learner was strapped into a chair and had electrodes attached to his wrist. Each lever was labeled with a voltage figure, starting with 15 volts and moving up in volt increments to volts.
Through a microphone, the teacher administered a memory test to the learner in the next room. The learner responded to the multiple-choice items by pressing one of four buttons that were barely within reach of his strapped-down hand. If the teacher saw the correct answer light up on his side of the wall, he simply moved on to the next item. The teacher was instructed to start with the volt lever and move up to the next highest shock for each successive wrong answer.
In reality, the learner received no shocks. But he did make a lot of mistakes on the test, which forced the teacher to administer what he believed to be increasingly strong shocks. The purpose of the study was to see how far the teacher would go before refusing to continue. Get me out of here. I told you I had heart trouble.
This reveals that classification process is implicit in both conformity and obedience. Consistency level may affect conformity and obedience decisions in a similar neuropsychological pattern. Event-related brain potentials ERPs were used in this study to explore the neural mechanisms of conformity and obedience on the model of online book purchasing. Conformity was aroused by the majority influence caused by positive and negative comments.
Obedience was induced by forcing participants to buy the book with lots of negative comments. P3 and N2, two kinds of ERP components which are assumed to be social cognitive related, were recorded and studied in this study. Even though behavioral data displayed no remarkable differences between conformity decisions and obedience decisions, ERP results suggest that obedience triggered bigger cognitive conflicts than conformity.
On the surface, the subjects were easily influenced by both majority opinion and authority command. Deep inside, however, they were more struggling when making the obedience decisions. In the ERP, greater amplitudes of N2 component were observed in the context of obedience. Consistency level did not make a difference on P3 peak latency for both conformity and obedience, which reveals that a classification process is implicit in both decision types i. In addition, for both conformity and obedience decisions, the augmented P3 was observed in the absolutely consistent review situations compared to the relatively consistent review situations.
This study has a number of limitations. The simulation of online book purchase used in this study is rather simple and based on significantly reduced amount of information provided. Measures should be taken to explore better ways to simulate the online purchasing.
It might be possible to introduce graphs and music to enrich the stimulus material. In addition, ERP used in this study records a wide range of brain wave data. More complicated analysis methods might be used to obtain further valuable information. In our research, data analysis was time locked. In the future investigations it would be worth trying some new methods like reaction locked method and traceability analysis.
Future studies should also look into the confounding variables more strictly in order to get more refined results. YX: Main research conceptual framework and reporting. HL: Design and analysis. WZ: Referencing and reporting. ZZ: Methods and formatting. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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Miller, A. New York, NY: Praeger. Milgram, S. Obedience to Authority. Mixon, D. Instead of deception. Theory Soc. Nail, P. Proposal of a four-dimensional model of social response. Nieuwenhuis, S. Palmera, B. Task decision difficulty: effects on ERPs in a same-different letter classification task. Pincus, S. Cross-cultural research in other Western cultures has also yielded high rates of obedience using Milgram's procedure.
Unfortunately, it seems as though Milgram's results were not flukes. By no means. The Asch and Milgram experiments have been repeated in many societies, where they have yielded results roughly similar to those seen in the United States. Thus the phenomena of conformity and obedience seem to transcend culture Many of the studies have reported even higher obedience rates than those seen in Milgram's American samples.
Ever wonder what your personality type means? Sign up to find out more in our Healthy Mind newsletter. Principles of Social Psychology. American Psychological Association. Obeying and Resisting Malevolent Orders.
Published May 25, Milgram S. Obedience to Authority: an Experimental View. Published June 8, Pastorino E, Doyle-Portillo S. What Is Psychology? Australia: Wadsworth Cengage Learning; Weiten W. Psychology: Themes and Variations. Thomson Wadsworth. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for VerywellMind. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page.
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