In the early 1960s, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram began what would become one of social psychology’s most famed and chilling experiments. Milgram began his work during the widely publicized trial of World War Two Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. His defence, along with other Nazis for sending millions of people to their deaths was that he was simply ‘following the orders of his superiors. He was executed for his crimes against humanity, but the question got Milgram thinking, what might the average person be capable of when under orders? Under what conditions does someone conform to orders, and what dynamics affect how humans are likely to behave?
For his initial experiment, Milgram recruited forty male volunteers using newspaper adverts. He built a fake shock generator with a scale of thirty switches that could deliver shocks of increments from thirty volts up to four hundred and fifty volts. He then paired each volunteer with someone who was the participant, this person was in fact one of the colleagues posing as a research subject. He had them draw straws to see who would be the ‘learner’ and who would be the ‘teacher’. The volunteers didn’t realize that the draw was fixed so that they’d always be the ‘teacher’, and their partner would be the ‘learner’. The fake ‘learner’ was put into a room strapped to a chair and wired up with electrodes.
The ‘teacher’ had no idea that the learner was fake, and was asked to memorize a list of word pairs. The ‘teacher’ was told that he’d be testing the ‘learners’ to meet all of those words and should administer an electric shock for every wrong answer, increasing the shock level a little bit each time. From here the pretend ‘learner’ purposely gave mainly wrong answers eliciting shocks from the ‘teacher’. If a ‘teacher’ hesitated, perhaps affected by the learners’ cries of pain, the researcher would give orders to make sure he continued. These orders were delivered in a series of four prompts. He first was told to ‘please continue’. If the participant didn’t comply, the researcher issued other prompts such as ‘the experiment requires you to continue’ and then ‘it’s absolutely essential that you continue’ and finally ‘you have no choice but to continue’.
Even Milgram was surprised by the first round of experiments about two-thirds of the participants ended up delivering the maximum four hundred and fifty volt shock all of the volunteers continued to at least three hundred volts. Over a years, Milgram kept conducting this experiment changing the situation in different ways to see if it had any effect on people’s obedience. What he repeatedly found was that obedience was highest when the person giving the orders was nearby, was perceived as an authority figure, especially if they were from a prestigious institution. This was also true if the victim was depersonalized, were placed at a distance such as in another room, plus subjects were more likely to comply with the orders if they didn’t see anyone else disobeying. If there were no role models of defiance, in the end, Millgram’s path-breaking work shed some seriously harsh light on the enormous power of two of the key cornerstone topics of social psychology.: social influence and conformity.
We all conform to some sort of social norms, such as following traffic laws or even obeying the dress codes for different roles and environments. When we know how to act in a certain group or setting life just seems to go more smoothly some of this conformity is nonconscious automatic mimicry like how you’re likely to laugh. If you see someone else laughing or nodding thier head, this behaviour can become contagious, but overall conformity describes how we adjust our behaviour or thinking to follow the behaviour or rules of the group we belong to. Social psychologists have always been curious about the degree to which a person might follow or rebel against their group’s social norms.
During the early 1950s Polish American psychologist Solomon Eliot Asch tested the power of conformity through a simple test. In this experiment, the volunteer is told that they’re participating in the study on visual perception and is seated at a table with five other people. The experimenter shows the group a picture of a standard line and three comparison lines of various lengths, then he asked the people to say which of the three lines matches the comparison line. It’s clear to anyone with any kind of good vision that the second line is the right answer. Most if not all of the other people in the group start choosing the wrong line, the participant doesn’t know that those other people are all actors. He
A common deception used in social psychological research is intentionally giving the wrong answer. This causes the real participant to struggle with trusting their own eyes or going with the group in the end. Asch found that most subjects still gave what they knew was the correct answer, but more than a third were willing to give the wrong answer to fit in with the group. Subsequent researchers found that people are more likely to conform to the group if they’re made to feel incompetent or insecure, are in a group of three or more people, especially if all those people are in agreement. In addition, status or attractiveness, if they feel that others are watching, all have an influence on whether we are to conform in situations.
The experiments of Milgram and Asch showed us that people conform for lots of different reasons. They both investigated the power of the situation, conformity, respect for authority, fear of being different, fear of rejected or simply a desire for approval and how this can affect our behaviour. This is known as normative social influence, the idea that we comply in order to fuel our need to be liked or belong. Next time you are in a group setting or are told to do something by someone whom you perceive to be in a position of authority, remind yourself of Milgram and Asch’s results from their social conformity experiments.
Meriam
