11.4 Social Influence

Conformity

We often adopt the preferences, actions, and attitudes of the people around us, like fashion, music, food, and entertainment. Our views on political issues, religious questions, and lifestyles also reflect, to some degree, the attitudes of the people we interact with. Decisions about risk-taking behaviors, such as smoking and drinking, are also influenced by whether the people we spend time with engage in these activities. Psychologists refer to this tendency to act and think like the people around us as conformity.

Asch’s Conformity Experiment on Groupthink (YouTube)

Consider a classic study conducted many years ago by Solomon Asch (1956). Male college students gave wrong answers to a simple visual judgment task rather than go against the group (Asch, 1956). Variations of Asch’s procedures have been conducted numerous times across many cultures (Bond, 2005; Bond & Smith, 1996), and conformity appears to be a universal construct. Bond and Smith (1996) analyzed the results of 133 studies using Asch’s line-judging task in 17 countries categorized as collectivist or individualist orientation. Results were significant, and conformity was greater in more collectivist countries than in individualistic countries. Compared with individualistic cultures, people who live in collectivist cultures place a higher value on the group’s goals than on individual preferences. They are also more motivated to maintain harmony in their interpersonal relations.

Kim and Markus (1999) examined conformity using advertisements from popular magazines in the United States and Korea to see if they emphasized conformity and uniqueness differently. As you can see below, the researchers found that while magazine ads from the United States tended to focus on uniqueness (e.g., “Choose your own view!”; “Individualize”), Korean ads tended to focus more on themes of conformity (e.g., “Seven out of 10 people use this product”; “Our company is working toward building a harmonious society”).

Although the effects of individual differences on conformity tend to be smaller than those of the social context, they do matter. And gender and cultural differences can also be significant. Like most other psychological processes, conformity represents an interaction between culture and the individual.

Obedience

Although we may be influenced by the people around us more than we recognize, whether we conform to the norm is up to us. However, decisions about how to act are not always simple. Sometimes, a more powerful person directs us to do things against our wishes. Psychologists who study obedience are interested in how people react when given an order or command from someone perceived to be in a position of authority. In many situations, obedience can be a favorable thing, like obeying parents, teachers, and police officers, but obedience has a dark side. When “following orders” or “just doing my job,” people can violate ethical principles, break laws, or harm others. This unsettling side of obedience led to some of the most famous and most controversial research in the history of psychology.

Milgram (1963, 1965, 1974) wanted to know why so many otherwise decent German citizens went along with the brutality of the Nazi leaders during the Holocaust, so he conducted a series of laboratory investigations. In his now-famous deception study, Milgram found that 65% of research participants were willing to administer what they believed were 330-volt electric shocks to a fellow research participant despite hearing cries and protests. No one was hurt or injured during this study. The research participant receiving the electric shocks was a confederate—part of the study—but the actual research participants did not know this. They were willing to administer electric shocks because the experimenter told them to continue. These were not cruel people, but they followed the experimenter’s instructions to administer what they believed to be excruciating, if not dangerous, electric shocks to an innocent person.

Milgram’s initial research used male participants, but he found that female participants followed the experimenter’s instructions at exactly the same rate as the men. Some people have argued that today we are more aware of the dangers of blind obedience than we were before Milgram’s research in the 1960s; however, findings from partial and modified replications of Milgram’s procedures recently conducted suggest that people respond to the situation today much like they did a half a century ago (Burger, 2009). Cross-cultural studies of obedience found obedience rates similar to those of Milgram. The United States had an obedience rate of 61%, and the mean across other cultures was about 66%. Some countries had much lower rates of obedience (India reported 42% and Spain reported about 50%), while some countries had much higher rates of obedience (Germany and Austria reported about 80%) (Blass, 2011). Cultural and social norms shape perspectives of authority and obedience and interact with individual decision-making.

Watch this video that shows scenes from a recent partial replication of Milgram’s obedience studies by Burger (2009).

ABC News Primetime Milgram (YouTube)

Decades of research on social influence, including conformity and obedience, make it clear that we live in a social world and that, for better or worse, much of what we do reflects the people we encounter and the groups we belong to. Disturbing implications from the research are that, under the right circumstances, each of us may be capable of acting in some very uncharacteristic and perhaps some very unsettling ways.

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