Lecture Overview:
Conformity, Compliance, and Obedience
Conformity
Depth of Conformity
Compliance
Obedience
Dissent
CONFORMITY
Change in behaviour due to the real or imagined influence of
other people
-
COMPLIANCE:
Change in behaviour due to direct requests #om another person
OBEDIENCE:
Change in behaviour due to commands of an authority figure
Conformity_-->Compliance-->Obedience
Increasing Pressure on the Individual
Conformity
Change in behaviour due to the real or imagined influence of
other people
How Does Conformity
Operate?
Implicit Social Influence
Informational Social Influence
Normative Social Influence
Implicit Social Influence
Influence caused by increasing the accessibility of social beliefs in working memory
Typically occurs outside of awareness
Implicit Social Influence experiment
-The Unbearable Automaticity of Being" (Bargh & Chartrand,
1999)
trying to show that social beliefs affect you without you knowing they affect you
-went to elderly living home, they had people participate in experiment in a word recognition tasks
-made pe
Informational Social Influence
-The influence of other people that leads us to conform because we see them as a source of information to guide our behaviour
-Mass psychogenic illness
-Sherif's (1936) dot studies
-Factors that increase informational social influence
-Resisting informati
Mass Psychogenic Illness
The occurrence of similar
physical symptoms in a
group of people with no
known physical cause
Orson Welles (1938)
War of the Worlds
Broadcast
freaked out people
Situations that Increase
Informational Social Influence
More likely to look to others for cues in:
Ambiguous situations
Situations of Crisis
When you have reason to believe other people are
Experts
Resisting Informational
Social Influence
Look for non-human evidence
Remember that you have a consistency bias
If something is wrong, then be the one who speaks out!
Normative Social Influence
Influence of others that leads us to conform in order to be liked
and accepted by them
Causes:
Power of Social Norms
Conformity & Social Approval
Social Impact Theory
The study of factors that increase conformity based on Normative Social Influence
Strength: The group is important
Immediacy: The group is temporospatially proximal
Number:Group size (larger group = more conformity)
Resisting Normative Social Influence
-Find an ally
-Social norms allow occasional deviation
-----Idiosyncrasy credits
-----By conforming over time, you earn "idiosyncrasy credits"
that you can effectively cash in when you want to
deviate #om the group
Depth of Conformity
Private Acceptance
Public Compliance
Private Acceptance
--> Conformity due to a genuine belief that others are right
Likely to change long term behaviour
Public Compliance
Conformity where behaviour is only changed publicly
-->You believe the others are wrong
-->May or may not change behaviour in the long run
Implicit Social Influence
Private Acceptance
Informational
Social Influence
Sherif's Dot Studies
Private Acceptance
Asch's Lines
Normative
Influence
Public Compliance
Compliance
! Change in behaviour due to direct requests #om another
person
Persuasion Strategies:
Door-in-the-face
Reciprocity Norm
Foot-in-the-door
Low-Balling
Obedience
Change in behaviour due to commands of an authority figure
Milgram's Obedience
Results:
64% of participants shocked up to 450 V mark
Recent meta-analysis (Blass, 1999):
Mean of 61 - 66% of participants shock up to the
450 V mark
Obedience
Why obey?
Normative social influence
Disobeying authority figures can have severe
consequences - very rigid social norms
Informational social influence
Authority figures are experts
Why disobey?
Sometimes the costs of compliance are too great
Minority Dissent
Observing minority dissenters may not result in explicit
behaviour change, but has a deeper impact on implicit
attitudes