Conformity and Obedience

“A few decades ago American social psychologists were interested in proving that someone like Hitler could never rise to power in the United States. After all, our country was founded by people who broke away from a tyrannical monarchy and later, its tough pioneers pushed the frontier from the Atlantic, across the Greats Plains, over the Rockies and the Sierras, and dumped it into the Pacific Ocean. So, the folklore has it that we’re a nation of such rugged individualists that we could never be squeezed under the thumb of a ruthless dictator. To add a little scientific leverage to this idea, Drs. Stanley Milgram and Solomon Asch marched off to their laboratories to gather data and spin theories.

Asch tested the participants in his now-classic experiment by having them, one at a time, sit around a table with six other people and compare the length of a standard line to three other lines – one of which was an obvious replica of the standard line. The experimental task was to decide which line matched the standard. Unbeknownst to the participants, the other six people at the table were actually working for Dr.Asch and had been primed to give the wrong answer. Answers to the line-matching task were given out loud, going around the table.

What happened when several people answering before the real participant picked what was clearly the wrong line? Almost one-third of the people tested ignored the information staring them in the face and conformed with the group – they also picked the wrong line! Who forgot to mention the story about rugged individualists to this group?

Milgram put a little added juice in his equally-classic study: Each participant was told to give an electric shock to another person, at the researcher’s command. The experimental task was structured so that each participant was asked to give progressively higher shocks, and the other person was in another room. Again, the other person was actually working for the researcher, and the “shock” was fake, but conditions were extremely realistic and appeared to fooled virtually everyone in Milgram’s study.

Milgram was testing to see how many “normal” people would deliver a “lethal” shock to another person simply because an authority figure (the researcher) told them to. The real shock in the Milgram study lay in the results: About two-thirds of the people tested in Milgram’s experiment followed all the experimenter’s instructions to deliver shocks – past the point where the other person cried out, pounded on the walls, begged for mercy, and then stopped apparently dead!

With two straight out fast ball strikes against the non-conformist, was science proving that we are just a bunch of weak-kneed conformists who were as cowardly as the people who carried out the orders of any past dictators?

Not exactly, although these experiments blasted the original hypothesis of unshakable American independence right out of the water. What was demonstrated by these studies, and all the follow-up research projects they inspired, is the formerly inconceivable power of social forces such as conformity and obedience. What we know now is that a lot, if not most, everyday people will follow the lead of their follows – no matter how convincing the physical evidence to the contrary (think of the Asch study). We are also forced to face the frightening truth that most of us blindly obey “authorities,” no matter how heinous their commands (think of the Milgram study)”

Randell J. Strossen, Ph.D wrote the last 7 paragraphs, not me. Whereas, Strossen was setting up his point of not blindly listening to others in the gym, I’ve got my own plans….

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