The classic rhetorical question, “If all of your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump too?” Is meant to test the power of social influence, a topic I discussed in my last blog post. An edited version of that question, “If a person of great authority ordered you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?”, is focussed more on the idea of obedience.

Obedience refers to complying to a command, made typically by someone who is of high authority. This implies conformity without really believing in or supporting the behavior demanded. While self-preservation, the drive evaluated in the second question proposed above, is often strong enough to overcome our desire to obedient, you would be surprised by how much we are capable of sacrificing in order to satisfy this desire.

It is frightening to believe that all people, not just those who are perceived as bad or immoral, have a capacity for evil. This capability depends especially on our psychological need to be obedient. But from where is this need derived? Social psychologists attribute human obedience to normative and informational social influence, as well as self-justification.

Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to explore the extent of human obedience when people are told to harm other people. Milgram created an experiment that is taught in almost every university’s social psychology class. HIs findings provided significant information about how the social situation affects the behavior affects human beings, while also calling into question the morality of psychological research methods.

Milgram has participants enter his lab under the impression that they would be participating in a study regarding learning and teaching methods. Participants were joined by confederates, people working with the psychological team. The participants and confederates were assigned either the role of teacher or student for the next situation. This assignment was not random, although the participants believed it was, with confederates being given the student role and participants the teacher role.

The participants and confederates were taken to separate rooms. Participants were shown a shock device and were told that the confederates in the other room were wired to this machine. They were instructed to ask confederates questions from a list. If the confederates answered correctly, no shock would be administered, but if the answer was incorrect, the participants were told to press a button and unleash an electric shock on the “students’. After each incorrect answer, the shock level would increase in increments, spanning from 15 volts to 450 volts.

In the other room, confederates increasingly answered questions incorrectly, as per instructions. As the electric shock voltage grew, confederates played pre-recorded audio snippets of them crying out in pain or asking to be let out of the study. These recordings became even more disturbing as the voltage grew. Eventually, the confederates stopped playing recordings, giving the participants the idea that they had gone unconscious.

Why would the participants continue to shock the confederates after feelings of pain were vocalized? It is important to mention that an experimenter was present in the room where the participants sat. This experimenter told the participants that it was imperative that they continue with the study, and that they could not stop. Protesting participants were met with those kinds of statements.

The participant’s behavior can be attributed to their need for obedience. Participants did not want to challenge the experimenter; they felt the need to continue administering electric shocks simply because the experimenter was telling them to do so.

The participants who reached the electric shock level after which the confederates feigned unconsciousness or death walked out of the studying knowing they were capable of killing a stranger, simply because someone else told them to do so. This inevitably caused psychological, even though they were informed that they had not actually harmed the confederates.

The findings of Milgram’s study make me re-evaluate my power to resist the authority of others, and hopefully, they do the same for you.

 

We all like to believe that peer pressure doesn’t affect us, that advertising doesn’t work, and that we would be completely comfortable being the only individual facing the door of an elevator when the six other passengers decide to randomly face the back. Why would you turn to the back of an elevator, even if everyone else was? You are not stupid! Unfortunately, when placed in this situation, you would most likely find that your ability to resist the actions of the group is handicapped. Just like the man in this episode of the popular 1960s show Candid Camera, which I have linked, you are greatly susceptible to the power of conformity.

Conformity in social psychology is defined by Revel’s Social Psychology as “changing one’s behavior due to the real or imagined influence of others.” Conformity is a strong aspect of almost every social situation. Our willingness to sacrifice individuality in order to fulfill the expectations of others has puzzled social psychologists for years and has spawned an abundance of psychological research.

Social psychologists have been able to identify two major reasons for conformity. The first is informational social influence, which occurs when situations are ambiguous and we look at others for information. When we are unsure about something we use the behaviors and attitudes of other people to fill this void in comprehension. We adopt the behavior of others, thus conforming for the purpose of cognition.

The second cause of conformity is derived from our need for high self-esteem, the desire for others to like us. This is referred to as normative social influence. Psychologist Solomon Asch was particularly interested in this source of conformity, conducting a series of experiments that are now widely known and respected- Asch Tests. 

In this blog post, I will simply focus on Asch’s initial experiment. Asch had subjects walk into a room as a group and sit around a table. Of the five to six people spread around the table, only one was a participant, all the others were confederates- members of the study working directly with the experimenters. The participate was unaware of this; he or she believed he was surrounded by fellow study participants.

Asch knew he had to create a situation that was not ambiguous, because such a situation would lend itself to informational social influence, instead of proving the presence of normative social influence.

He first showed participants a photo of three vertical straight lines of various sizes. Then he showed a photo of one line and asked the participants which of the three lines from the first photo was closest in length. The correct answer to this question was obvious, thus the singular unwitting participant could easily identify the right line to choose. However, Asch had all of the confederates answer the question before the participants, all choosing the same incorrect line.

Asch continued to ask other similar questions with obvious answers. He found that around 76% of participants conformed, offering the incorrect answer, after only one of these questions. The 24% that did not conform after the first question caved after the next few rounds.

While these participants decided to affirm the answers of the confederate majority, Asch understood that they did not actually believe that was the correct answer. The participants were motivated by a need to fit into a group, to be liked and accepted by others, by normative social influence.

76% of people were willing to offer an obviously incorrect answer to a question in order to fit in with a group of people they did not even know and would most likely never see again. This information seems to challenge the commonplace that we all tend to hold that we are strong enough to resist conformity. It might be time to reevaluate just how much the presence of others influences your thoughts and behaviors.

 

What are you feeling right now? Can you describe it? Are you happy that it is Friday and the school week is almost over? Are you nervous about an upcoming exam? Are you homesick, wishing you could see your family and pets?

When I asked you what you were feeling, I asked you to identify an emotion. We all know what emotions are, and we can easily bring forth examples. But, it is much more difficult to answer the questions of how and why we are able to experience emotion.

Psychological researcher Stanley Schacter developed a two-factor theory of emotion. This theory asserts that in order for one to feel and emotion, two components must be available. First, one must undergo physiological arousal; heart rate increases, breathing rate increases, one’s palms start to sweat. Second, one must acknowledge this change in body physiology and attempt to understand it. Only after physiological arousal occurs, accompanied by a social cognition, can an emotional label be created.

This theory asserts that humans can actually make mistakes when identifying emotion. When the social cognition created about arousal is incorrect, one has undergone the process of misattribution.

Misattribution is the key to how emotional theory relates to social psychology. The social situation is often ambiguous, and although we do not feel as though we are constantly confused, our brains work incredibly hard to make sense of all facets of the situation. The vagueness of the social situation offers a breeding ground for misattribution.

In order to test the occurrence of misattribution, in relation to Schacter’s two-factor theory of emotion, researchers Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron developed an experiment involving a suspension bridge and a beautiful woman.

In 1974, Dutton and Arthur observed people walking along a suspension bridge. The bridge was strung at an extremely high height over a large river. The researchers knew that crossing the bridge evoked physiological arousal, as it was a slightly dangerous and scary situation. They decided to capitalize on this arousal in order to emotional misattribution.

Dutton and Arthur had an attractive woman approach different men, give them her phone number, and tell them to call her some time. Unfortunately for these men, the number was actually that of Dutton and Arthur’s laboratory. Some of these interactions occurred in the middle of the bridge, where the men’s physiological arousal was high. Other interactions took place on a bench a few feet away from the edge of the bridge, where men sat to relax after crossing the bridge. These men were experiencing less physiological arousal.

A larger percentage of men who had been approached by the woman while standing the middle of the bridge called her phone number. The men who had been approached while cooling down on the bench where less likely to call the woman back.

This was due to the misattribution of arousal. The men in the middle of the bridge attributed their arousal to sexual attraction to the woman, when in actuality, they felt that way because of the alarming height of the bridge. Men that had time to unwind on the bench, did not have this extra arousal to attribute to sexual attraction.

The results of this study show that we can actually be experiencing an “incorrect” emotion. It is often difficult to think about emotions in biological terms, because our feelings seem so personal and almost spiritual. It is hard to believe that what one feels could possibly be “wrong” in relation to the social situation, but psychological studies have proven the existence of misattribution.