Unquestioned Conformity, Compliance, and Obedience
It may not be obvious at first, but the majority of citizens follow several sets of rules that may be publicized while others are more unspoken, and these behaviors may not always have ethical results. Social influence causes an individual to conform, comply, and obey based on the actions and commands of others in order to not feel excluded.
Conformity is how a person perceives the norms or rules in a given situation and decides to behave in that manner in order to fit in. Compliance is the act of following along with whatever the group is doing regardless of personal opinion. Obedience involves firmly following the laws that are given by an authoritative person.
Professor of psychology, Philip Zimbardo, believes that violence is caused by negative situations that are triggered by failed systems. While conformity, compliance, and obedience can aid in efficiency, these three things have resulted in questionable human experiments and have violated human rights at the global level by forcing the masses to commit acts of aggression.
Influence
According to Pozzi, Quartiroli Alfieri, Fattori, and Pistoni, people conform to perceived norms because there is pressure to belong to society in order to succeed. Normative influence occurs when an individual conforms because they care what others think of them. Informational influence causes a person to conform based on the preferred behavior that is shown by others. A descriptive norm is situational and depends on what a person perceives at the given moment.
Normative influence, information influence, and descriptive norms do play a role in changing attitudes and behaviors to conform to norms because people generally want to get along with others and want to be inclusive by behaving justly. The fear of punishment or disapproval are other reasons why individuals choose to comply with the instructions or perceived rules.
The research by Pozzi, Quartiroli Alfieri, Fattori, and Pistoni shows that obedience is promoted as a moral quality and skill since birth, and disobeying is viewed as a failure by the majority.
The Experiments
The Asch Conformity Experiment, the Milgram Experiment, and the Stanford Prison Experiment are examples of the vile side of social influence.
The Asch Conformity Experiment involved one real participant and multiple fake participants, in multiple trials, who were asked about the size of the lines that were shown on several cards in comparison to the line on another card. The Milgram Experiment included an experimenter, a real participant behaving as a teacher, and a fake participant behaving as a learner where the legitimate participant applied a fake electric shock to the learner when they answered incorrectly. The Stanford Prison Experiment had one group of participants behave as prison guards while the other group behaved as prisoners.
The results of the Asch Conformity Experiment were that even when the false participants gave an obviously wrong answer, the real participants conformed with the wrong answer a third of the time. The results of the Milgram Experiment were that 65% of the participants continued shocking the fake participant to the highest voltage possible.
The results of the Stanford Prison Experiment were that the guards became progressively demeaning and aggressive while the prisoners followed along — some stoically whereas others had emotional breakdowns.
Unchecked obedience — because of the belief that a system cannot fail — will lead to abuses of power which harm others psychologically and physically.
Social Norm Misconceptions
Real-world examples of normative influence, informational influence and descriptive norms can be found everywhere, and they can have positive effects on human behavior. The research by Dempsey, McAlaney, and Bewick shows that healthy habits can be encouraged through social influence.
For example, normative influence can cause a person to wear ethical clothing items and attempt to have the so-called ideal body. Information influence can inspire a person to throw trash away in the appropriate bin while recyclable items are thrown in the assigned bins, and others may feel forced to eat fresh produce instead of potato chips. An example of descriptive influence would be how a person may drink water or a sports drink during a sporting event.
Even Dempsey, McAlaney, and Bewick admit that social norm misconceptions exist where people perceive that certain behaviors are appropriate when they’re actually unhealthy and unpopular. Excessive alcoholic consumption, hazardous sexual habits, driving while distracted, and abuse of legal and illegal drugs are examples of misperceived norms that young adults tend to believe.
People are just as likely to commit to an unhealthy behavior as much as a healthy behavior if they believe enough people are doing it and there is some amount of social reward.
“Good” and “Evil”
Aaccording to the speech given by Philip Zimbardo, the systems created by men carry more blame than the men that cause physical and psychological harm. He played a part in the Abu Ghraib trials and was involved in the research conducted during the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment.
American soldiers brutalized Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison while college students — those roleplaying as prison guards — abused other students that had roles as prisoners in a research study. One genuinely occurred in a prison while the other was an experiment, and while the goals may have been to gather intelligence about the enemy or to understand how power influences behavior, the results were the dehumanization of the real and roleplaying prisoners.
Those who perceived themselves as holding the authority became aggressive while those who perceived themselves as submissive did not fight back and suffered social stress.
Although it is usual to try to find blame at the individual level or the situational level, Philip Zimbardo believes that in order to change an “evil” person that was once “good” or healthy, the situation must be changed, but in order to alter that situation, the core system of rules needs to be transformed.
The video indicates that the effects of social influence can cause people to abuse power that they are not accustomed to handling, and the people in a group are likely to follow what the others are doing — even if it’s unethical.
Conclusion
While systems aid in organizing people and behaviors for efficiency, it is obvious that unquestioned loyalty, rules, and authority can create acts of violence that would go against the very rules of the system. The benefits and consequences of complying, conforming and obeying are order and some level of morality, but if the power tips and some people are allowed to break the rules, it opens a flood of inappropriate behavior.
Zimbardo thinks that small acts of heroism by average people, during moments of social abuse, can make a difference in minimizing and preventing human rights violations. Conformity, compliance, and obedience, when it does result in aggressive behavior, needs to be addressed by normal people who are willing to stand up to the abuses instead of doing nothing. Ignoring “evil” is just as guilty and criminal as following the actions of a group or the orders of authority.
Social influence has two sides, “good” and “evil,” but failing to consider the possibility that systems are corrupt, and not realizing that authority is flawed with the human condition, will make it difficult to stop unethical and violent violations of power.
