Research suggests that overall rates of conformity may have reduced since the time of Asch’s research. Furthermore, efforts to replicate Asch’s study have made it clear that many factors determine how likely it is that someone will demonstrate conformity to the group. These factors include the participant’s age, gender, and socio-cultural background (Bond & Smith, 1996; Larsen, 1990; Walker & Andrade, 1996). An example of informational social influence may be what to do in an emergency. Imagine that you are in a movie theater watching a film and what seems to be smoke comes in the theater from under the emergency exit door.

Compliance and obedience also have a similarity in the foot-in-the-door approach. This is also reflected in the Milgram experiments on obedience where the subject built up from smaller shocks to larger ones. There are much experiments (Asch, 1951; Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2003) done to show that when confronted by social norms individuals will often adjust their behaviour to closer approximate of the perceived norm. The participants were deceived as they were led to believe they had given electric shocks to the learner. The main difference between conformity and obedience is that the influence of authority in conformity is indirect whereasthe influence of authority in obedience is direct. Behavioral study of obedience.The Journal of abnormal and social psychology,67, 371.

Neural Basis of Two Kinds of Social Influence: Obedience and Conformity

However, this does not mean that you now agree with the way you voted or what you voted for….only that you did what you were told to do. As a child, you consider your parent to be an authority figure in your life, so when they tell you to do something, you do so, i.e., sticking to curfew, cleaning your room, doing chores etc. At the same time, you’re aware that if you don’t obey them, then your parent can, and often will, punish you.

The tendency to conform occurs in small groups and in society as a whole, and may result from subtle unconscious influences or direct and overt social pressure. Conformity can occur in define obedience in psychology the presence of others, or when an individual is alone. For example, people tend to follow social norms when eating or watching television, regardless of whether others are present.

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Additionally, extensive training is given in armies to make soldiers capable of obeying orders in situations where an untrained person would not be willing to follow orders. Soldiers are initially ordered to do seemingly trivial things, such as picking up the sergeant’s hat off the floor, marching in just the right position, or marching and standing in formation. The orders gradually become more demanding, until an order to the soldiers to place themselves into the midst of gunfire gets an instinctively obedient response. Obedience can also be studied outside of the Milgram paradigm in fields such as economics or political science. One economics study that compared obedience to a tax authority in the lab versus at home found that participants were much more likely to pay participation tax when confronted in the lab.

• However, contrarily, Opdenakker , argues that the face to face interview method has its advantage of social cues such as body language and this helps the interviewee get a lot more extra information.
• In addition to the above studies, additional research using participants from different cultures (including Spain, Australia, and Jordan) also found participants to be obedient.
• When he was a teenager, my son often enjoyed looking at photographs of me and my wife taken when we were in high school.
• Maximum amplitudes were observed at approximately 450 ms. Amplitude of P3 in the absolutely consistent review situations is much larger than in the relatively consistent review situations and inconsistent situations.
• This paper aims to look at the similarities and differences between the concepts of the three types of social influences.
• The findings raise questions about the power of blind obedience in deplorable situations such as atrocities and genocide.

A confederate is a person working as a researcher who pretends to be a participant instead. The confederate was an actor who would scream out in pain when the fake shock was delivered. Perhaps amazingly, to Milgram’s surprise and consternation, twenty-six of the forty men, or 65 percent, continued to give the fake shocks even though they knew they were harming their fellow human beings. The best definition of obedience would be a person being submissive to the command of authority. Understand Milgram’s obedience to authority study and view examples of obedience to authority.