...individuals in authority. One psychology in particular, Stanley Milgram, conducted a series of experiments investigating individuals’ obedient behavior to authoritative figures, whether positive deeds or acts of violence. This paper will summarize Milgram’s famous research as well as analyze the most current research of conforming to authority. Additionally, this paper will examine the current research on Milgram's findings from the early part of the 1960s. Summary of Milgram's Research Stanley Milgram (1963) was a social psychologist who set out to investigate human obedience, especially following the Second World War and in particular, the Holocaust (Milgram, 1963). Milgram’s interest was to conduct a study to answer the research question, are Germans different? However, as Milgram began to develop a tool used for studying obedience, he soon discovered that all individuals are remarkably obedient to people in authority. Milgram chose a naive subject to administer a dangerous electric shock to a victim, which releases voltage ranges from 15 to 450 (Milgram, 1963). Throughout the experiment, a naive participant is directed to administer more intense shocks to a victim as the role of the teacher were given memory tasks by reading lists of two word pairs and the learner was instructed to read them back. As the internal resistance became stronger, the participants can choose to no longer participate with the experiment; however, the behavior preceding this decision is deliberated...
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...society through compliance to authority. Such historical events of massive genocides include the Holocaust; where Nazi soldiers killed six million innocent Jewish people based on their political and ethical reasoning. Troubled by situations of this nature, Stanley Milgram held a collection of experiments that his book “Obedience to Authority” outlines. Milgram tells us that “the aim of the study was to find when and how people defy authority in the face of clear moral imperatives” ( 4). Milgram found that there are social forces which allow populations to commit morally conflicting acts against other populations. The fundamental variable for this influence is ideology; which is defined in Webster’s dictionary as “a systematic body of concepts, especially about human life or culture”(“ideology”). Ideologies accompanied by social contagions, admit ordinary individuals to transgress in inhumane conformed evils. The obedient subjects of Milgram’s studies and the Nazi soldiers alike are not all necessarily sadistic psychopaths. Rather, they’re a result of ideological social conformity. It has been a commonly accepted idea that those who participated in the holocaust were all individually psychopaths, but conformity to a corrupt authority’s dogma influences ordinary people to behave malevolently. Between 1941- 1945, fifty-five thousand Nazi soldiers worked at death and work camps (Wikipedia, World War 2 casualties). Considering that there were so many participants in this genocide...
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...Two Social Psychology Social Influence Student workbook Name: .................................................................................. Form: ................................................................................... Teacher: .............................................................................. Specification requirements Social psychology Candidates will be expected to demonstrate: • Knowledge and understanding of concepts, theories and studies in relation to individual differences • Skills of analysis, evaluation and application in relation to individual differences • Knowledge and understanding of research methods associated with this area of psychology • Knowledge and understanding of ethical issues associated with this area of psychology. |Content outline | |Social influence |Conformity (majority influence) and explanations of why people conform, including informational | | |social influence and normative social influence | | | | | |Types of conformity, including...
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...Obedience is a form of social influence that occurs when a person yields to explicit instructions on orders from an authority figure. Obedience is compliance with commands given by an authority figure. In the 1960s, the social psychologist Stanley Milgram did a famous research study called the obedience study. It showed that people have a strong tendency to comply with authority figures. Milgram’s Obedience Study Milgram told his forty male volunteer research subjects that they were participating in a study about the effects of punishment on learning. He assigned each of the subjects to the role of teacher. Each subject was told that his task was to help another subject like himself learn a list of word pairs. Each time the learner made a mistake, the teacher was to give the learner an electric shock by flipping a switch. The teacher was told to increase the shock level each time the learner made a mistake, until a dangerous shock level was reached. Throughout the course of the experiment, the experimenter firmly commanded the teachers to follow the instructions they had been given. In reality, the learner was not an experiment subject but Milgram’s accomplice, and he never actually received an electric shock. However, he pretended to be in pain when shocks were administered. Prior to the study, forty psychiatrists that Milgram consulted told him that fewer than 1 percent of subjects would administer what they thought were dangerous shocks to the learner...
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...Social influence is the change in the way that an individual behave, think or comport themselves that occur when they relate or interact with another individual or groups of individuals (Rashotte, 2007, p.562). These changes may be deliberate or sometimes occur subconsciously and the individual in question may not be aware of them (Wood, 2000). There are various forms of social influence among which the most important and widely recognised ones are conformity and obedience. They are concepts that put into perspective how individuals’ behaviours are affected or influenced in a group or social circumstances. This essay looks to explore compliance and obedience in detail. It may seem sometimes these two concepts might be slightly similar in how they affect behaviour in such situations; however they are not to be confused for each other. This essay aims to clarify such perception and distinctively point out the similarities and differences between these two concepts by exploring how they come about and factors that influence them using relevant research evidence. Conformity can be defined as the inclination by individuals to modify their attitudes or manner of behaving to suit that of the social standards. It simply means to succumb to pressures of the society (Crutchfield, 1955) However, it does not necessarily mean that their opinion or perception has changed; it simply means that they have changed their behaviour just for the purpose of being considered acceptable by the society...
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...M3. Explain why conformity and obedience are important in the public services, with reference to research studies. Conformity and obedience are forms of social influence which strongly affect our behaviour is social situations, from following fashions and unwritten social norms which organise our behaviour, to committing immoral acts because we are commanded to by someone who appears to be in a position of authority. This essay looks at the similarities and differences between the three, looking specifically at the factors that influence each two. Conformity within a group entails members changing their attitudes and beliefs in order to match those of others within the group. Those that conform tend to be obedient and compliant. In order to conform, the group member must attribute someone as having the legitimacy and credibility to lead or influence the group's behaviour. Without this "leader", conformity toward the group's goals will be less prevalent. If a member of the group fails to conform to the groups needs, he/she would lose credibility with the rest of the group. Conformity is a change in an individuals behaviour according to certain accepted standards within society as well as the influence of others whether this be a real or imaginary influence. There are 2 key concepts of conformity, acceptance or compliance. People plan to join a specific public service because they want to belong to that team because they may like the sentiments of the service etc. Hence...
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...Abstract The use of power to influence others within a social group has evolved over centuries. Gaining dominion, wealth and social standing are central motives for gaining power over others within a communal group. Those with power can leverage off humans innate psychological leanings toward normative and informative influences to create the norms which others in society will accede to. Psychological experiments by Stanley Milgram and Solomon Asch demonstrate humans predisposition to obedience and compliance, in order to secure their acceptance within society, mean many can are influenced by those in power. It is an astonishing power, to influence another person or a whole society to buy into a reality created by another. To first understand how those in power can influence others, an understanding of ‘power’ is required. Power is a currency, a power currency, that’s desired by others which affords the holder the ability to exert both influence and dominion over people and surroundings. The ‘currency’ can be power of knowledge, love, charisma, wealth, fear, acceptance, social status, strength, or beauty to identify just a few. An individual or group possessing a power currency desired or feared by others ultimately holds a social balance of power and subsequently gains the ability to influence. Those in power use the media to tell others how they should look, who they should like, how they should act and what they should believe. The powerful use media to sell...
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...The Nazi regime came to power in German in 1933. In the same year, in August, Stanley Milgram was born into a working class Jewish family in the Bronx in New York City. Throughout his childhood Stanley was acutely aware of his family’s worries concerning Nazi Germany. Milgram (1963) was interested in understanding how Nazi officers and soldiers could commit the atrocities they did in the Holocaust. Milgram became interested especially in obedience since it was being suggested after the Second World War that the German people must have some national character defect which made them especially susceptible to obeying orders. At the Nuremburg trials after the World war 11, Nazi justified that they were only following orders. It is important to...
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...Born on August 15th, 1933, Stanley Milgram was an American social psychologist. He is most notable for his Milgram experiment, a controversial experiment that drastically changed the way social psychologist’s looked at obedience. Early Years and Education In his early years, Milgram lived in the Bronx. By the time he had reached college age, his family had moved to Queens. Here, Milgram attended Queens College in New York. In 1954, he would receive his Bachelor’s degree in political science. From here, his interests shifted to psychology. He applied to Harvard University’s graduate program in Social Relations but was initially rejected due to never have taken a single psychology course in his undergraduate years. Later, he was able to gain...
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...in the city of Warsaw on September 14th, 1907. At the age of thirteen, his family immigrated to the United States, in which he resides for the rest of his life. Being mostly known for his contributions in social psychology and his experiments on conformity through the Asch Conformity Experiments, he set the foundation for the elaboration of social psychology today. Before the numerous contributions to the field of psychology, Asch went through quite a long journey of education. Asch graduated from the City College of New York in 1928, where he earned his Bachelor of Science. Although he majored in both literature and science, his interests in psychology only became apparent towards the...
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...conform to social norms in order to be accepted into a certain group or society. Although everyone conforms to social standards, not everyone realizes that they do. However, one might register this social conformity if they simply ask themselves the question, “why do I act the way I do?”. For example, when teenagers are surrounded by their peers, they might find it acceptable to drink alcohol and use profanity. On the other hand, when in a school setting, teenagers would not find this behavior acceptable because they are surrounded by authority figures. Therefore, behavior that is acceptable in one setting is not tolerable in another. Consequently, the tolerability of certain behaviors differs upon the setting and can be influenced...
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...The Power of the Situation The way we behave due to our enviroment around us, has been proven threw experiments in social psychology. Power can become many different things, it has the ability to achive the control of individals in their actions and/or sayings. Although, power is necessary in achieving a well organized society, other wise their would be no law or order: athority must be established. But, when power is in the hand of the wrong individal and taken to an extreme level it can become dangerous. One of the most common examples of this is Adolph Hitler when he achieved great power in Nazi Gerany. Hitler did not believe rules or control of the athority applied to him, he believed he help absolute power and could not be stopped in...
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...The Studies of Non-Conformity Brandon Connell Colorado Technical University Professor: Ashraf Esmail SOCL102-1404B-08 Phase 3 IP The Studies of Non-Conformity Conformity is a normal in this day and age. This is largely due to aggressive marketing campaigns, however those campaigns target a natural human flaw. The majority of the population holds this flaw, but we are starting to see many more break free. Influence without Marketing During the Asch experiment, the line test showed that about one third conformed to the majority opinion despite the fact that the answer was wrong. (McLeod, 2008). Keep in mind that these results were achieved by just having the participant in the room with others who influenced their opinions. The results that could have been achieved if the participants were brainwashed with marketing could have been unimaginable. Consider the fact that every year, millions of people we call “sheep” line up for the latest release of the iPhone. Consider also that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on political advertising, and there is weight supporting the fact that people are easily influenced. Following Orders During the Milgram experiment, unethical tests were done using shock therapy. The findings showed that participants would allow themselves to be severely shocked simply because they were told to continue by someone with an air of authority. (McLeod, 2007). This brings to mind the litmus tests given to American Generals by the Obama...
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...most definitions, if we are persuaded by an individual, we are said to be obedient to that individual. If we are persuaded by a group, we are said to have conformed to that group’s objectives. Compare and contrast the core differences between these two concepts. In what ways do group and individual persuasion techniques differ? As social beings, why are we naturally prone to conformity and obedience? For this discussion, please review Solomon Asch’s (1958) study of conformity. The results of this study, demonstrate how many of the individual participants conformed to the group despite the fact that the group was clearly wrong, and the individuals were clearly right. In addition, watch the video on the ABC New Primetime: Milgram Experiment Update video. Through this experiment we observe how perceptions of authority directly influence obedience. For example, even when the action ordered by the authority figure caused physical harm, the participants were still obedient. What are some explanations for this type of behavior? Can you think of an example of when you disregarded your own desires or values for the sake of obedience or conformity? Conformity is defined in our text as, “as going along with a group in actions or beliefs.” (Feenstra, 2013). Obedience, on the other hand, is something that is deeply engrained in us and we are taught to be obedient from a very early age. For most of the time, obedience is a very positive behavior. If we are persuaded by an individual,...
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...Social influence occurs when one's emotions, opinions, or behaviors are affected by others.[1] Social influence takes many forms and can be seen in conformity, socialization, peer pressure, obedience, leadership, persuasion, sales, and marketing. In 1958, Harvard psychologist, Herbert Kelman identified three broad varieties of social influence.[2] 1. Compliance is when people appear to agree with others, but actually keep their dissenting opinions private. 2. Identification is when people are influenced by someone who is liked and respected, such as a famous celebrity. 3. Internalization is when people accept a belief or behavior and agree both publicly and privately. Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard described two psychological needs that lead humans to conform to the expectations of others. These include our need to be right (informational social influence), and our need to be liked (normative social influence).[3] Informational influence (or social proof) is an influence to accept information from another as evidence about reality. Informational influence comes into play when people are uncertain, either because stimuli are intrinsically ambiguous or because there is social disagreement. Normative influence is an influence to conform to the positive expectations of others. In terms of Kelman's typology, normative influence leads to public compliance, whereas informational influence leads to private acceptance. [edit] Types Social Influence is a broad term...
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