Conformity, Obedience & Group Behavior

You’ll be able to

Explain Asch’s conformity and Milgram’s obedience findings
Distinguish normative from informational social influence
Describe group phenomena such as groupthink, polarization, and the bystander effect

Conformity: Asch and why we go along

Conformity is adjusting behavior or thinking to match a group standard. Solomon Asch’s line-judgment experiments showed that many participants gave an obviously wrong answer just to match a unanimous group. Two forces drive conformity: normative social influence — going along to gain approval or avoid rejection (fitting in) — and informational social influence — going along because we believe the group knows something we don’t (being right). Conformity rises with group size (up to a point), unanimity, and when we admire the group; a single dissenter sharply reduces it.

Obedience: Milgram

Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience studies asked participants to deliver what they believed were increasingly dangerous electric shocks to a "learner" on the orders of an experimenter. About 65% obeyed all the way to the maximum voltage — not because they were cruel, but because a legitimate authority pressed them on. Obedience was highest when the authority was close and seemed legitimate, the victim was distant, and no one modeled defiance. Milgram’s work, though ethically controversial, showed the power of the situation to override personal conscience.

Groups: think, polarize, and diffuse

Groups reshape behavior. Groupthink (Irving Janis) is the drive for harmony that suppresses dissent and leads to poor decisions. Group polarization is the tendency for a group to strengthen its members’ pre-existing leanings after discussion. Social facilitation improves performance on easy tasks when others watch, while social loafing is exerting less effort in a group. Deindividuation is the loss of self-restraint in anonymous crowds. The bystander effect (Darley and Latané, after the Kitty Genovese case) shows people are less likely to help as the number of bystanders grows — a diffusion of responsibility.

Worked example

A person collapses on a busy subway platform crowded with commuters, yet no one steps forward to help, each assuming someone else will. Identify the phenomenon and the mechanism behind it.

1.Identify the pattern: many potential helpers are present, yet help is less likely, not more — this is the bystander effect.
2.Recall the research: Darley and Latané found that the presence of others reduces the likelihood any individual helps.
3.Name the mechanism: with many people present, each feels less personal responsibility to act — diffusion of responsibility.
4.Apply it: on the crowded platform, everyone assumes someone else will intervene, so no one does.

Answer: This is the bystander effect: the more bystanders present, the less likely any one person helps, because responsibility is diffused across the group (diffusion of responsibility). Each commuter assumes someone else will act, so no one does.

Checkpoint

A new employee privately thinks a proposal is flawed but votes to approve it because everyone else on the team is voting yes and she does not want to seem like an outsider. Her conformity is driven mainly by:

Watch out

Separate the two influences by motive: normative = to be liked/accepted (you may still privately disagree), informational = to be right (you actually adopt the group’s view, assuming they know more). "I went along to fit in" is normative; "I figured they knew better" is informational.

Checkpoint

In Milgram’s obedience studies, the finding that about 65% of participants delivered the maximum shock when ordered by the experimenter most strongly demonstrates that:

On the exam

Match the landmark study to its lesson: Asch = conformity to a group’s wrong answer, Milgram = obedience to authority, Darley & Latané = bystander effect/diffusion of responsibility, Janis = groupthink. FRQs often give the scenario and want the study or term named.

Answer the 2 checkpoints as you read.