Should Humans Obey And Conformity To Others In The Social Group
In this essay, I will look at previous psychological research and discuss whether humans do obey and conform to others in the social group.
“Conformity is a tendency to align your beliefs, attitudes and behaviours to others around you”. Conforming to social norms is a very common thing, whether it’s subconscious or conscious. There are a number of different reasons as to why someone would conform, whether it’s to fit into society more, to fit more into a group and gain a sense of belonging and identification or maybe it’s happening completely subconsciously.
A number of studies have been done when looking at conforming to the social norms.
Sherif (1935) carried out a study looking at whether a participant would conform to a group’s answer. …show more content…
One of them being Milgram’s study of obedience. Milgram wanted to see whether people would still obey a legitimate authority, even if they knew the task they were doing was morally wrong. Milgram told the participants that they were investigating whether punishment had an effect on learning. He hired two confederates, one of them being the ‘experimenter’ and the other one being the other ‘participant’, the experimenter had a white coat on to show he was an authority figure. The ‘experimenter’ then allocated the real participant the ‘teacher’ role and the confederate participant the ‘learner’ role. The task was to learn word pairs, the participant would ask the learner the question and if the learner got the question wrong which he would as instructed by Milgram, then the experimenter would tell the participant to administer electric volts, starting at 15 volts, eventually reaching 450. None of the volts were real, but the learner acted as if they were so the participant believed they were shooting electric volts through the learner. Milgram carried out this study to see how far someone would go when given instructions by an authority figure. At 150 volts the learner demanded to be released his heart’s starting to bother him now, at 180 the learner said he could no longer stand the pain, at 300 the learner refused to give any more answers – which the experimenter just treated as an incorrect answer and finally the participant gave the last shock which was 450 volts and labelled as “danger severe shock” going against all predictions that were only 0.1 percent of people would give the whole 450 volts when in fact 24 out of 30 went the whole way, showing just how effective an authority figure is when it comes to
“Conformity is a tendency to align your beliefs, attitudes and behaviours to others around you”. Conforming to social norms is a very common thing, whether it’s subconscious or conscious. There are a number of different reasons as to why someone would conform, whether it’s to fit into society more, to fit more into a group and gain a sense of belonging and identification or maybe it’s happening completely subconsciously.
A number of studies have been done when looking at conforming to the social norms.
Sherif (1935) carried out a study looking at whether a participant would conform to a group’s answer. …show more content…
One of them being Milgram’s study of obedience. Milgram wanted to see whether people would still obey a legitimate authority, even if they knew the task they were doing was morally wrong. Milgram told the participants that they were investigating whether punishment had an effect on learning. He hired two confederates, one of them being the ‘experimenter’ and the other one being the other ‘participant’, the experimenter had a white coat on to show he was an authority figure. The ‘experimenter’ then allocated the real participant the ‘teacher’ role and the confederate participant the ‘learner’ role. The task was to learn word pairs, the participant would ask the learner the question and if the learner got the question wrong which he would as instructed by Milgram, then the experimenter would tell the participant to administer electric volts, starting at 15 volts, eventually reaching 450. None of the volts were real, but the learner acted as if they were so the participant believed they were shooting electric volts through the learner. Milgram carried out this study to see how far someone would go when given instructions by an authority figure. At 150 volts the learner demanded to be released his heart’s starting to bother him now, at 180 the learner said he could no longer stand the pain, at 300 the learner refused to give any more answers – which the experimenter just treated as an incorrect answer and finally the participant gave the last shock which was 450 volts and labelled as “danger severe shock” going against all predictions that were only 0.1 percent of people would give the whole 450 volts when in fact 24 out of 30 went the whole way, showing just how effective an authority figure is when it comes to