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Obedience to Authority: The Milgram Experiment
The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of notable experiments in social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.
I highly recommend reading the book, such an interesting read. One of my favorite experiments ever.
The Power of Conformity in Groups: The Asch Experiment
In the basic Asch paradigm, the participants — the real subjects and the confederates — were all seated in a classroom. They were asked a variety of questions about the lines such as how long is A, compare the length of A to an everyday object, which line was longer than the other, which lines were the same length, etc. The group was told to announce their answers to each question out loud. The confederates always provided their answers before the study participant, and always gave the same answer as each other. They answered a few questions correctly but eventually began providing incorrect responses.
In a control group, with no pressure to conform to an erroneous view, only one subject out of 35 ever gave an incorrect answer. Solomon Asch hypothesized that the majority of people would not conform to something obviously wrong; however, when surrounded by individuals all voicing an incorrect answer, participants provided incorrect responses on a high proportion of the questions (32%). Seventy-five percent of the participants gave an incorrect answer to at least one question.
Bystander Effect - people watch child being abducted
When there’s only one person around in a situation, they’re much more likely to lend assistance to people in need, whether it’s to help pick up something they’re dropped or something more important like warn them they’re about to step into traffic, etc.
When there’s a group of people, though, no one acts. They all expect someone else will do it, so no one volunteers or pauses.
by Solomon E. Asch
Exactly what is the effect of the opinions of others on our own?
In other words, how strong is the urge toward social conformity?
The question is approached by means of some unusual experiments
A psychologist at a girl’s college asked the members of his class to compliment any girl wearing red. Within a week the cafeteria was a blaze of red. None of the girls were aware of being influenced, although they did notice that the atmosphere was more friendly. A class at the University of Minnesota is reported to have conditioned their psychology professor a week after he told them about learning without awareness. Every time he moved toward the right side of the room, they paid more attention and laughed more uproariously at his jokes, until apparently they were able to condition him right out the door.
– W. Lambert Gardiner, Psychology: A Story of a Search, 1970
The Standford Prison Guard Experiment & The Psychology of Power of the Social Situation
The classic Standford Prison Guard Experiment which experimentally assigned participants to either the guard or prisoner role examines how social roles can greatly impact our behaviors sometimes more than our personality.
Participants were recruited by poster ads that said something a long the line of “If you are interested in getting paid for staying in prison (not the exact wordings of course; if someone can find the exact wordings of the ads, let me know and I will insert it here), then you may want to consider participating in this study.”
Participants were then recruited and either selected at random (maybe a coin toss?) to be the guard or the prisoner. Guards were then given special instructions to do what ever they want with the exception of using violence to keep the prisoners in check. They were also made to wear sunglasses and wear guard uniforms. The prisoners were made to wear prisoners uniforms.
The results show that the participants adapted to the roles they were assigned in. Guards became abusive. Prisoners became frightful and anxious. Even though some of the participants were probably positive, thoughtful, intelligent individuals, they actually believed the roles they played. In reality, they were just in an experiment that was located in a regular school building.
This experiment teaches us about the power of the social situation. It is the idea that sometimes the situation may cause us to behave in ways consistent with the situation and override our personality. This was clearly illustrated in the experiment, because healthy normal participants when assigned to either the guard or prisoner roles played out the roles as such.
(via psychology2010)
Psychologists set up telephone conversations between a man and a woman. Neither could see the other. Before the conversation started, the man was shown a photograph of the woman he was going to meet on the phone. However, the photograph was actually picked randomly, and depicted either an attractive woman or an unattractive one (how this was determined I don’t know).
Men who believed they were talking with an attractive woman were much more friendly, active, and open during the conversation than men who believed they were talking to an unattractive woman. What’s more, the women — who did not know whether their partners believed they were attractive or unattractive — responded differently depending on the beliefs of their partner. Women who were believed to be unattractive were more detached, cold, formal, and even rude than those who were believed to be attractive.
Clearly these women were picking up on and responding to unconscious clues in the way their male partners spoke to them. When men were friendly and talkative, the women responded with warmth; when men were distant, women responded accordingly. But the subjects themselves did not report any difference in the way they thought they had acted — for them, they were just “normal”.
But there’s more. In interviews before the conversation took part, the men were asked to describe what they expected their partners to be like. Men who thought they were about to talk to an attractive woman said they expected her to be warm, open, friendly, and so on — which in most cases is exactly what she was. Men who expected their partner unattractive thought they would also be cold, distant, and unfriendly — and lo and behold, she was. In our minds, attractive people are better people — and apparently thinking makes it so.
(Source)
The Asch conformity experiments were a series of studies published in the 1950s that demonstrated the power of conformity in groups. These are also known as the “Asch Paradigm”.
Experiments led by Solomon Asch of Swarthmore College asked groups of students to participate in a “vision test”. In reality, all but one of the participants were confederates of the experimenter, and the study was really about how the remaining student would react to the confederates’ behavior.
In the basic Asch paradigm, the participants — the real subjects and the confederates — were all seated in a classroom. They were asked a variety of questions about the lines such as how long is A, compare the length of A to an everyday object, which line was longer than the other, which lines were the same length, etc. The group was told to announce their answers to each question out loud. The confederates always provided their answers before the study participant, and always gave the same answer as each other. They answered a few questions correctly but eventually began providing incorrect responses.
In a control group, with no pressure to conform to an erroneous view, only one subject out of 35 ever gave an incorrect answer. Solomon Asch hypothesized that the majority of people would not conform to something obviously wrong; however, when surrounded by individuals all voicing an incorrect answer, participants provided incorrect responses on a high proportion of the questions (32%). Seventy-five percent of the participants gave an incorrect answer to at least one question.
