• ‘Conformity is that jailer of freedom
and the enemy of growth’
• John F. Kennedy
• ‘When someone demands blind
obedience, you’d be a fool not to peek’
• Jim Fiebig
• ‘The opposite of courage in our society
is not cowardice, its conformity’
• Rollo May
• ‘It is easy to ignore responsibility when
one is only an intermediate link in a
chain of action’
• Milgram
• ‘If you stand up and be counted, from
time to time you may get yourself
knocked down. But remember this: a
man flattened by an opponent can get up
again. A man flattened by conformity
stays down for good’
• Thomas J. Watson
Is it better to resist or to
conform/obey?
• Know how people resist the pressure to
conform
• Understand explanations for resisting
obedience
Funnel it down!
• Read the information in your booklets.
• Funnel the information down to the key
words/phrases to write your own
definitions
• Write your definition in your OWN
WORDS!
Think of 3 examples when you
have not conformed
1.
2.
3.
Think of examples in Asch and
Milgram’s studies when people
didn’t
obey
or
conform
Conformity
Obedience
Resisting pressures to conform
Moral considerations
• If the task involves judgements with moral
dimensions (aspects), the cost to one’s
personal honour may be higher and they
are less likely to conform
• Evaluation
• Hornsey et al (2003) found little
movement towards the majority on
attitudes that had moral significance for
individuals (e.g cheating), even when it
involved public (rather than just private)
behaviours.
The non-conformist personality
• fill in the gaps
• The extent to which _______ influence impacts upon
individuals is _____________ by their ___________.
Not _____________ to a given norm is usually a result of
_____________ towards the group norm. Some people
are _____________ to react to majority influence by
__________ the norm. Such __________ are said to
have an anti-conforming orientation to their personalities.
• Evaluation
• Those who __________ to majority influence with
_____________ tend to be unconcerned with social
_______ (Nail et al 2000) or even __________ of the
social norms.
predisposed
norms
independence
individuals
indifference
social
conforming
personality
respond
opposing
affected
unaware
Further evaluation of resisting
pressures to conform
• Match the statement to the correct
evaluation point.
Individualist cultures are less conforming than collectivist. E.g.
Bond & Smith (1996) looked at 133 studies across 17
countries.
Asch (1956) found that when task is easy there is lower
conformity.
Having a non-conformist or disobedient role model reduces the
behaviour. Milgram and Asch both carried out relevant
variations on this.
Perrin & Spencer (1981) (maths/engineering students) were less
conforming due to their own perceived expertise.
Resisting pressures to obey
Moral considerations
• Description: One of Milgram’s
colleagues, moral philosopher Lawrence
Kohlberg (1969), presented a group of
Milgram’s volunteers with a set of
imaginary moral dilemmas.
• These dilemmas determined not so much
what people would do in situations like
Milgram’s shock experiment, but WHY
they would behave in that way.
• Evaluation: Kohlberg found that those who
based their decisions on more general moral
principles (e.g. the importance of justice over
social order), were more defiant in the Milgram
study, while most of those at a more restricted
level of moral development obeyed the
experimenter completely.
• The American civil rights leader Martin Luther
King argued that laws are only valid insofar as
they are grounded in justice, and that a
commitment to justice carries with it an
obligation to disobey unjust laws.
Social Heroism
• In his book, The Lucifer
Effect (2007) Zimbardo
suggests that while the
most humans obey unjust
authority, the few who
resist are really heroes.
• In this context, heroes
are those people who are
willing to make sacrifices
for the good of others in
society.
• Social heroism involves
putting oneself at risk in
pursuit of an important
principle.
• It may be very costly in
terms of lowered social
status, loss of credibility
and in some cases, even
arrest, torture and even
death.
Social Heroism
• The best-known ‘hero’ is
probably Nelson
Mandela, imprisoned for
36 years for his
resistance to
government apartheid
policies in South Africa.
• A less well-known ‘hero’
is Michael Bernhardt,
the US soldier who
refused to obey orders
to shoot unarmed
civilians in the My Lai
massacre during the
Vietnam war in which
nearly 500 Vietnamese
died at the hands on the
US troops.
Zimbardo’s beliefs – Social
Heroism
• Zimbardo believes a key
factor that encourages
heroic action is stimulation
of the ‘heroic imagination’, a
mental orientation that
makes people more likely to
act ‘heroically’ when the time
comes.
• This involves imagining facing
potentially risky social
situations, struggling with
the hypothetical problems
these situations raise, and
considering one’s likely
actions and their
consequences.
Further evaluation of resisting
pressures to obey
• Milgram showed that when the authority figure (AF) is
absent obedience is reduced (20%).
• Bickman (1974) used three male actors dressed in normal
clothes, as a milkman, or as a security guard. Passersby
were most likely to obey the actor dressed as a security
guard and least likely to obey the actor in normal clothes.
This is because the actor dressed in normal clothes had
less legitimacy
• disobedient role model reduces the behaviour. In
Milgram’s experiment, participants found it easier to
refuse to obey the order to give electric shocks when
they could see another participant also disobey.
Homework
• Revision notes
• Essay plan – ‘Discuss one or more
explanations of independent behaviour,
for example, how people resist
pressures to conform or obey’ (8 marks)