Groups, Conformity & Obedience

Group psychology is the study of behaviour in face-to-face groups of three or more people. Social psychology is interested in such groups both because they epitomize the influence of social forces on individuals' behaviour and judgements, and because they are manageable substitutes for various real collectives like committees, workgroups, juries and political meetings. Generally psychologists have studied ad hoc groups of strangers although groups such as families or school classes have been investigated. Findings have been interesting but it is often unclear how far one can generalize from them. Most group research has been in the USA, where it was a dominant topic in the emergence of social psychology. Serious group experiments began in the 1920s and 1930s concerned with social facilitation, conformity, and problem-solving or decision-making. In the 1930s the Rumanian-born Jacob Moreno began to investigate the interrelationships among group members. For 30 years there was continuing interest in the causes of mutual attraction and group "cohesiveness" and the way in which this increases group conformity and improves task performances. In the 1950s the American Robert Bales drew attention to the distinct kinds of communication and social influence in groups. Bales found that when people emerge into specialized roles in initially unstructured problem-solving groups there is likely to be an influential figure who concentrates on the task and a different figure who keeps the group together socially. The contrast between task-oriented "structuring" and "socio-emotional" concern has continued to be a dominant theme. There is some evidence that large corporations function best if their senior management includes taskobsessed individuals and others who are good at communicating with subordinates. In the 1960s psychologists were fascinated by the counter-intuitive finding that groups often make riskier decisions than individuals. This finding is not however reliable. It turned out to be an example of conformity. It depends on the initial position of the majority of members and is not intrinsically related to risk. The Turkish-born Muzafer Sherif (1906-1988) extended group studies to relationships between groups as an analogue of prejudice and this approach has continuing importance. Crowd psychology is the study and theory of crowd and mass action and emotion in contrast to those of individuals. A primary controversy concerns the extent to which individuals in crowds cease to behave like themselves and give way to impulse or the power of the crowd. The French theorist Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931) set the agenda for most discussion in The Crowd (1895). Drawing on ideas of Jean Charcot (1825-1893) who also influenced Sigmund Freud, Le Bon held that important human thoughts and motives operate at an unconscious level. He suggested that in a crowd people become "suggestible" and lose conscious control of themselves just as someone under hypnosis does; the mood of a crowd is "contagious", and its anonymity and apparent power cause people to yield to dangerous instincts and disregard personal responsibility. Le Bon's ideas therefore picture persons

in a crowd as emotional, irrational and violent in comparison with individuals alone. This can lead to heroism but is usually destructive. The mob manipulations of the 1930s Nuremburg Nazi rallies were influenced by crowd psychology. Evidence from real crowds let alone riots and lynchings is comparatively sparse, but psychologists have studied role-played panics and analogues of crowd behaviour such as group conformity, the impact of anonymity, arousal in groups and social contagion of emotion. The groups involved are fairly small and evidence gives mixed support for Le Bon's ideas. Studies of real crowds seem to give less, as individuals' behaviour in football crowds and even race riots seems rule-governed and frequently rational. Looting for instance is selective and not often over-audacious. Social facilitation was the first experimentally tested effect in social psychology (Triplett, 1898) but still awaits a satisfactory explanation. Social facilitation refers to the fact that individuals often work faster in groups than on their own. Individuals however reason less accurately about complex problems when in groups. Hence there appears to be social facilitation for some tasks but social inhibition or interference for others. One possible explanation is that the arousal of anxiety increases intensity of response but lowers its flexibility. Such arousal would therefore explain these findings if it is assumed that such arousal is common in group contexts. But physiological measures of people's arousal in groups give inconsistent results. Other possible explanations are cognitive rather than emotional. They suggest that people may think about how others will evaluate them. This may motivate them or simply distract their attention. These explanations encounter the difficulty that social facilitation also occurs in species such as chickens and cockroaches. They could certainly be distracted by other chickens or cockroaches but are unlikely to be helped or hindered by excess thought or concern about how they are looking to the other chickens (or cockroaches). Conformity refers to changes in a person's beliefs, feelings or behaviour due to the influence of other people. Experimental findings about the power of such influence are sobering and cast doubt on our beliefs about the self-determination of individual behaviour. Conformity is distinguished from obedience because the former is imitation, often of equals, and the person conforming feels he is acting voluntarily, whereas obedience is a response to a superior's explicit command and therefore comparatively involuntary. In America in the 1930s Muzafer Sherif (1935) and Solomon Asch (1938) each showed that people's judgements are affected by what others think even in the absence of any attempt at persuasion. Sherifs study highlighted peoples legitimate use of others opinions when faced with a difficult and ambiguous visual judgement. Using a visual illusion, the autokinetic effect (the impression that a fixed point of light is moving when it is seen in total darkness) he showed how members of groups come to agree in their estimation of the displacement of the light until their shared opinion remains stable even if they are subsequently asked to do the experiment on their own. Participants were subsequently shown to make the agreed judgements even when tested alone 12 months after the original experimental session.

After World War II Asch demonstrated that social pressure often induces people to deny the unambiguous evidence of their own senses. Participants were shown four lines and were asked to judge which of the three comparison lines was the same length as the fourth line. In most cases the three comparison lines were sufficiently different from each other that the judgements were very simple. Participants in control groups made virtually no errors. Participants gave judgements orally in small face-to-face groups, typically of five or six members. In the experimental groups all but one group member were confederates who gave the wrong answer on a 12 of the 18 judgement trials. Asch found that 75% of the lone uninstructed individuals gave the same wrong answer as the group at least once. Approximately one third of participants did so on six or more of the trials. Post-experimental interviews suggested that most participants who conformed were simply lying to avoid ridicule. On tasks like Aschs individuals do not follow the majority's judgement when they answer in private. When one of the confederates deviated from the majority by giving the other wrong line, the single uninstructed participants conformity dropped dramatically. In these circumstances they gave the right answer and did not follow either the majority or the single deviant confederate. More recently the French psychologist Serge Moscovici has shown that a minority in a group may influence the majority and actually change the other group members' opinions. This implies that a credible minority produces persuasion whereas a majority causes the minority to fear rejection rather than to attend to what the majority say (see Social Influence). Obedience means acting in accordance with a superior's instructions. Obediaence is therefore doing what someone tells one to do rather than doing what others do. The latter is conformity. The most famous studies of obedience were performed by the American psychologist Stanley Milgram (1933-1984). They were carried out during the 1960s and are described in his book Obedience to Authority (1974). Milgram set up an experiment supposedly to test the effects of punishment (electric shocks) on people's learning ability. Two individuals took part. They were allotted, apparently by chance, to the teacher and learner roles. The task involved standard paired-associate word-learning with multiple-choice response options. Learners received electric shocks whenever they made a mistake. Shock level rose by 15 volts for each successive mistake, the maximum shock being 450 volts. The "learner" was a confederate of the experimenter and received no shocks but acted as if he did. In the original study 26 out of 40 males obeyed the experimenter's instructions and continued to do so right through to the maximum 450 volts, a possibly lethal shock given that the learner had remarked at the outset that he had a heart condition. Milgram argued that under orders people abandon personal responsibility. He explicitly compared this to the behaviour of concentration camp guards or ordinary soldiers who massacre prisoners or civilians and defend their actions as "obeying orders". Milgram conducted follow up studies showing various factors reduced obedience: carrying out the experiment in an apartment rather than at Yale University; a casual experimenter who did not wear a lab coat;

placing the learner/victim in the same room as the participant rather than in an adjoining room (obedience was further reduced if the participant had to touch the learner/victim); having the experimenter in a different room from the participant, unlike the original experiment in which they were both in the same room together. When they were not in the same room the participant often cheated by not raising shock levels in accordance with instructions. Female participants were as obedient and murderous as males. All who took part seemed to believe the shocks were genuine and many were acutely distressed by what they had done. These studies caused an outcry and a change in the American Psychological Association's rules about experimenter procedure.