Conformity is essentially seen in groups and communities where the members should follow the accepted standards or norms imposed upon them. Likewise, they can retain the credibility of the group and work together towards their goal without any unwanted pressure. In order to belong to this group, the members should conform themselves to the rules and standards of the group so that they can easily reach their goals together as one. Hence, in conformity, there is more of an adaptive quality when compared to obedience.
However, there is an indirect authority in conformity as well. It can also be defined as the phenomenon where a person is yielding to explicit instructions or orders from an authority figure. Accordingly, obedience is the way of following the orders of someone who has an authority over the other; the person who is under the authority of that person has to follow those orders without any retaliation.
In obedience, there is a direct influence of authority. Consequently, high respect or fear for those who have an authority above you and being subservient to them are core elements of obedience. Thus, this happens in most cases as a result of respect to the authoritative party or even as a result of reverential fear one has towards the authoritative party. Likewise, obedience can be observed in situations where kids become obedient to their parents, students following the instructions of a teacher, employee following the orders of their boss or when followers of religious leaders become obedient to their leaders.
Thus, obedience can also assist a person to guide someone to the correct path and eventually be an example to others. In total, they conformed with the group on one-third of the 12 test trials. Although we might be impressed that the majority of the time participants answered honestly, most psychologists find it remarkable that so many college students caved in to the pressure of the group rather than do the job they had volunteered to do.
In almost all cases, the participants knew they were giving an incorrect answer, but their concern for what these other people might be thinking about them overpowered their desire to do the right thing. This last finding is consistent with the notion that participants change their answers because they are concerned about what others think of them.
Compared with individualistic cultures, people who live in collectivist cultures place a higher value on the goals of the group than on individual preferences. They also are more motivated to maintain harmony in their interpersonal relations. The other reason we sometimes go along with the crowd is that people are often a source of information. Psychologists refer to this process as informational influence. Most of us, most of the time, are motivated to do the right thing.
That is, we act the way most people—or most people like us—act. This is not an unreasonable strategy. Other people often have information that we do not, especially when we find ourselves in new situations. If you have ever been part of a conversation that went something like this,. A good example of how misperceived norms can lead to problems is found in research on binge drinking among college students.
Excessive drinking is a serious problem on many campuses Mita, There are many reasons why students binge drink, but one of the most important is their perception of the descriptive norm. They notice the boisterous heavy drinker at the party but fail to consider all the students not attending the party.
Most students believe they consume significantly less alcohol than the norm, a miscalculation that creates a dangerous push toward more and more excessive alcohol consumption. Researchers have demonstrated the power of descriptive norms in a number of areas. Undergraduates selected the healthy food option when led to believe that other students had made this choice Burger et al.
Although we may be influenced by the people around us more than we recognize, whether we conform to the norm is up to us. But sometimes decisions about how to act are not so easy. Sometimes we are directed by a more powerful person to do things we may not want to do.
Researchers who study obedience are interested in how people react when given an order or command from someone in a position of authority. In many situations, obedience is a good thing. We are taught at an early age to obey parents, teachers, and police officers. And a military would fail to function if soldiers stopped obeying orders from superiors. But, there is also a dark side to obedience. More disturbingly, obedience often is at the heart of some of the worst of human behavior—massacres, atrocities, and even genocide.
It was this unsettling side of obedience that led to some of the most famous and most controversial research in the history of psychology. Milgram , , wanted to know why so many otherwise decent German citizens went along with the brutality of the Nazi leaders during the Holocaust. To understand this obedience, Milgram conducted a series of laboratory investigations.
In all but one variation of the basic procedure, participants were men recruited from the community surrounding Yale University, where the research was carried out.
These citizens signed up for what they believed to be an experiment on learning and memory. In particular, they were told the research concerned the effects of punishment on learning. Three people were involved in each session. One was the participant. Another was the experimenter.
The third was a confederate who pretended to be another participant. The experimenter explained that the study consisted of a memory test and that one of the men would be the teacher and the other the learner. The teacher watched as the learner was strapped into a chair and had electrodes attached to his wrist.
Each lever was labeled with a voltage figure, starting with 15 volts and moving up in volt increments to volts. Through a microphone, the teacher administered a memory test to the learner in the next room. The learner responded to the multiple-choice items by pressing one of four buttons that were barely within reach of his strapped-down hand.
If the teacher saw the correct answer light up on his side of the wall, he simply moved on to the next item. The teacher was instructed to start with the volt lever and move up to the next highest shock for each successive wrong answer.
In reality, the learner received no shocks. But he did make a lot of mistakes on the test, which forced the teacher to administer what he believed to be increasingly strong shocks. The purpose of the study was to see how far the teacher would go before refusing to continue. Get me out of here. I told you I had heart trouble.
Get me out of here, please. I refuse to go on. Let me out. After volts, the learner refused to answer any more questions, which led the experimenter to say that no answer should be considered a wrong answer. After volts, despite vehement protests from the learner following previous shocks, the teacher heard only silence, suggesting that the learner was now physically unable to respond.
If the teacher reached volts—the end of the generator—the experimenter told him to continue pressing the volt lever for each wrong answer. It was only after the teacher pressed the volt lever three times that the experimenter announced that the study was over. If you had been a participant in this research, what would you have done? Virtually everyone says he or she would have stopped early in the process. And most people predict that very few if any participants would keep pressing all the way to volts.
Yet in the basic procedure described here, 65 percent of the participants continued to administer shocks to the very end of the session. These were not brutal, sadistic men. The disturbing implication from the findings is that, under the right circumstances, each of us may be capable of acting in some very uncharacteristic and perhaps some very unsettling ways. Milgram conducted many variations of this basic procedure to explore some of the factors that affect obedience.
He found that obedience rates decreased when the learner was in the same room as the experimenter and declined even further when the teacher had to physically touch the learner to administer the punishment. Neuroscan Synamp2 Amplifier Scan 4. Vertical and horizontal EEGs were recorded with two pairs of electrodes, one placed above and below the left eye, and the other 10 mm from the lateral canthi. The recording started ms used as the baseline before the onset of each picture, and ended ms after the presentation.
Electrooculogram artifacts were corrected using the method proposed by Semlitsch et al. Within-subjects design of Analysis of Variance ANOVA with repeated-measure was used to explore the neural mechanisms of subjects in different situations.
Conformity rate is the ratio of subjects who made conformity decision according to the number of positive and negative reviews decide to buy a book under relatively positive and absolute positive conditions and not to buy a book under relatively negative and absolutely negative conditions in part 1. Obedience rate stands for the ratio of participants who followed what the examiner told them to do decide to buy a book under relatively negative and absolute negative conditions and not to buy a book under relatively positive and absolute positive conditions.
Response times RTs refer to the time periods from the moment the picture was presented to the moment the decision was made. It indicates the shortest time one need to make the purchase decision.
Table 1 illustrates the behavioral data obtained for conformity and obedience. RTs for conformity were shorter than that for obedience. Due to the similarity of review consistency, we further sort the four contexts into two groups: absolutely consistent context absolutely positive trails and absolutely negative trails and relatively consistent context relatively positive trails and relatively negative trails.
Data for these two categories of review consistency are given in Table 2. It is clear from the table that review consistency affected both conformity and obedience. In conformity section, conformity rate is higher in the absolutely consistent context RTs are shorter in the absolutely consistent context In obedience section, the obedience rate is also higher in the absolutely consistent context According to the known distribution of N2 Yuan et al.
N2 amplitudes in the — ms time windows were analyzed. Topographic maps of the maximal amplitudes of N2 ms are presented in Figure 1B. N2 in the obedience section was more remarkable than that in the conformity section, with almost all frontal and frontal-central areas covered by higher negative potential. Figure 1. Event-related potential ERP raw waveforms at six electrodes for obedience light lines and conformity dotted lines.
For details regarding Figures 1A,B please see text. According to the distribution of P3 Jones et al. Relatively positive and relatively negative reviews were regarded as relatively consistent reviews. Similarly, absolutely positive and absolutely negative reviews were regarded as absolutely consistent reviews.
Topographic maps of the maximal amplitudes of P3 ms are presented in Figure 2B1. The P3 in the absolutely consistent trials was more remarkable compared to that in the relatively consistent trials, with almost all central, central-parietal and parietal areas covered by higher positive potential. Figure 2. Grand-averaged ERP waveforms. Topographic maps of the maximal amplitudes of P3 ms are presented in Figure 2B2. The P3 in the absolutely consistent trials was more remarkable compared to the relatively consistent trials, with almost all central, central-parietal and parietal areas covered by higher positive potential.
This study aimed to explore neural activities associated with conformity and obedience and further investigate inner neural mechanisms in different situations where these social influences play role. Online book purchasing context was used as a model in this study. Total conformity rate observed in this study did not differ significantly from the total obedience rate. This implies that subjects are easily influenced by the majority opinion and the authority command, thus leading to no significant influence of conformity and obedience on the decision-making.
There was also no significant difference between the RTs, i. Consistency level has significant effect on conformity Burnkrant and Cousinesu, ; Pincus and Waters, ; Huang and Chen, Our results indicated that the conformity rate is much higher in the absolutely consistent trails comparing to the relatively consistent trails. Congruence exists between our conclusion and the published data: more subjects choose to follow the majority when the consistency level was high Burnkrant and Cousinesu, ; Pincus and Waters, ; Huang and Chen, ; Chen, ; Chen et al.
Meanwhile, our data indicate that the conformity RTs are much shorter when consistency level is high. It supported our point of view in another perspective, namely that high consistency helped participants to make the conformity decisions. Consistency level also had an impact on obedience.
Obedience rate was much higher in the absolutely consistent trails compared to the relatively consistent trails.
Obedience RTs in the absolutely consistent contexts were significantly shorter than in the relatively consistent contexts. This may be attributed to the fact that consistency level largely relates to classification.
High consistency reduces the difficulty of the decision-making, and people need less time to make a decision. N2 reflects the early — ms decision-making process Bekker et al. In our experiments, peak latency is evoked at approximately ms after the presence of the picture. Flostein and Van Petten hold the view that N2, which is generated from anterior cingulate, is bound up with conflict detection Clayson and Larson, ; Buzzell et al. The conflict detection and conflict monitoring role of anterior cingulate has also been confirmed by many other researches like Carter et al.
It implies that obedience arouses greater cognitive conflict. Previous studies have established that N2 has a positive relationship with cognitive conflicts Yang et al.
Obedience is associated with excessive conflicts. Therefore, higher N2 amplitudes are observed in the contexts of obedience comparing to conformity.
Moreover, although the task is fairly clear in the obedient situations, subjects need to adjust their cognitive factors to fulfill it. Comparatively speaking, greater efforts must be paid to the obedient decision rather than to the conformity decision. Amplitudes of N2 positively correlate with the cognitive conflict and perception of task difficulty. Consequently, amplitudes of N2 for the obedience were significantly higher than for conformity. Remarkable P3 waves which vary according to the consistency levels were elicited in both conformity trials and obedience trials.
Maximum amplitudes were observed at approximately ms. Amplitude of P3 in the absolutely consistent review situations is much larger than in the relatively consistent review situations and inconsistent situations.
A considerable body of literature suggests that comparing to inconsistent reviews, the consistent reviews would attract more supporters Burnkrant and Cousinesu, ; Pincus and Waters, ; Weiner, P3 is an effective index for the core information processing in brain Palmera et al. Recent studies have shown that amplitude of P3 is related to the difficulty of decision making Vallesi, , with greater difficulties arising smaller amplitudes.
So, in the absolutely consistent situations, participants can easily follow the consensus groups. Decision-making difficulty is smaller than that taking place under the relatively consistent reviews conditions. Cutmore and Muckert put forward the idea that the smaller P3 emerges when subjects face greater difficulty in sorting stimulus or lacking confidence to decide. In our experiments, in the absolutely consistent situations, the participants faced clear judgment discrepancy, the sorting stimulus was easy, the participants were determined and confident, and the P3 amplitudes were large.
In the relatively consistent situations, the participants faced obscure judgment discrepancy, the sorting stimulus was difficult, the participants were uncertain and not confident. It is worth mentioning that consistency level did not influence the P3 peak latency between conformity decision and obedience decision.
This reveals that classification process is implicit in both conformity and obedience. Consistency level may affect conformity and obedience decisions in a similar neuropsychological pattern. Event-related brain potentials ERPs were used in this study to explore the neural mechanisms of conformity and obedience on the model of online book purchasing. Conformity was aroused by the majority influence caused by positive and negative comments.
Obedience was induced by forcing participants to buy the book with lots of negative comments. P3 and N2, two kinds of ERP components which are assumed to be social cognitive related, were recorded and studied in this study.
Even though behavioral data displayed no remarkable differences between conformity decisions and obedience decisions, ERP results suggest that obedience triggered bigger cognitive conflicts than conformity. On the surface, the subjects were easily influenced by both majority opinion and authority command. Deep inside, however, they were more struggling when making the obedience decisions. In the ERP, greater amplitudes of N2 component were observed in the context of obedience.
Consistency level did not make a difference on P3 peak latency for both conformity and obedience, which reveals that a classification process is implicit in both decision types i. In addition, for both conformity and obedience decisions, the augmented P3 was observed in the absolutely consistent review situations compared to the relatively consistent review situations.
This study has a number of limitations. The simulation of online book purchase used in this study is rather simple and based on significantly reduced amount of information provided. Measures should be taken to explore better ways to simulate the online purchasing. It might be possible to introduce graphs and music to enrich the stimulus material. In addition, ERP used in this study records a wide range of brain wave data. More complicated analysis methods might be used to obtain further valuable information.
In our research, data analysis was time locked. In the future investigations it would be worth trying some new methods like reaction locked method and traceability analysis. Future studies should also look into the confounding variables more strictly in order to get more refined results. YX: Main research conceptual framework and reporting. HL: Design and analysis. WZ: Referencing and reporting.
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