The document discusses the concepts of obedience, compliance, and conformity, highlighting how obedience involves following orders from authority figures, while conformity entails adapting behavior to match that of a group. It details Milgram's obedience experiments, which revealed that a significant majority of participants were willing to administer harmful shocks when instructed by an authority figure, as well as Zimbardo's prison experiment that showcased the psychological impact of assigned roles. The findings have been replicated across different cultures, indicating that obedience and conformity are widespread social phenomena.

1. By
Col Mukteshwar Prasad(Retd)
Based on
About.com Psychology
Obedience

2. Obedience , Compliance and Conformity
 Why do people sometimes follow orders, even if it means doing something
they know is wrong?
 Obedience is a form of social influence that involves performing an
action under the orders of an authority figure. It differs from
 compliance (which involves changing your behavior at the request
of another person) and
 conformity (which involves altering your behavior in order to go
along with the rest of the group). Instead, obedience involves altering
your behavior because a figure of authority has told you to.

3. How Does Obedience Differ From Conformity?
 Obedience differs from conformity in three key ways:
 Obedience involves an order; conformity involves a request.
 Obedience involves following the order of someone with a
higher status; conformity usually involves going along with
people of equal status.
 Obedience relies on social power; conformity relies on the
need to be socially accepted.

4. Milgram’s Obedience Experiments
 During the 1950s, a psychologist Stanley Milgram became intrigued with the
conformity experiments performed by Solomon Asch.
 What Is the Milgram Obedience Experiment?
 Asch had demonstrated that people could easily be swayed to conform to
group pressure, but Milgram wanted to see just how far people would be
willing to go.
 The trial of Adolf Eichmann, who had planned and managed the mass
deportation of Jews during World War II, helped spark Milgram’s interest in
the topic of obedience. Throughout the trial, Eichmann suggested that he
was simply following orders and that he felt no guilt for his role in the mass
murders because he had only been doing what his superiors requested and
that he had played no role in the decision to exterminate the captives.
 Milgram wanted to explore the question "are Germans different?," but he
discovered that the majority of people are surprisingly obedient to authority.
After the horrors of the Holocaust, some people, such as Eichmann,
explained their participation in the atrocities by suggesting that they were just
doing as they were commanded. Milgram wanted to know – would people
really harm another person if they were ordered to by an authority figure?

5. Milgram’s Obedience Experiments
 Milgram’s studies involved placing participants in a room and directing them
to deliver electrical shocks to a "learner" located in another room.
Unbeknownst to the participant, the person supposedly receiving the shocks
was actually in on the experiment and was merely acting out responses to
imaginary shocks. Surprisingly, Milgram found that 65 percent of participants
were willing to deliver the maximum level of shocks on the orders of the
experimenter.

6. Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment
 Milgram’s controversial experiments generated a great deal of interest in the
psychology of obedience. During the early 1970s, social psychologist Philip
Zimbardo staged an exploration into the study of prisoners and prison life. He
set up a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford University psychology
department and assigned his participants to play the roles of either prisoners
or guards, with Zimbardo himself acting as the prison warden.
 The study had to be discontinued after a mere six days even though it was
originally slated to last two weeks. Why did the researchers end the
experiment so early? Because the participants had become so involved in
their roles, with the guards utilizing authoritarian techniques to gain the
obedience of the prisoners. In some cases, the guards even subjected the
prisoners to psychological abuse, harassment, and physical torture. The
results of the Stanford Prison Experiment are often used to demonstrate how
easily people are influenced by characteristics of the roles and situations
they are cast in, but Zimbardo also suggested that environmental factors play
a role in how prone people are to obey authority.

7. Obedience in Action
 Milgram's experiments set the stage for future investigations into obedience,
and the subject quickly became a hot topic within social psychology. But what
exactly do psychologists mean when they talk about obedience?
 Some definitions, examples, and observations:
 "Studies have been conducted with participants in other countries, with
children, and with other procedural variations. The same basic result in
consistently obtained: many people readily accept the influence of an
authority, even when that means causing potential harm to another person.
One interesting application of this concept has been to the nurse-physician
relationship. Several studies have shown that nurses will often carry out the
orders of a physician even when there is good reason to believe that
potential harm could come to the patient."
(Breckler, Olson, & Wiggins, 2006)
 "Other researchers have since replicated Milgram's findings. High school
students were found to be even more willing to obey orders. Cross-cultural
research in other Western cultures has also yielded high rates of obedience
using Milgram's procedure. Unfortunately, it seems as though Milgram's
results were not flukes."

8. Obedience in Action
 "Are conformity and obedience unique to American culture? By no means.
The Asch and Milgram experiments have been repeated in many societies,
where they have yielded results roughly similar to those seen in the United
States. Thus the phenomena of conformity and obedience seem to transcend
culture... Many of the studies have reported even higher obedience rates
than those seen in Milgram's American samples. For example, obedience
rates of over 80% have been reported for samples from Italy, Germany,
Austria, Spain, and Holland." (Weiten, 2010)