Conformity and Obedience

Hi.

My name is Gordon Sam Moot and I would like to welcome

you to this course that is concerned with resistance to social influence.

I am associate professor of social psychology

at the University of Malta and visiting lecturer

at the Department of Psychological and Behavioural

Sciences at the London School of Economics.

My research looks at social influence in various different settings.

I specialise in intergroup and intercultural relations as well as, uh,

the role that social influence plays

in developing public understanding of science.

Um, as I said,

I'm going to be leading this brief course on resistance to social influence.

I will be covering four topics during this course over a sequence of lectures.

I'm going to talk specifically about obedience

and conformity and resistance to social influence.

And then we're going to

talk a little bit about the role of different variables and different issues in

formulating this resistance, particularly

the role of social support,

the role of locus of control

and the role that individual differences play in resisting obedience.

But as the saying goes, let's start from the beginning

when we talk about resistance to influence a couple of

major experiments from the social psychological tradition come to mind,

particularly those concerning conformity and obedience.

So you would remember from other courses ashes, conformity experiments,

for instance, or Milgram's obedience experiments,

the one the former had to do with judging the length of lines and

individuals were subject to conformity pressures by

Confederate into giving an erroneous response.

The latter involved recruiting subjects for an experiment on learning,

and then teachers had to administer electric shocks to

students to help them in their learning abilities.

And both of these findings were very contested

at the time because they seem very counterintuitive.

They seem to suggest that human beings demonstrate tendencies

to conformity and obedience that are somehow maladaptive,

that are somehow the result of dupes who carry out their

behaviours and actions in everyday life without giving anything at all,

even though they might be harming other people in the process.

And this would be very problematic if

our societies were made up of psychological dupes

who aren't able to think rationally about

what they're doing in their everyday lives.

But what I want to do is I want to challenge that notion of human beings being, um,

somehow irrational in their business because I

think it is worth underlining that boat conformity

and obedience play a very crucial role

in our social relations and in our social affairs

in particular

these characteristics.

The psychological characteristics enable us to form large scale organisations,

large scale groups

that enable systemic functioning in society.

So these tendencies enabled things to come together such as

schools, for instance, or workplace organisations or service systems,

religions and nation states.

These large scale organisations and large scale units were

an individual working in that circumstance and participating in

the scripts of that cultural organisation does not necessarily

have a full understanding of everything that is happening.

So an individual might go to school and be a student

but not know anything about the financial accounts of that school.

Or the accountant of the school might not know

much about the subjects that are being thought.

So there's different roles that individuals play in a large scale organisation. A.

They do not necessarily know

everything about

anything that is happening within that setting.

I mean,

think about everyday life and what we do in everyday life

and routine behaviours where we just wake up and go to

the school and hop on a bus and trust that the

bus driver is actually going to take us to our location.

Even something as routine as hitting the bell

on the bus us and expecting the bus driver

to actually stop on the next bus stop is

something that we take routinely and for granted.

Now imagine if individuals did not have the capability

to conform to social norms and to obey authority.

What would happen in circumstances such as

flying to a different destination,

taking a holiday, a vacation or flying for work?

Imagine all the people you have to trust that will do

their job and execute the role in those kinds of circumstances.

You go to the airport and you trust that the baggage handler is not going to

run away with your luggage but is actually going to put it on the flight.

Your boarding.

You trust that the security personnel are actually doing

their job and making sure that you're travelling safe.

Then you go to the other end. You're trusting that the pilot is going to get you there,

and you're trusting the baggage handler at the other end

to not take your baggage and make off with it,

but to actually put it on the conveyor belt for you to pick up.

So all of these

only come together and work smoothly when individuals conform

to descript that they have been given

and do not individually go about doing their own thing.

And when they obey the authority of people

who occupy authoritative positions so that the whole can

be managed as per everybody's intentions if the pilot

tells us to put on our seat belts,

but we don't for our own arbitrary reasons, well,

one thing that is clear out of such a circumstances that we wouldn't be able

to fly because the whole flying arrangement is

is going to become dangerous for everyone.

So what I want to do in this first lecture is fundamentally

challenge this notion that obedience and

conformity are somehow maladaptive behaviours.

They are something that is essential to the functioning of social orders.

One other thing,

and to close off this first lecture that I would

like to highlight is that in such an arrangement,

social order is possible because everyone has an

understanding of the role within the broader system

and what other people are meant to be doing in the broader system.

So when there are problems experienced by the individual,

you know who the authoritative position is.

Therefore, you know who to go to.

If you had a single world order or a single organisational order,

then you have a single authority

that put in place a common set of unchallenged norms.

And what happens as a result of that is

a fetch, efficiency and effectiveness.

Things work as they should if everyone keeps their place

and follows the script that other people are expecting them to keep and follow.

Of course,

this is also taken on a broader scale

and a much larger scale in things like ideologies

and

leading religions,

ideologies and religions try to put in place a world order where a single authority,

such as a God or a particular human being that is at

the top of a particular party that is advancing a particular ideology,

leads the rest of the hierarchy in a determined direction

that satisfies the needs and aspirations of the entire hierarchy.

And so the idea is that

conformity and obedience could

actually help bring about

world peace as it were, or

a social order

that lasts over the long duration over the longer time frame.

And this is brought about through the exercise,

obedience and conformity when everyone knows their place, when who is at the top,

knows that they are at the top and who's

at the bottom knows that they're at the bottom.

Of course, in such a situation,

those who are at the top want to stay at the top,

and those who are at the bottom have no way of climbing

up to the top because climbing up also means, to an extent,

some social disorder,

and that is where

nonconformity and disobedience come in.