Introduction to Psychology

Introduction to Psychology of 97 being. Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up. People tend to obey orders fromother people if they recognize their authority as morally right and / or legally based. This response to legitimate authority is learned in a variety of situations, for example, in the family, school and workplace. Zimbardo’s Prison Study- The Stanford prison experiment (SPE) was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. The experiment was conducted at Stanford University, August 14–20, 1971, by a team of researchers led by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo. It was funded by the US Office of Naval Research and was of interest to both the US Navy and Marine Corps, as an investigation into the causes of conflict between military guards and prisoners. Twenty-four male students out of seventy-five were selected to take on randomly assigned roles of prisoners and guards, in a mock prison situated in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. The participants adapted to their roles well beyond Zimbardo's expectations, as the guards enforced authoritarian measures and ultimately subjected some of the prisoners to psychological torture. Many of the prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, at the request of the guards, readily harassed other prisoners who attempted to prevent it. The experiment even affected Zimbardo himself, who, in his role as the superintendent, permitted the abuse to continue. Two of the prisoners quit the experiment early and the entire experiment was abruptly stopped after only six days. Certain portions of the experiment were filmed and excerpts of footage are publicly available. The results of the experiment favor situational attribution of behavior rather than dispositional attribution (a result caused by internal characteristics). In other words, it seemed that the situation, rather than their individual personalities, caused the participants' behavior. Under this interpretation, the results are compatible with the results of the Milgram experiment, in which ordinary people fulfilled orders to administer what appeared to be agonizing and dangerous electric shocks to a confederate of the experimenter. Why People Obey- Social norms are shared expectations about how group members should behave. People conform because of informational and normative social influence. The majority’s size and presence of a dissenter influence people’s degree of conformity. Milgram’s research found an unexpectedly high percentages of people willing to obey destructive orders. Such obedience is stronger when the victim is remote and when the authority figure is close by, legitimate, and assumes responsibility for what happens. The results of Milgram’s and Zimbardo’s studies provide examples of how social contexts can induce people to behave in ways they never would have imagined possible. Some of the pressures to influence a person’s behavior come in the form of deliberate strategies. By learning to identify these techniques, people will be in a better position to resist them. The powerful norm of reciprocity involves the expectation that when others treat us well, we should respond in kind. The door-in-the-face technique is when a persuader makes a large request, expecting it to be rejected, and the presents a smaller request. The foot-in-the-door technique is when a persuader first gets compliance with a small request and then later presents a larger request. The final technique is low balling, where a persuader gets a person to commit to an action, and then before actually performing the action they increase the cost of that same behavior. By recognizing what compliance techniques are being used to manipulate behavior, people are in a better position to resist them. © 2015 Achieve Page 83