Required Resources
Read/review the following resources for this activity:

• Textbook: Chapter 7,8
• Lesson
• Minimum of 2 scholarly sources in addition to textbook and lesson.

Instructions
While our focus in the lesson this week was on the concepts of conformity and obedience, we also studied group processes and dynamics in our readings for the week. For this assignment, select two specific groups to which you personally belong. This could be a church group, sports team, club, department at work, etc. In a slide presentation, address the following for each of the groups you selected:

• Describe the group (membership, purpose, etc.).
• Define the group roles, emphasizing your own role in that group.
• Describe the group norms.
• Analyze the group dynamics – How does the group communicate? How are decisions made? Who evaluates group members’ performance?
• Evaluate how dissension or conflict are managed within the group.
• Select two social psychology group concepts (for example: cohesion, groupthink, social loafing) and apply them to these two groups, comparing and contrasting how the group norms and dynamics impact how the group behaves.

Writing Requirements (APA format)
As you complete your presentation, be sure to:

• Use speaker’s notes to expand upon the bullet point main ideas on your slides, making references to research and theory with citation.
• Proof your work
• Use visuals (pictures, video, narration, graphs, etc.) to complement the text in your presentation and to reinforce your content.
• Do not just write a paper and copy chunks of it into each slide. Treat this as if you were going to give this presentation live to a group of middle school kids – be relevant, engaging, and focused.

Presentation Requirements (APA format) 

• Length: 8-10 slides (not including title, introduction, and references slides)  
• Font should not be smaller than size 16-point  
• Parenthetical in-text citations included and formatted in APA style  
• References slide (a minimum of 2 outside scholarly sources plus the textbook and/or the weekly lesson for each course outcome) 
• Title and introduction slide required 

People may conform or maintain their independence from others, they may comply with direct requests or react with assertiveness, or they may obey the commands of authority or oppose power- ful others in an act of defiance. In this chapter, we examine the factors that lead human beings to yield to or resist social influence.

Social Influence as “Automatic”

Before we consider the explicit forms of social influence depicted in d Figure 7.1, whereby individuals choose whether or not to “go along,” it’s important to note that as social animals humans are vulnerable to a host of subtle, almost reflex-like influences. Without realizing it, we often crack open an involuntary yawn when we see others yawning, laugh aloud when we hear others laughing, and grimace when we see others in pain. In an early demonstration, Stanley Milgram and others (1969) had research confederates stop on a busy street in New York City, look up, and gawk at the sixth-floor window of a nearby building. Films shot from behind the window indicated that about 80% of passersby stopped and gazed up when they saw the confederates.

Rudimentary forms of automatic imitation have been observed in various animal species, such as pigeons, monkeys, hamsters, and fish (Heyes, 2011; Zentall, 2012). There is even evidence to suggest that “cultures” are transmitted through imitation in groups of whales, as when humpback whales off the coast of Maine use lobtail feeding, a technique in which they slam their tail flukes onto the water, then dive and exhale, forming clouds of bubbles that envelop schools of prey fish to be gulped. This complex behavior was first observed in 1980. By 1989 it was measur- ably adopted by 50% of the whale population in that area (Rendell & Whitehead, 2001). Even more recently, researchers using a “network-based diffusion analysis” found that up to 87% of whales that adopted this technique learned it by exposure from other humpbacks (Allen et al., 2013). Similar observations in other species have led animal scientists to suggest that many nonhuman animals form and trans- mit cultures in this manner to succeeding generations (Laland & Galef, 2009).

Do humans similarly imitate one another automatically, without thought, effort, or conflict? It appears that we do. Controlled studies of human infants have shown that some time shortly after birth, babies not only look at faces but (to the delight of parents all over the world) often they mimic simple gestures such as moving the head, pursing the lips, and sticking out the tongue (Meltzoff & Moore, 1977; Ray & Heyes, 2010). Studying 162 infants from 6 to 20 months old, Susan Jones (2007) found that imitation developed at different rates for different behaviors. Using parents as models, she found, for example, that infants mimicked opening the mouth wide, tapping their fingers on a table, and waving bye-bye before they

mimicked clapping hands, flexing their fingers, or putting their hands on the head.

You may not realize it, but we humans unwittingly mimic each other all the time. You might not know you’re doing it, but when you are in a conversation with someone, chances are you are subtly mirroring them as you speak: nodding when they do, sitting back, leaning forward, scratching your face, or crossing your legs. To demonstrate, Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh (1999) set up participants to work on a task with a partner, a confederate who exhib- ited the habit of rubbing his face or shaking his foot. Hidden cameras recording the interaction revealed that without realizing it, participants mimicked these motor behaviors, rubbing their face or shaking a foot to match their partner’s behavior. Chartrand and Bargh dubbed this phenomenon the “chameleon effect,” after the reptile that changes colors according to its physical environment (see d Figure 7.2).

There are two possible reasons for this nonconscious form of imitation. Char- trand and Bargh theorized that such mimicry serves an important social function, that being “in sync” in terms of their pace, posture, mannerisms, facial expressions, tone of voice, accents, speech patterns, and other behaviors enables people to in- teract more smoothly with one another. Accordingly, Chartrand and Bargh (1999) turned the tables in a second study in which they instructed their confederate to match in subtle ways the mannerisms of some par- ticipants but not others. Sure enough, participants who had been mimicked liked the confederate more than those who had not.

Two additional sets of findings further demonstrate the social benefits of mimicry. First, research shows that people mimic others more when they are highly motivated to affiliate—say, because they are similar to these others or are feeling excluded—than when they are not (Chartrand & Lakin, 2013; Chartrand & van Baaren, 2009; Lakin et al., 2008). Second, research shows that when participants interact with others who exhibit negative, antisocial behaviors— say, in their tone of voice—mimicry backfires and causes the par- ticipants to be perceived unfavorably (Smith-Genthôs et al., 2015).

Social mimicry is so powerful that it can influence us even when the mimicker is not a real person. In a study entitled “digi- tal chameleons,” Jeremy Bailenson and Nick Yee (2005) immersed college students, one at a time, in a virtual reality environment in which they found themselves seated at a table across from an avatar, a human-like person that looked something like a three- dimensional cartoon character. This avatar proceeded to argue that students should be required to carry identification cards at all times for security purposes. In half the sessions, his back-and- forth head movements perfectly mimicked the participant’s head movements at a four-second delay. In the other half, he repeated the head movements of an earlier recorded participant. Very few of the students who were mimicked were aware of it. Yet when later asked about the experience, they rated the avatar as more likable and were persuaded by its speech more if it imitated their head movements than the previous participant. The human impulse to mimic others may have adaptive social value, but these types of effects can also be found in nonsocial situations. In one study, Roland Neumann and Fritz Strack (2000) had people listen to an abstract philosophical speech that was recited on tape in a happy, sad, or neutral voice. Afterward, participants rated their own mood as more positive when they heard the happy voice and as more negative when they heard the sad voice. Even though the speakers and participants never interacted, the speaker’s emotional state was infectious, an auto- matic effect that can be described as a form of “mood contagion.” The same can be true about the way we mimic the language we hear in other people’s expres- sions and speech styles. To illustrate, Molly Ireland and James Pennebaker (2010) found that college students answering essay questions or working from excerpts of fictional writing tended in subtle ways to match the language style of the target material to which they were exposed—for example, in terms of their use of personal pronouns (such as I, you), conjunctions (such as but, while), and quantifiers (such as many, few).

It is also important to realize that mimicry is a dynamic process, as when two people who are walking together or dancing become more and more coordinated over time. To demonstrate, Michael Richardson and others (2005) sat pairs of college students side by side to work on visual problems while swinging a hand- held pendulum as “a distraction task.” The students did not need to be synchro- nized in their swinging tempo to get along or solve the problems. Yet when each could see the other’s pendulum, even without speaking, their tempos gradually converged over time—like two hearts beating as one.

Conformity

It is hard to find behaviors that are not in some way affected by exposure to the actions of others. When social psychologists talk of conformity, they specifically refer to the tendency of people to change their perceptions, opinions, and behavior in ways that are consistent with group norms.

Using this definition, would you call yourself a conformist or a nonconform- ist? How often do you feel inclined to follow what others are saying or doing? At first, you may deny the tendency to conform and, instead, declare your individuality and uniqueness. But think about it. When was the last time you attended a formal wedding dressed in blue jeans or remained seated during the national anthem at a sports event? When was the last time you tweeted an unpopular con- trarian position for others to see? People find it difficult to breach social norms. In an early demonstration of this point, research assistants were recruited to ask subway passengers to give up their seats—a conspicuous violation of the norm of acceptable conduct. Many of the assistants could not carry out their assignment. In fact, some of those who tried it became so anxious that they pretended to be ill just to make their request appear justified (Milgram & Sabini, 1978).

With conformity being so widespread and seemingly so natural to human nature, it is interesting and ironic that research participants in North America who are coaxed into following a group norm will often not admit to being influenced. Instead, they try to reinterpret the task and rationalize their behavior as a way to see themselves in as independent (Hornsey & Jetten, 2004). But there is a second reason why people do not see themselves as conformist. In a series of studies, Emily Pronin and others (2007) found that people perceive others to be more conforming than themselves in all sorts of domains—from why they bought an iPad to why they hold a popular opinion. Part of the reason for this asymmetry is that people judge others by their overt behavior and the degree to which it matches what others do, but they tend to judge themselves by focusing inward and introspecting about their thought processes, which blinds them to their own conformity.

People understandably have mixed feelings about conformity. On the one hand, some degree of it is essential if individuals are to maintain communities and coexist peacefully, as when people assume their rightful place in a waiting line. Yet at other times, conformity can have harmful consequences, as when people drink too heavily at parties, cheat on taxes, or tell offensive jokes because they believe others are doing the same. For the social psychologist, the goal is to understand the conditions that promote conformity or independence and the rea- sons for these behaviors.

The early Classics In 1936, Muzafer Sherif published a classic laboratory study of how norms develop

in small groups. His method was ingenious. Male students, who believed they were participating in a visual perception experiment, sat in a totally darkened room. Fifteen feet in front of them, a small dot of light appeared for two seconds, after which participants were asked to estimate how far it had moved. This procedure was repeated several times. Although participants didn’t realize it, the dot of light always remained motionless. The movement they thought they saw was merely an optical illusion known as the autokinetic effect: In darkness, a stationary point of light appears to move, sometimes erratically, in various directions.

At first, participants sat alone and reported their judgments to the experimenter. After several trials, Sherif found that they settled in on their own stable perceptions of movement, with most estimates ranging from 1 to 10 inches (although one participant gave an estimate of 80 feet!). Over the next three days, people returned to participate openly in three-person groups. As before, lights were flashed and the participants, one by one, announced their estimates. As shown in Figure 7.3, initial estimates varied considerably, but participants later converged on a common perception. Eventually, each group established its own set of norms.

Some 15 years after Sherif’s demonstration, Solomon Asch (1951) constructed a very different task for testing how people’s beliefs affect the beliefs of others. To appreciate what Asch did, imagine yourself in the following situation. You sign up for a psychology experiment, and when you arrive, you find six other students waiting around a table. Soon after you take an empty seat, the experimenter explains that he is interested in the ability to make visual discriminations. As an example, he asks you and the others to indicate which of three comparison lines is identical in length to a standard line.

That seems easy enough. The experimenter then says that after each set of lines is shown, you and the others should take turns announcing your judgments out loud in the order of your seating position. Beginning on his left, the experimenter asks the first person for his judgment. Seeing that you are in the next-to-last position, you patiently await your turn. The opening moments pass uneventfully. The task and discriminations are clear and everyone agrees on the answers. On the third set of lines, however, the first participant selects what is quite clearly the wrong line. Huh? What happened? Did he suddenly lose his mind, his eyesight, or both? Before you have the chance to figure this one out, the next four participants choose the same wrong line. Now what? Feeling as if you have entered the twilight zone, you wonder if you misunderstood the task. And you wonder what the others will think if you have the nerve to disagree. It’s your turn now. You rub your eyes and take another look. What do you see? More to the point, what do you do?

d Figure 7.4 gives you a sense of the bind in which Asch’s participants found themselves—caught between the need to be right and a desire to be liked (Insko et al., 1982; Ross et al., 1976). As you may suspect by now, the other “participants” were actually confederates and had been trained to make incorrect judgments on 12 out of 18 presentations. There seems little doubt that the real participants

knew the correct answers. In a control group, where they made judgments in isolation, they made almost no errors. Yet Asch’s participants went along with the incorrect majority 37% of the time—far more often than most of us would ever predict. Not everyone conformed, of course. About 25% refused to agree on any of the incorrect group judgments. Yet 50% went along on at least half of the critical presentations, and remaining participants conformed on an occasional basis. Similarly high levels of conformity were observed when Asch’s study was repeated years later and in recent studies involving other cognitive tasks. For example, recent research demonstrates strong conformity effects on memory—as when an eyewitness is influenced by the report of a co-witness

(Gabbert et al., 2003; Horry et al., 2012). Asch-like conformity effects are also found in the perceptual judgments of 3- and 4-year-old children (Corriveau et al., 2009; Corriveau & Harris, 2010).

Let’s compare Sherif’s and Asch’s classic studies of social influence. Obviously, both demonstrate that our visual perceptions can be heavily influenced by others. But how similar are they, really? Did Sherif’s and Asch’s participants exhibit the same kind of conformity and for the same reasons or was the resem- blance in their behavior more apparent than real?

From the start, it was clear that these studies differed in some important ways. In Sherif’s situation, participants were quite literally “in the dark,” so they natu- rally turned to others for guidance. When physical reality is ambiguous and we are uncertain of our own judgments, as in the autokinetic situation, others can serve as a valuable source of information (Festinger, 1954). In contrast, Asch’s participants found themselves in a much more awkward position. Their task was relatively simple, and they could see with their own eyes which answers were correct. Still, they often followed the incorrect majority. In interviews, many of Asch’s participants reported afterward that they went along with the group even though they were not convinced that the group was right. Many who did not conform said they felt “conspicuous” and “crazy,” like a “misfit” (Asch, 1956, p. 31).

Worldwide, 3.05 billion people, accounting for over 42% of Earth’s population, have access to the Internet (Internet World Stats, 2015). This being the case, you may wonder: Do the social forces that influence people in the face-to-face encounters studied by Sherif and Asch also operate in virtual groups whose other members are nameless, faceless, and anonymous? The answer is yes. McKenna and Bargh (1998) observed behavior in various online blogs in which people with common interests posted and responded to messages on a whole range of topics, from obesity and sexual orientation to money and the stock market. The social nature of the medium in this virtual

Why Do People Conform?

The Sherif and Asch studies demonstrate that people conform for two very differ- ent reasons: one informational, the other normative (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004; Crutchfield, 1955; Deutsch & Gerard, 1955).

A Need to Be right Through informational influence, people conform because they want to make good and accurate judgments of reality and assume that when others agree on something, they must be right. In Sherif’s autokinetic task, as in other difficult or ambiguous tasks, it’s natural to assume that four eyes are better than two. Hence, research shows that eyewitnesses trying to recall a crime or some other event will alter their recollections and even create false memories in response to what they hear other witnesses report (Gabbert et al., 2003).

When people are in a state of uncertainty, following the collective wisdom of others may prove to be an effective strategy. In the popular TV game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? contestants who were stumped on a question were able to invoke one of two human forms of assistance: (1) calling a friend or relative who served as a designated “expert”; or (2) polling the studio audience, which casted votes by computer for instant feedback. Overall, the “experts” were useful, as they offered the correct answer 65% of the time. Illustrating the wisdom of crowds, however, the studio audiences were even more useful, picking the right answer 91% of the time (Surowiecki, 2005). These days, relying on the collective wisdom of large numbers of other people is something we do all the time. When you look to buy merchandise on Amazon.com, you will see average customer situation was “remote.” Still, these researchers found that in newsgroups that brought together people with “hidden identities” (such as gays and lesbians who had concealed their sexuality), members were highly responsive to social feed- back. Those who posted messages that were met with approval rather than disapproval later became more active participants of the newsgroup. When it comes to social support and rejection, even remote virtual groups have the power to shape our behavior (Bargh & McKenna, 2004; Kassner et al., 2012; Williams et al., 2000).

Why Do People Conform?

The Sherif and Asch studies demonstrate that people conform for two very different reasons: one informational, the other normative (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004; Crutchfield, 1955; Deutsch & Gerard, 1955).

A Need to Be right Through informational influence, people conform because they want to make good and accurate judgments of reality and assume that when others agree on something, they must be right. In Sherif’s autokinetic task, as in other difficult or ambiguous tasks, it’s natural to assume that four eyes are better than two. Hence, research shows that eyewitnesses trying to recall a crime or some other event will alter their recollections and even create false memories in response to what they hear other witnesses report (Gabbert et al., 2003).

When people are in a state of uncertainty, following the collective wisdom of others may prove to be an effective strategy. In the popular TV game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? contestants who were stumped on a question were able to invoke one of two human forms of assistance: (1) calling a friend or relative who served as a designated “expert”; or (2) polling the studio audience, which casted votes by computer for instant feedback. Overall, the “experts” were useful, as they offered the correct answer 65% of the time. Illustrating the wisdom of crowds, however, the studio audiences were even more useful, picking the right answer 91% of the time (Surowiecki, 2005). These days, relying on the collective wisdom of large numbers of other people is something we do all the time. When you look to buy merchandise on Amazon.com, you will see average customer satisfaction ratings from 1 to 5 stars and product reviews; similar ratings can be found on Zagat, Yelp, and OpenTable for restaurants; Expedia.com and Trip- Advisor for hotels; Rotten Tomatoes for movies, and, well you get the idea.

A Fear of Ostracism In contrast to the informational value of conformity, normative influence leads people to conform because they fear the consequence of rejection that follows deviance. It’s easy to see why. Early on, research showed that individuals who stray from a group’s norm tend to be disliked, rejected, ridiculed, and outright dismissed (Schachter, 1951). Although some people are more resilient than others, these forms of interpersonal rejection can be hard to take (Smart Richman & Leary, 2009). In a series of controlled experiments, people who were socially ostracized—for example, by being neglected, ignored, and excluded in a live or online chatroom conversation—react with various types of emotional distress, feeling alone, hurt, angry, and lacking in self-esteem (Williams et al., 2002; Gerber & Wheeler, 2009). Even being left out of a three-way text-messaging conversation on a cell phone can have this effect on us (Smith & Williams, 2004). Kipling Williams and Steve Nida (2011) note that the research on this point is clear: Some people become so distressed when they are ignored or excluded from a group, even one that is newly and briefly formed, that they begin to feel numb, sad, angry, or some combination of these emotions. Over time, ostracism becomes a form of social death, making it difficult to cope.

Why does being ostracized hurt so much? Why, for example, have some teenage victims of cyber bullying, re- acted with such devastation that they committed suicide? Increasingly, social psychologists are coming to appreciate the extent to which human beings, over the course of evolution, have needed each other in order to survive and to flourish. According to Geoff MacDonald and Mark Leary (2005), our need to belong is so primitive that rejection can inflict a social pain that feels just like physical pain. You can sense the connection in the way people describe their emotional reactions to social loss using such words as “hurt,” “brokenhearted,” and “crushed.” Social neuro- science research lends provocative support to this linkage. In brain-imaging studies, for example, young people who were left out by other players in a three-person Internet ball-tossing game called “Cyberball” exhibited elevated neural activity in a part of the brain that is normally as- sociated with physical pain (Eisenberger et al., 2003). In some instances, people who are excluded report feeling a heightened sensitivity to pain; in other cases, the experience leads them to feel numb (Bernstein & Claypool, 2012).

If there is a silver lining, it is that social pain can have positive motivating effects. Once feeling rejected, people seek to re-affiliate with others, which should increase their sensitivity to social perception cues that signal opportunities for inclusion. In a study that tested this hypothesis, Michael Bernstein and others (2008) found that research participants who were led to feel socially rejected or excluded became more accurate in their ability to distinguish between true smiles, which betray happiness and an openness to interaction, and “masking” smiles, which do not express a genuine emotion. Even young children are highly sensitive to cues that signal ostracism. In one study, 4- and 5-year-old children were shown a cartoon video in which a character repeatedly approached a group at play and was either ac- cepted into the group or excluded. Shortly afterward, all the children were asked to “draw a picture of you and your friend.” Interestingly, those who saw the social rejection version of the cartoon drew pictures that placed themselves and their friend closer together and that adults rated as more affiliative (Song et al., 2015).

On final point about being ostracized is important: The effect depends on the source of exclusion and the cultural context. In a fascinating series of studies designed to address this question, Ayse Uskul and Harriet Over (2014) compared farmers and herders in the Eastern Black Sea region of Turkey—two groups that shared the same geographical space, national identity, language, and religion. The farmers, who grow tea and other products, show a high level of interdependence within their social network, having to rely heavily on family and neighbors. In contrast, the herders, who sell cattle and dairy products, tend to be more individualistic and independent, moving between neighboring towns and interacting with strangers and others outside their immediate social circle. In one study, participants were asked to visualize themselves as the character in a vignette who was socially excluded either by a close other person or by a stranger. They were then asked to rate in various ways how they would feel about themselves. Two important results consistently emerged. First, both groups were more distressed about being excluded by close others than by strangers. Second, the herders felt worse about being excluded by strangers than the farmers did. As a cultural subgroup that relies on strangers to make a living, herders did not make the same ingroup- outgroup distinction that the farmers did. In this domain of social influence, as in others, cultural context plays an important role.

Distinguishing Types of Conformity In group settings, both informational and normative influences are typically at work. Consider the Asch experiment. Even though many of his participants said they had conformed just to avoid being differ- ent, others said that they came to agree with their group’s erroneous judgments. Is that possible? At the time, Asch had to rely on what his participants reported in inter- views. Thanks to recent developments in social neuroscience, however, researchers can now peer into the socially active brain. In an ingenious medical school study that illustrates the point, Gregory

Berns and others (2005) put 32 adults into a visual-spatial per- ception experiment in which they were asked to “mentally rotate” two geometric objects to determine if they were the same or different (see d Figure 7.5). As in the original Asch study, participants were accompanied by four con- federates who unanimously made incorrect judgments on certain tri- als. Unlike in the original study, however, participants were placed in an fMRI scanner while engaged in the task. There were two note- worthy results. First, participants conformed to 41% of the group’s incorrect judgments. Second, these conforming judgments were ac- companied by heightened activity in a part of the brain that controls spatial awareness—not in areas as- sociated with conscious decision making. These results suggest that the group altered perceptions, not just behavior.

Conformity effects on Perception

In this study, participants tried to determine if pairs of geometric objects were the same or different after observing the responses of four unanimous confederates. Participants followed the incorrect group 41% of the time. Suggesting that the group had altered perceptions, not just behavior, fMRI results showed that these conforming judgments were accompanied by increased activity in a part of the brain that controls spatial awareness. Berns et al., 2005

The distinction between the two types of social influence— informational and normative—is important, not just for under- standing why people conform but because the two sources of influence produce different types of conformity: private and public (Allen, 1965; Kelman, 1961). Like beauty, conformity may be skin deep or it may penetrate beneath the surface. Private conformity, also called true acceptance or conversion, describes instances in which others cause us to change not only our overt behavior but our minds as well. To conform at this level is to be truly persuaded that others in a group are correct. In contrast, public conformity (sometimes called compliance, a term used later in this chapter to describe a different form of influence) refers to a more superficial change in behavior. People often respond to normative pressures by pretending to agree even when privately they do not. This often happens when we want to curry favor with others. The politician who tells voters whatever they want to hear is a case in point.

How, you might be wondering, can social psychologists ever tell the dif- ference between the private and public conformist? After all, both exhibit the same change in their observable behavior. The difference is that compared with someone who merely acquiesces in public, the individual who is truly persuaded maintains that change long after the group is out of the picture. When this dis- tinction is applied to Sherif’s and Asch’s research, the results come out as ex- pected. At the end of his study, Sherif (1936) retested participants alone and found that their estimates continued to reflect the norm previously established in their group—even among those who were retested a full year after the experi- ment (Rohrer et al., 1954). Similar results were recently reported in a study in which college students rated the attractiveness of various faces, were shown the average higher or lower results from other students, and then re-rated the same faces—one, three, or seven days or three months later. In this situation, the con- formity effect lasted three to seven days (Huang et al., 2014). Yet in contrast to these results, Asch (1956) himself had reported that when he had participants

d Figure 7.6 Distinguishing Types of Conformity

People made judgments under conditions in which they had a high or low level of motivation. Regardless of whether the judgment task was difficult or easy, there were moderate levels of conformity when participants had low motivation (left). But when they were highly motivated (right), participants conformed more when the task was difficult (as in Sherif’s study) and less when it was easy (as in Asch’s study). From Baron, R. et al., (1996). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology vol 71 (pp. 915–927).

write their answers privately, so that others in the group could not see, their level of conformity dropped sharply (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955; Mouton et al., 1956).

In a study that showed both processes at work, Robert S. Baron and others (1996) had people in groups of three (one participant, two confederates) act as eyewitnesses: First, they would see a picture of a person, then they would try to pick that person out of a lineup. In some groups, the task was difficult, like Sherif’s, since participants saw each picture only once for half a second. For other groups, the task was easier, like Asch’s, in that they saw each picture twice for a total of 10 seconds. How often did participants conform when the confederates made the wrong identification? It depended on how motivated they were. When the experimenter downplayed the task as only a “pilot study,” the conformity rates were 35% when the task was dif- ficult and 33% when it was easy. But when participants were of- fered a financial incentive to do well, conformity went up to 51% when the task was difficult and down to 16% when it was easy (see d Figure 7.6). With pride and money on the line, the Sherif- like participants conformed more and the Asch-like participants conformed less.

Table 7.1 summarizes the comparison of Sherif’s and Asch’s studies and the depths of social influence that they demonstrate. Looking at this table, you can see that the difficulty of the task is crucial. When reality cannot easily be validated by physical evidence, as in the autokinetic situation, people turn to others for information and conform because they are truly persuaded by that information. When reality is clear, however, the cost of dissent becomes the major issue. As Asch found, it can be difficult to depart too much from others even when you know that they—not you—are wrong. So you play along. Privately you don’t change your mind. But you nod your head in agreement anyway.

Majority influence

Realizing that people often succumb to pressure from peers is only a first step in understanding the process of social influence. The next step is to identify the situ- ational and personal factors that make us more or less likely to conform. We know that people tend to conform when the social pressure is intense and that they are insecure about how to behave. But what creates these feelings of pressure and insecurity? Here, we look at four factors: the size of the group, a focus on norms, the presence of an ally, and gender.

group Size: The Power in Numbers Common sense would suggest that as the number of other people in a majority increases, so should their impact. Actually, it is not that simple. Asch (1956) varied the size of groups, using 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, or 15 confederates, and he found that conformity increased with group size—but only up to a point. Once there were 3 or 4 confederates, the amount of additional influence exerted by the rest was negligible. Other researchers have obtained similar results (Gerard et al., 1968).

Beyond the presence of three or four others, additions to a group are subject to the law of “diminishing returns” (Knowles, 1983; Mullen, 1983). As we will see later, Bibb Latané (1981) likens the influence of people on an individual to the way lightbulbs illuminate a surface. When a second bulb is added to a room, the effect is dramatic. When the tenth bulb is added, however, its impact is barely felt, if at all. Economists say the same about the perception of money. An additional dollar seems greater to the person who has only three dollars than it does to the person who has 300.

Another possible explanation is that as more and more people express the same opinion, an individual is likely to suspect that they are acting either in “collusion” or as “spineless sheep.” According to David Wilder (1977), what matters is not the actual number of others in a group but one’s perception of how many distinct others who are thinking independently the group includes. Indeed, Wilder found that people were more influenced by two groups of two than by one four-person group and by two groups of three than by one six-per- son group. Conformity increased even more when people were exposed to three two-person groups. When faced with a majority opinion, we do more than just

count the number of warm bodies—we try to assess the number of independent minds.

A Focus on

Norms

The size of a majority may influence the amount of pressure that is felt, but social norms give rise to conformity only when we know the norms and focus on them. This may sound like an obvious point, yet we often misperceive what is normative, particularly when others are too afraid or too embarrassed to publicly present their true thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

One common example of this “pluralistic ignorance” concerns perceptions of alcohol usage. In a number of college-wide surveys, Deborah Prentice and Dale Miller (1996) found that most students overestimated how comfortable their peers were with the level of drinking on campus. Those who most over- estimated how others felt about drinking at the start of the school year even- tually conformed to this misperception in their own attitudes and behavior. In contrast, students who took part in discussion sessions that were designed to correct these misperceptions actually consumed less alcohol six months later. These findings are important. Additional research has shown that both male and female students tend to overestimate how frequently their same-sex peers use various substances and the quantities they consume. Whether the substance in question is alcohol, tobacco, or marijuana, the more normative students perceive peer usage to be, the more they consume (Henry et al., 2011). More generally, across a range of situations and intervention purposes, chang- ing people’s perceptions of norms can be used to change their behavior (Miller & Prentice, 2016).

Knowing how others are behaving in a situation is necessary for conformity, but these norms will influence us only when they are brought to our awareness, or “activated.” Robert Cialdini (2003) and his colleagues have demonstrated this point in studies on littering. In one study, researchers had confederates pass out handbills to amusement park visitors and varied the amount of litter that ap- peared in one section of the park (an indication of how others behave in that set- ting). The result: The more litter there was, the more likely visitors were to toss their handbills to the ground (Cialdini et al., 1990).

A second study showed that passersby were most influenced by the prior behavior of others when their attention was drawn to the existing norm. In this instance, people were observed in a parking garage that was either clean or cluttered with cigarette butts, candy wrappers, paper cups, and trash. In half of the cases, the norm that was already in place—clean or cluttered—was brought to participants’ attention by a confederate who threw paper to the ground as he walked by. In the other half, the confederate passed by without incident. As participants reached their cars, they found a “Please Drive Safely” handbill tucked under the windshield wiper. Did they toss the paper to the ground or take it with them? The results showed that people were most likely to conform (by littering more when the garage was cluttered than when it was clean) when the confederate had littered—an act that drew attention to the norm (Cialdini et al., 1991).

An Ally in Dissent: getting by With a Little Help In Asch’s initial experiment, unwitting participants found themselves pitted against unanimous majorities. But what if they had an ally, a partner in dissent? Asch investigated this issue and found that the presence of a single confederate who agreed with the participant reduced conformity by almost 80%. This finding, however, does not tell us

why the presence of an ally was so effective. Was it because he or she agreed with the participant or because he or she disagreed with the majority? In other words, were the views of the participants strengthened because a dissenting confederate offered validating information or because dissent per se reduced normative pressures?

A series of experiments explored these two possibilities. In one, Vernon Allen and John Levine (1969) led participants to believe that they were working together with four confederates. Three of these others consistently agreed on the wrong judgment. The fourth then followed the majority, agreed with the participant, or made a third judgment, which was also incorrect. This last variation was the most interesting: Even when the confederate did not validate their own judgment, participants conformed less often to the majority. In an- other experiment, Allen and Levine (1971) varied the competence of the ally. Some participants received support from an average person. In contrast, others found themselves supported by someone who wore very thick glasses and complained that he could not see the visual displays. Not a very reassuring ally, right? Wrong. Even though participants derived less comfort from this sup- porter than from one who seemed more competent at the task, his presence still reduced their level of conformity.

Two important conclusions follow from this research. First, it is substantially more difficult for people to stand alone for their convictions than to be part of even a tiny minority. Second, any dissent—whether it validates an individual’s opinion or not—can break the spell cast by a unanimous majority and reduce the normative pressures to conform. In an interesting possible illustration of how uncommon it is for individuals to single-handedly oppose a majority, researchers examined voting patterns on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1953 to 2001. Table 7.2 shows that out of 4,178 decisions in which all nine justices voted, the 8-to-1 split was the least frequent, occurring in only 10% of all decisions (Granberg & Bartels, 2005).

Gender Differences

Are there gender differences in conformity? Based on Asch’s initial studies, social psychologists used to think that women, once considered the “weaker” sex, conform more than men. In light of all the research, however, it appears that two additional factors have to be considered. First, sex differences depend on how comfortable people are with the experimental task. In a classic study, Frank Sistrunk and John McDavid (1971) had male and female participants answer questions on stereotypically masculine, feminine, and gender-neutral topics. Along with each question, participants were told the per- centage of others who agreed or disagreed. Although females conformed to the contrived majority more on masculine items, males conformed more on feminine items. There were no sex differences on the neutral questions. This finding suggests that one’s familiarity with the issue at hand, not gender, is what affects conformity (Eagly & Carli, 1981). A second factor is the type of social situation people face. As a general rule, gender differences are weak and unreliable. But there is an important exception: In face-to-face encounters, where people must disagree with each other openly, small differences do emerge. In fact, when participants think they are being observed, women conform more and men conform less than they do in a more private situation. Why does being “in public” create such a divergence in behavior? Alice Eagly (1987) argues that in front of others, people worry about how they come across and feel pressured to behave in ways that are viewed as acceptable according to traditional gender-role constraints. At least in public, men feel pressured to behave with fierce independence and autonomy, whereas women are expected to play a gentler, more harmonious role.

From an evolutionary perspective, Vladas Griskevicius and others (2006) sug- gest that people are most likely to behave in gender-stereotyped ways when motivated to attract someone of the opposite sex. Consistent with the stereotypic notion that women tend to like men who distinguish themselves as independent and dominant, whereas men prefer women who are agreeable and cooperative, their research shows that women conform more—and that men conform less— when primed to think about themselves in a romantic situation. But here’s the interesting part: When Matthew Hornsey and others (2015) asked people in a series of experiments to indicate their personal preferences for a romantic partner, both men and women alike were attracted to others who are nonconformists. This pairing of results begs the question: Why did female participants in the first study present themselves as conformist to attract a male partner when men in the second set of studies consistently expressed a preference for nonconformist women? Although more research is needed, these studies seem to suggest that women harbor the belief that men like conformist women—a belief, grounded in the past, that may well turn out to be a myth.

Minority influence

In a book entitled Dissent in Dangerous Times, Austin Sarat (2005) noted that while the freedom to dissent is highly valued in the American national psyche, individual dissenters are often vilified for their beliefs— especially in today’s post-9/11 war on terrorism.

The fact is, it has never been easy for individuals to express unpopular views and enlist support for these views from others. Philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, “Conventional people are roused to frenzy by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as criticism of themselves.” He may have been right. Although people who assert their beliefs against the majority are generally seen as competent and honest, they are also disliked and roundly rejected (Bassili & Provencal, 1988; Levine, 1989). It’s no wonder that most people think twice before expressing unpopular positions. In a series of survey studies of what he called the “minority slowness effect,” John Bassili (2003) asked people about their attitudes on social policy issues such as affirmative action or about their likes and dislikes for various celebrities, sports, foods, places, and activities. Consistently, and regardless of the topic, respondents who held minority opinions were slower to answer the questions than those in the majority.

Resisting the pressure to conform and maintaining one’s independence may be socially difficult, but it is not impossible. History’s most famous heroes, villains, and creative minds are living proof: Joan of Arc, Jesus Christ, Galileo, Charles Darwin, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela, to name just a few,

were dissenters of their time who continue to capture the imagination. Then there is human behavior in the laboratory. Social psychologists have been so intrigued by Asch’s initial finding that participants conformed 37% of the time that textbooks such as this one routinely refer to “Asch’s conformity study.” Yet the overlooked flip side of the coin is that Asch’s participants refused to acquiesce 63% of the time—thus also indicating the power of independence, truth telling, and a concern for social harmony (Friend et al., 1990; Hodges & Geyer, 2006; Jetten & Hornsey, 2011).

Twelve Angry Men, a classic film starring Henry Fonda, illustrates how a lone dissenter can resist the pressure to conform and convince others to follow. Al- most as soon as the door of the jury room closes, the jury in this film takes a show-of-hands vote. The result is an 11-to-1 majority in favor of conviction with Fonda the lone holdout. Through 90 minutes of heated deliberation, Fonda works relentlessly to plant a seed of doubt in the minds of his peers. In the end, the jury reaches a unanimous verdict: not guilty.

Sometimes art imitates life; sometimes it does not. In this instance, Henry Fonda’s heroics are highly atypical. When it comes to jury decision making, as we’ll see in Chapter 12, the majority usually wins. Yet in trial juries, as in other small groups, there are occasional exceptions where minorities prevail—as when someone from the majority faction defects. Thanks to Serge Moscovici and others, we now know quite a bit about minority influence and the strategies that astute nonconformists use to act as agents of social change (Gardikiotis, 2011; Maass & Clark, 1984; Moscovici et al., 1985; Mugny & Perez, 1991).

Moscovici’s Theory According to Moscovici, majorities are powerful by virtue of their sheer numbers, whereas nonconformists derive power from the style of their behavior. It is not just what nonconformists say that matters but how they say it. To exert influence, says Moscovici, those in the minority must be forceful, persistent, and unwavering in support of their position. Yet at the same time, they must appear flexible and open-minded. Confronted with a consistent but even- handed dissenter, members of the majority will sit up, take notice, and rethink their own positions.

Why should a consistent behavioral style prove effective? One possible reason is that unwavering repetition draws attention from those in the mainstream, which is a necessary first step to social influence. Another possibility is that consistency signals that the dissenter is unlikely to yield, which leads those in the majority to feel pressured to seek compromise. A third possible reason is that when con- fronted with someone who has the self-confidence and dedication to take an un- popular stand without backing down, people assume that he or she must have a point. Of course, it helps to be seen as part of “us” rather than “them.” Research shows that dissenters have more influence when people identify with them and perceive them to be similar in ways that are relevant and desirable (Turner, 1991; Wood et al., 1996).

Based on a meta-analysis of 97 experiments investigating minority influence, Wendy Wood and her colleagues (1994) concluded that there is strong support for the consistency hypothesis. In one classic study, for example, Moscovici and others (1969) turned Asch’s procedure on its head by confronting people with a minority of confederates who made incorrect judgments. In groups of six, participants took part in what was supposed to be a study of color perception. They viewed a series of slides that all were blue but varied in intensity. For each slide, the participants took turns naming the color. The task was simple, but two confederates announced that the slides were green. When the confederates were consistent—that is, when both made incorrect green judgments for all slides—they had a surprising degree of influence. About a third of all participants incorrectly reported seeing at least one green slide, and 8% of all responses were incorrect. Subsequent research confirmed that the perception of consistency increases minority influence (Clark, 2001; Crano, 2000).

Noting that social dissent can also breed hostility, Edwin Hollander (1958) recommended a different approach. Hollander warned that people who seek positions of leadership or challenge a group without first becoming accepted full- fledged members of that group run the risk that their opinions will fall on deaf ears. As an alternative to Moscovici’s consistency strategy, Hollander suggested that to influence a majority, people should first conform in order to establish their credentials as competent insiders. By becoming members of the mainstream, they accumulate idiosyncrasy credits, or “brownie points.” Once they have accumulated enough goodwill within the group, a certain amount of their deviance will then be tolerated. Several studies have shown that this “first conform, then dis- sent” strategy, like the “consistent dissent” approach, can be effective (Bray et al., 1982; Lortie-Lussier, 1987; Rijnbout & McKimmie, 2012).

Processes and Outcomes of Minority influence Regardless of which strategy is used, minority influence is a force to be reckoned with. But does it work just like conformity, or is there something different about the way minorities and majorities effect change? Some theorists have proposed that a single process accounts for both directions of social influence—that minority influence is like a “chip off the old block” (Latané & Wolf, 1981; Tanford & Penrod, 1984). Others have taken a dual- process approach (Moscovici, 1980; Nemeth, 1986). In this second view, majorities and minorities exert influence in different ways and for different reasons. Majorities, because they have power and control, elicit public conformity by bringing stressful normative pressures to bear on the individual. But minorities, because they are seen as seriously committed to their views, produce a deeper and more lasting form of private conformity, or conversion, by leading others to become curious and rethink their original positions.

To evaluate these single- and dual-process theories, researchers have com- pared the effects of majority and minority viewpoints on participants who are otherwise neutral on an issue in dispute. On the basis of this research, two conclusions can be drawn. First, the relative impact of majorities and minorities depends on whether the judgment that is being made is objective or subjective, a matter of fact or opinion. In a study conducted in Italy, Anne Maass and others (1996) found that majorities have greater influence on factual questions, for which only one answer is correct (“What percentage of its raw oil does Italy import from Venezuela?”), but that minorities exert equal impact on opinion questions, for which there is a range of acceptable responses (“What percent- age of its raw oil should Italy import from Venezuela?”). People feel freer to stray from the mainstream on matters of opinion, when there is no right or wrong answer.

The second conclusion is that the relative effects of majority and minor- ity points of view depend on how and when conformity is measured. To be sure, majorities have a decisive upper hand on direct or public measures of conformity. After all, people are reluctant to oppose a group norm in a conspicuous manner. But on more indirect or private measures of conformity, on attitude issues that are related but not focal to the point of conflict, or after the passage of time—all of which softens the extent to which majority participants would appear deviant—minorities exert a strong impact (Clark & Maass, 1990; Crano & Seyranian, 2009; Moscovici & Personnaz, 1991). As Moscovici cogently argued, each of us is changed in a meaningful but subtle way by minority opinion.

In Rogues, Rebels and Dissent: Just Because Everyone Agrees, Doesn’t Mean They’re Right, Charlan Nemeth (2016) reviews more than 30 years of research indicating that dissenters in a group serve an invaluable purpose—regardless of whether their views are correct. Dissenters may feel like a nuisance, she notes, and an unnecessary source of conflict, forcing others to defend a position that everyone else agrees with. Yet research shows that dissent sparks innovation (De Dreu & De Vries, 2001).

Simply by their willingness to stay firmly independent, minorities can force other group members to think more carefully, more openly, in new and different ways, and more creatively about a problem, enhancing the quality of a group’s output. In one study, participants exposed to a minority viewpoint on how to solve anagram problems later found more novel solutions themselves (Nemeth & Kwan, 1987). In a second study, those exposed to a consistent minority viewpoint on how best to recall information later recalled more words from a list they were trying to memorize (Nemeth et al., 1990). In a third study, interacting groups with one dissenting confederate produced more original analyses of complex business problems (Van Dyne & Saavedra, 1996). Importantly, Nemeth and her colleagues (2001) found that to have influence over a group, lone individuals must exhibit “authentic dissent,” not merely play “devil’s advocate,” a tactic that actually bolsters a majority’s position.

Culture and Conformity

We humans are a heterogeneous and diverse lot. As a matter of geography, some of us live in large, heavily populated cities whereas others live in small towns, af- fluent suburbs, rural farming or fishing communities, jungles, expansive deserts, high-altitude mountains, tropical islands, and vast arctic plains. Excluding dia- lects, more than 6,500 different languages are spoken. There are also hundreds of religions that people identify with—the most common being Christianity (32%), Islam (23%), Hinduism (14%), and Buddhism (8%), with Judaism (0.20%) and others claiming fewer adherents. Roughly 15% of the world’s population is not affiliated with a religion (Adherents.com, 2015).

Linked together by historical time and geographical space, each culture has its own ideology, music, fashions, foods, laws, customs, and manners of expression. As many tourists and exchange students traveling abroad have come to learn, sometimes the hard way, the social norms that influence human conduct can vary in significant ways from one part of the world to another.

In Do’s and Taboos Around the World, R. E. Axtell (1993) warns world travelers about some of these differences. Dine in an Indian home, he notes, and you should leave food on the plate to show the host that the portions were generous and you had enough to eat. Yet as a dinner guest in Bolivia, you would show your appreciation by cleaning your plate. Shop in an outdoor market in Iraq, and you should expect to negotiate the price of everything you buy. Plan an appointment in Brazil, and the person you’re scheduled to meet is likely to be late; it’s nothing personal. In North America, it is common to sit casually opposite someone with your legs outstretched. Yet in Nepal, as in many Muslim countries, it is an insult to point the bottoms of your feet at someone. Even the way we space ourselves from each other is influenced by culture. Americans, Canadians, British, and northern Europeans keep a polite distance between themselves and others and feel “crowded” by the touchier, nose-to-nose style of the French, Greeks, Arabs, Mexicans, and people of South America. In the affairs of day-to- day living, each culture operates by its own rules of conduct.

Just as cultures differ in their social norms, so too they differ in the extent to which people are expected to adhere to those norms. As we saw in Chapter 3,

there are different cultural orientations toward per- sons and their relationships to groups. Some cultures primarily value individual- ism and the virtues of independence, autonomy, and self-reliance, whereas others value collectivism and the virtues of interdependence, cooperation, and social harmony. Under a banner of individualism, personal goals take priority over group allegiances. Yet in collectivistic cultures, the person is first and foremost a loyal member of a family, city, team, company, church, and state.

What determines whether a culture becomes individualistic or collectivistic? Speculating on the origins of these orientations, Harry Triandis (1995) suggested that there are three key factors. The first is the complexity of a society. As people come to live in more complex industrialized societies (compared, for example, with a simpler life of food gathering among desert nomads), there are more groups to identify with, which means less loyalty to any one group and a greater focus on personal rather than collective goals. Second is the affluence of a society. As people prosper, they gain financial independence from others, a condition that promotes social independence as well as mobility and a focus on personal rather than collective goals. The third factor is heterogeneity. Societies that are homogeneous or “tight” (where members share the same language, religion, and social customs) tend to be rigid and intolerant of those who veer from the norm. Societies that are culturally diverse or “loose” (where two or more cultures co- exist) tend to be more permissive of dissent, thus allowing for more individual expression. According to Edward Sampson (2000), cultural orientations may also be rooted in religious ideologies, as in the link between Christianity and individualism.

Early research across nations showed that autonomy and indepen- dence were most highly valued in the United States, Australia, Great Britain, Canada, and the Netherlands, in that order. In contrast, other cultures value social harmony and “fitting in” for the sake of com- munity, the most collectivist people being from Venezuela, Colombia, Pakistan, Peru, Taiwan, and China (Hofstede, 1980). Although re- search shows that the differences are even more complicated, that individuals differ even within cultures, and that cultures change over time, it is clear that nations on average vary in their orientations on the dimension of individualism (Schimmack et al., 2005). The differ- ence can be measured in books and other written materials—by the contents of the stories told (Imada, 2012) and the use of the first- person singular pronouns, “I” and “me” (Hamamura & Xu, 2015; Twenge et al., 2013).

Do cultural orientations influence conformity? Among the Bantu of Zimbabwe, an African people in which deviance is scorned, 51% of participants who were placed in an Asch-like study conformed— more than the number typically seen in the United States (Whittaker & Meade, 1967). When John Berry (1979) compared participants from 17 cultures, he found that conformity rates ranged from a low of 18% among Inuit hunters of Baffin Island to a high of 60% among village- dwelling Temne farmers of West Africa. Additional analyses have shown that conformity rates are generally higher in cultures that are collectivistic rather than individualistic in orientation (Bond & Smith, 1996). Hence, many anthropologists—interested in human culture and its influence over individuals—study the processes of conformity and independence (Spradley et al., 2015)

Compliance

In conformity situations, people follow implicit or explicit group norms. But an- other common form of social influence occurs when others make direct requests of us in the hope that we will comply. Situations that call for compliance take many forms. These include a friend’s plea for help, sheepishly prefaced by the question “Can you do me a favor?” They also include the pop-up ads on the Internet de- signed to lure you into a commercial site and the salesperson’s pitch for business prefaced by the dangerous words “Have I got a deal for you!” Sometimes, the request is up front and direct; what you see is what you get. At other times, it is part of a subtle and more elaborate manipulation.

How do people get others to comply with self-serving requests? How do police interrogators get crime suspects to confess? How do political parties and charitable organizations draw millions of dollars in contributions from voters? How do you exert influence over others? Do you use threats, promises, politeness, deceit, or reason? Do you hint, coax, sulk, negotiate, trick, throw tantrums, or pull rank whenever you can? To a large extent, the compliance strategies we use depend on how well we know the person we target, our status within a relationship, our personality, our culture, and the nature of the request.

By observing the masters of influence—advertisers, fund-raisers, politicians, and business leaders—social psychologists have learned a great deal about the subtle but effective strategies that are commonly used. What they have discovered is that people often get others to comply with their requests by setting subtle psychological traps. Once caught in these traps, the unwary victim finds it difficult to escape. Anthony Pratkanis (2007) identified 107 methods of social influence that have been researched and published. These tactics go by various colorful names, including the lure, the 1-in-5 prize technique, the dump-and-chase technique, the disrupt-then-reframe technique, and the driving toward a goal technique. In the coming pages, some of the best known approaches will be described.

Mindlessness and Compliance

Sometimes people can be disarmed by the simple phrasing of a request, regardless of its merit. Consider, for example, requests that sound reasonable but offer no real basis for compliance. Ellen Langer and her colleagues (1978) have found that words alone can sometimes trick us into submission. In their research, an experimenter approached people who were using a library copying machine and asked to cut in. Three different versions of the request were used. In one, participants were simply asked, “Excuse me. I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?” In a second version, the request was justified by the added phrase “because I’m in a rush.” As you would expect, more participants stepped aside when the request was justified (94%) than when it was not (60%). A third version of the request, however, suggests that the actual reason offered had little to do with the increase in compliance. In this case, participants heard the following: “Excuse me. I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies?” Huh? Read this request closely and you’ll see that it really offered no reason at all. Yet 93% in this condition complied! It was as if the appearance of a reason, triggered by the word because, was all that was needed. In fact, Langer (1989) finds that the mind is often on “automatic pilot”—we respond mindlessly to words without fully processing the information they are supposed to convey. At least for requests that are small, “sweet little nothings” may be enough to win compliance.

Langer’s research shows that sometimes we process oral requests lazily, without critical thought. In these instances, words alone, if they sound good, can be used to elicit compliance. Consider, for example, words that evoke the concept of freedom. In a series of experiments, researchers found that merely by inserting the phrase “But you are free to accept or refuse this request” into a plea, they were able to increase the numbers of people who agreed to donate money, give someone a cigarette, fill out a survey, and buy pancakes. This technique increased compliance consistently in face-to-face re- quests, on the street and in shopping malls, by mail, over the phone, and on the internet (Guéguen et al., 2013). In a meta-analysis of 42 attempts involving more than 22,000 participants, mostly in France, Christopher Carpenter (2013) concluded that the technique of evoking freedom through words is consistently effective.

It is interesting that although a state of mindlessness can make us vulnerable to compliance, it can also have the opposite effect. For ex- ample, many city dwellers will automatically walk past panhandlers on the street looking for a handout. Perhaps the way to increase compliance in such situations is to disrupt this mindless refusal response by making a request that is so unusual that it piques the target person’s interest. To test the effect of this pique technique, researchers had a confederate approach people on the street and make a request that was either typical (“Can you spare a quarter?”) or atypical (“Can you spare 17 cents?”). The result: Atypical pleas elicited more comments and questions from those who were targeted—and produced a 60% increase in the number of people who gave money (Santos et al., 1994). In another study, researchers who went door to door selling holiday cards gained more compliance when they dis- rupted the mindless process and reframed the sales pitch. They sold more cards when they said the price was “three hundred pennies—that’s three dollars, it’s a bargain” than when they simply asked for three dollars (Davis & Knowles, 1999).

The Norm of reciprocity

One of us recently used Lyft for the first time. Lyft is a peer-to-peer ridesharing company whose service connects drivers in the area to prospective passengers via a mobile app. Founded in 2013, in San Francisco, Lyft is a taxi service that com- petes with Uber. After arriving at the GPS-set destination and completing credit card payment for the ride, this author received from Lyft a request to rate the driver on a 5-point scale (to help ensure customer satisfaction, average driver ratings can be found on the Lyft app). That was easy. He was a 5. The car was clean and comfortable; the ride was quick; the conversation was interesting. The next day, this author was notified that the driver had rated him a 5. Not only does the com- pany seek passenger ratings of drivers but also driver ratings of passengers! The author/passenger being a social psychologist, he could not resist wondering: Had he “earned the 5 rating, or was it “payback” for his prior high rating of the driver?

A simple, unstated, but powerful rule of social behavior known as the norm of reciprocity dictates that we treat others as they have treated us (Gouldner, 1960). On the negative side, this norm can be used to sanction retaliation against those who cause us harm—as captured in the expression “an eye for an eye.” On the positive side, reciprocity can lead us to feel obligated to repay others for acts of kindness. Thus, whenever we receive gifts, invitations, compliments, and free samples, we usually go out of our way to return the favor.

The norm of reciprocity contributes to the predictability and fairness of social interaction. But it can also be used to exploit us. Dennis Regan (1971) examined this possibility in the following laboratory study. Individuals were brought together with a confederate who was trained to act in a likable or unlikable manner for an experi- ment on “aesthetics.” In one condition, the confederate did the participant an unsolicited favor. He left during a break and returned with two bottles of Coca-Cola, one for himself and the other for the participant. In a second condition, he returned from the break empty-handed. In a third condition, participants were treated to a Coke, but by the experimenter, not the confederate. The confederate then told participants in all conditions that he was selling raffle tickets at 25 cents apiece and asked if they would be willing to buy any. On average, participants bought more raffle tickets when the confederate had earlier brought them a soft drink than when he had not. The norm of reciprocity was so strong that they returned the favor even when the confederate was not otherwise a likable character. In fact, participants in this condi- tion spent an average of 43 cents on raffle tickets. At a time when soft drinks cost less than a quarter, the confederate made a handsome quick profit on his investment!

It’s clear that the norm of reciprocity can be used to trap us, unwittingly, into acts of compliance. For example, research conducted in restaurants shows that wait- ers and waitresses can increase their tip percentages by writing, “Thank you” on the back of the customer’s check, by drawing a happy face on it, or by placing candy on the check tray (Rind & Strohmetz, 2001; Strohmetz et al., 2002). But does receiving a favor make us feel indebted forever or is there a time limit to the social obligation that is so quietly unleashed? In an experiment designed to answer this question, Jerry Burger and others (1997) used Regan’s soft drink favor and had the confederate try to “cash in” with a request either immediately or one week later. The result: Compliance levels increased in the immediate condition but not after a full week had passed. People may feel compelled to reciprocate, but that feeling—at least for small acts of kindness—is relatively short-lived.

Some people are more likely than others to trigger and exploit the reciprocity norm. According to Martin Green- berg and David Westcott (1983), individuals who use reci- procity to elicit compliance are called “creditors” because they always try to keep others in their debt so they can cash in when necessary. On a questionnaire that measures reciprocation ideology, people are identified as creditors if they endorse such statements as “If someone does you a favor, it’s good to repay that person with a greater favor.” On the receiving end, some people try more than others not to accept favors that might later set them up to be ex- ploited. On a scale that measures reciprocation wariness, people are said to be wary if they express the suspicion, for example, that “asking for another’s help gives them power over your life” (Eisenberger et al., 1987).

Cultures may also differ in terms of their reciproca- tion wariness—with interesting consequences for social behavior. Imagine that you bump into a casual friend at the airport, stop for a drink, and the friend offers to pay for it. Would you let the friend pay? Or, suppose a sales clerk in a supermarket offered you a free sample of soup to taste. Would you accept the offer? Theorizing that the norm of reciprocity operates with particular force in col- lectivist cultures that foster interdependence, Hao Shen and others (2011) conducted a series of studies in which they posed these kinds of questions to Chinese college students from Hong Kong and to European American

students from Canada. As you can see in Figure 7.7, the students from China were consistently less willing to accept the favor. Additional questioning revealed that these participants were more likely to see the gift giver’s motives as self-serving and to feel uncomfortably indebted by the situation.

Setting Traps: Sequential request Strategies

People who raise money or sell for a living know that it often takes more than a single plea to win over a potential donor or customer. Social psychologists share this knowledge and have studied several compliance techniques that are based on making two or more related requests. Click! The first request sets the trap. Snap! The second captures the prey. In a classic and important book entitled Influence: Science and Practice, Robert Cialdini (2009) described a number of sequential request tactics in vivid detail. Other social psychologists have continued in this tradition (Dolinski, 2016; Kenrick et al., 2012). The best known of these methods are presented in the following pages.

The Foot in the Door Folk wisdom has it that one way to get a person to com- ply with a sizable request is to start small. First devised by traveling salespeople peddling vacuum cleaners, hairbrushes, cosmetics, magazine subscriptions, and en- cyclopedias, the trick is to somehow get your “foot in the door.” The expression need not be taken literally, of course. The point of the foot-in-the-door technique is to break the ice with a small initial request that the customer can’t easily refuse. Once that first commitment is elicited, the chances are increased that another, larger request will succeed.

Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser (1966) tested the impact of this tech- nique in a series of field experiments. In one, an experimenter pretending to be employed by a consumer organization telephoned a large number of female home- makers in Palo Alto, California, and asked if they would be willing to answer some questions about the household products they use. Those who consented were then asked a few quick and innocuous questions and thanked for their assistance. Three days later, the experimenter called back and made a considerable, almost outrageous, request. He asked the women if they would allow a handful of men into their homes for two hours to rummage through their drawers and cupboards so they could take an inventory of their household products.

The foot-in-the-door technique proved to be very effective. When the par- ticipants were confronted with only the very intrusive request, 22% consented. Yet the rate of agreement among those who had been surveyed earlier more than doubled, to 53%. This basic result has now been repeated over and over again. People are more likely to donate time, money, food, blood, the use of their home, and other resources once they have been induced to go along with a small initial request. Although the effect is not always as dramatic as that obtained by Freed- man and Fraser, it does appear in a wide variety of circumstances, and it increases compliance rates, on average, by about 13% (Burger, 1999).

The practical implications of the foot-in-the-door technique are obvious. But why does it work? Over the years, several explanations have been suggested. One that seems plausible is based on self-perception theory—that people infer their at- titudes by observing their own behavior. This explanation suggests that a two-step process is at work. First, by observing your own behavior in the initial situation, you come to see yourself as the kind of person who is generally cooperative when approached with a request. Second, when confronted with the more burdensome request, you seek to respond in ways that maintain this new self-image. By this logic, the foot-in-the-door technique should succeed only when you attribute an initial act of compliance to your own personal characteristics.

Based on a review of dozens of studies, Jerry Burger (1999) concluded that the research generally supports the self-perception account. Thus, if the first request is too trivial or if participants are paid for the first act of compliance, they won’t later come to view themselves as inherently cooperative. Under these conditions, the technique does not work. Likewise, the effect occurs only when people are moti- vated to be consistent with their self-images. If participants are unhappy with what the initial behavior implies about them, if they are too young to appreciate the implications, or if they don’t care about behaving in ways that are personally consistent, then again the technique does not work. Other processes may be at work, but it ap- pears that the foot opens the door by altering self-perceptions, leading people who agree to the small initial request—without any compensation—to see themselves as helpful (Burger & Caldwell, 2003). In fact, this process can still occur even when a person tries to comply with the initial small request but fails. In a series of studies, Dariusz Dolinski (2000) found that when people were asked if they could find directions to a bogus street address or decipher an unreadable message—small favors that they could not satisfy—they too become more compliant with the next request.

Knowing that a foot in the door increases compliance rates is both exciting and troubling—exciting for the owner of the foot, troubling for the owner of the door. As Cialdini (2009) put it, “You can use small commitments to manipulate a person’s self-image; you can use them to turn citizens into ‘public servants,’

prospects into ‘customers,’ prisoners into ‘collaborators.’ And once you’ve got a man’s self-image where you want it, he should comply naturally with a whole range of your requests that are consistent with this view of himself” (p. 74).

Lowballing Another two-step trap, arguably the most unscrupulous of all com- pliance techniques, is also based on the “start small” idea. Imagine yourself in the following situation. You’re at a local car dealership. After some negotiation, the salesperson offers a great price on the car of your choice. You cast aside other con- siderations and shake hands on the deal and as the salesperson goes off to “write it up,” you begin to feel the thrill of owning a new car. Absorbed in fantasy, you are suddenly interrupted by the return of the salesperson. “I’m sorry,” he says. “The manager would not approve the sale. We have to raise the price by another $450. I’m afraid that’s the best we can do.” As the victim of an all-too-common trick known as lowballing, you are now faced with a tough decision. On the one hand, you really like the car; and the more you think about it, the better it looks. On the other hand, you don’t want to pay more than you bargained for and you have an uneasy feeling in the pit of your stomach that you’re being duped. What do you do?

Salespeople who use this tactic are betting that you’ll make the purchase despite the added cost. If the way research participants behave is any indication, they are often right. In one study, experimenters phoned introductory psychol- ogy students and asked if they would be willing to participate in a study for extra credit. Some were told up front that the session would begin at the uncivilized hour of 7 a.m. Knowing that, only 31% volunteered. But other participants were lowballed. Only after they agreed to participate did the experimenter inform them of the 7 a.m. starting time. Would that be okay? Whether or not it was, the pro- cedure achieved its objective—the signup rate rose to 56% (Cialdini et al., 1978).

Disturbing as it may be, lowballing is an interesting technique. Surely, once the lowball offer has been thrown, many recipients suspect that they were misled. Yet they go along. Why? The reason appears to hinge on the psychology of com- mitment (Kiesler, 1971). Once people make a particular decision, they justify it to themselves by thinking of all its positive aspects. As they get increasingly commit- ted to a course of action, they grow more resistant to changing their mind, even if the initial reasons for the action have been changed or withdrawn entirely. In the car dealership scenario, you might very well have decided to purchase the car because of the price. But then you would have thought about its sleek appearance, the scent of the leather interior, the iPod dock, and the brand-new satellite radio. By the time you learned that the price would be more than you’d bargained for, it would be too late—you would already have been hooked.

Lowballing also produces another form of commitment. When people do not suspect duplicity, they feel a nagging sense of unfulfilled obligation to the person with whom they negotiated. Even though the salesperson was unable to complete the original deal, you might feel obligated to buy anyway, having already agreed to make the purchase. This commitment to the other person may account for why lowballing works better when the second request is made by the same person than by someone else (Burger & Petty, 1981). It may also explain why people are most vulnerable to the lowball when they make their commitment in public rather than in private (Burger & Cornelius, 2003).

The Door in the Face Although shifting from an initial small request to a larger one can be effective, as in the foot-in-the-door and lowball techniques, oddly enough the opposite is also true. Cialdini (2009) described the time he was approached by a Boy Scout and asked to buy two five-dollar tickets to an upcoming circus. Having better things to do with his time and money, he declined. Then the boy asked if he would be interested in buying chocolate bars at a dollar apiece. Even though he does not particularly like chocolate, Cialdini—an expert on social influence—bought two of them. After a moment’s reflection, he realized what had happened. Whether the Boy Scout planned it that way or not, Cialdini had fallen for what is known as the door-in-the-face technique.

The technique is as simple as it sounds. An individual makes an initial request that is so large it is sure to be rejected and then comes back with a second more reasonable request. Will the second request fare better after the first one has been declined? Plagued by the sight of uneaten chocolate bars, Cialdini and others (1975) tested the effectiveness of the door-in-the-face technique. They stopped college students on campus and asked if they would volunteer to work without pay at a counseling center for juvenile delinquents. The time commitment would be forbidding: roughly two hours a week for the next two years! Not surpris- ingly, everyone who was approached politely slammed the proverbial door in the experimenter’s face. But then the experimenter followed up with a more modest proposal, asking the students if they would be willing to take a group of kids on a two-hour trip to the zoo. The strategy worked like a charm. Only 17% of the students confronted with only the second request agreed. But of those who initially declined the first request, 50% said yes to the zoo trip. Importantly, the door-in-the-face technique does not elicit mere empty promises. Most research participants who comply subsequently do what they’ve agreed to do (Cialdini & Ascani, 1976).

Why is the door-in-the-face technique such an effective trap? One possibil- ity involves the principle of perceptual contrast: To the person exposed to a very large initial request, the second request “seems smaller.” Two dollars’ worth of candy bars is not bad compared with ten dollars for circus tickets. Likewise, tak- ing a group of kids to the zoo seems trivial compared with two years of volunteer work. As intuitively sensible as this explanation seems, Cialdini and others (1975) concluded that perceptual contrast is only partly responsible for the effect. When participants only heard the large request without actually having to reject it, their rate of compliance with the second request (25%) was only slightly larger than the 17% rate of compliance exhibited by those who heard only the small request.

A more compelling explanation for the effect involves the notion of recipro- cal concessions. A close cousin of the reciprocity norm, this refers to the pressure to respond to changes in a bargaining position. When an individual backs down from a large request to a smaller one, we view that move as a concession that we should match by our own compliance. Thus, the door-in-the-face technique does not work if the second request is made by a different person (Cialdini et al., 1975). Nor does it work if the first request is so extreme that it comes across as an insincere “first offer” (Schwarzwald et al., 1979). On an emotional level, refusing to help on one request may also trigger feelings of guilt, which we can reduce by complying with the second, smaller request (O’Keefe & Figge, 1997; Millar, 2002).

That’s Not All, Folks! If the notion of reciprocal concessions is correct, then a person shouldn’t actually have to refuse the initial offer in order for the shift to a smaller request to work. Indeed, another familiar sales strategy manages to use concession without first eliciting refusal. In this strategy, a product is offered at a particular price, but then, before the buyer has a chance to respond, the seller adds, “And that’s not all!” At that point, either the original price is reduced or a bonus is offered to sweeten the pot. The seller, of course, intends all along to make the so-called concession.

This ploy, called the that’s-not-all technique, seems transparent, right? Surely no one falls for it, right? Burger (1986) was not so sure. He predicted that people are more likely to make a purchase when a deal seems to have improved than when the same deal is offered right from the start. To test this hypothesis, Burger set up a booth at a campus fair and sold cupcakes. Some customers who approached the table were told that the cupcakes cost 75 cents each. Others were told that they cost a dollar, but then, before they could respond, the price was reduced to 75 cents. Rationally speaking, Burger’s manipulation did not affect the ultimate price, so it should not have affected sales. But it did. When customers were led to believe that the final price represented a reduction, sales increased from 44% to 73%.

At this point, let’s step back and look at the various compliance tactics de- scribed in this section. All of them are based on a two-step process that involves a shift from a request of one size to another. What differs is whether the small or large request comes first and how the transition between steps is made (see Table 7.3). Moreover, all these strategies work in subtle ways by manipulating a target person’s self-image, commitment to the product, feelings of obligation to the seller, or perceptions of the real request. It is even possible to increase compliance by first asking “How are you feeling?” (Howard, 1990) or “I hope I’m not disturbing you, am I?” (Meineri & Guéguen, 2011), or by claiming some coincidental similarity like having the same first name or birthday (Burger et al., 2004). When you consider these various traps, you have to wonder whether it’s ever possible to escape.

Assertiveness: When People Say No Cialdini (2009) opened his book with a confession: “I can admit it freely now. All my life I’ve been a patsy.” As a past victim of compliance traps, he is not alone.

Many people find it difficult to assert themselves in social situations. Faced with an unreasonable request from a friend, spouse, or stranger, they become anxious at the mere thought of putting a foot down and refusing to comply. There are times when it is uncomfortable for anyone to say no. However, just as we can maintain our autonomy in the face of conformity pressures, we can also refuse direct requests—even clever ones. The trap may be set, but you don’t have to get caught.

According to Cialdini, being able to resist compliance pressures rests, first and foremost, on being vigilant. If a stranger hands you a gift and then launches into a sales pitch, you should recognize the tactic for what it is and not feel indebted by the norm of reciprocity. And if you strike a deal with a salesperson who later reneges on the terms, you should be aware that you’re being lowballed and react accordingly. That is exactly what happened to one of the authors of this book. After a Saturday afternoon of careful negotiation at a local car dealer, he and his wife finally came to terms on a price. Minutes later, however, the salesman returned with the news that the manager would not approve the deal. The cost of a power moonroof, which was supposed to be included, would have to be added on. Familiar with the research, the author turned to his wife and exclaimed, “It’s a trick; they’re lowballing us!” She then became furious, went straight to the man- ager, and made such a scene in front of other customers that he backed down and honored the original deal.

What happened in this instance? Why did recognizing the attempted manipu- lation spark such anger and resistance? As this story illustrates, compliance tech- niques work smoothly only if hidden from view. The problem is, these techniques are not only attempts to influence us; they are deceptive. Flattery, gifts, and other ploys often win compliance, but not if perceived as insincere (Jones, 1964) or if the target has a high level of reciprocity wariness (Eisenberger et al., 1987). Like- wise, sequential request traps are powerful only to the extent that they are subtle and cannot be seen for what they are (Schwarzwald et al., 1979). People don’t like to be hustled. In fact, feeling manipulated typically leads us to react with anger, psychological reactance, and stubborn noncompliance—unless the request is a command and the requester is a figure of authority.

Obedience

Allen Funt, the creator and producer of the original TV program Candid Camera (a forerunner of the show Punk’d), spent as much time observing human behav- ior in the real world as most psychologists do. When asked what he learned from all his people watching, Funt replied, “The worst thing, and I see it over and over, is how easily people can be led by any kind of authority figure, or even the most minimal signs of authority.” He cited the time he put up a road sign that read “Delaware Closed Today.” The reaction? “Motorists didn’t question it. Instead they asked, ‘Is Jersey open?’” (Zimbardo, 1985, p. 47).

Funt was right about the way we react to authority. Taught from birth that it’s important to respect legitimate forms of leadership, people think twice before de- fying parents, teachers, employers, coaches, and government officials. The prob- lem is that mere symbols of authority—titles, uniforms, badges, or the trappings of success, even without the necessary credentials—can sometimes turn ordinary people into docile servants. Leonard Bickman (1974) demonstrated this phenom- enon in a series of studies in which a male research assistant stopped passersby on the street and ordered them to do something unusual. Sometimes he pointed to a paper bag on the ground and said, “Pick up this bag for me!” At other times, he pointed to an individual standing beside a parked car and said, “This fellow is overparked at the meter but doesn’t have any change. Give him a dime!” Would anyone really take this guy seriously? When he was dressed in street clothes, only a third of the people stopped followed his orders. But when he wore a security guard’s uniform, nearly 9 out of every 10 people obeyed! Even when the uni- formed assistant turned the corner and walked away after issuing his command, the vast majority of passersby followed his orders. Clearly, uniforms signify the power of authority (Bushman, 1988).

Blind obedience may seem funny, but if people are willing to take orders from a total stranger, how far will they go when it really matters? As the pages of history attest, the implications are sobering. In World War II, Nazi officials participated in the deaths of millions of Jews, as well as of Poles, Russians, gypsies, and homosexuals. Yet when tried for these crimes, all of them raised the same defense: “I was following orders.”

Surely, you may be thinking, the Holocaust was a historical anomaly that says more about the Nazis as a group of bigoted, hateful, and pathologically frustrated individuals than about the situations that lead people in general to commit acts of destructive obedience. In Hitler’s Willing Executioners, historian Daniel Goldhagen (1996) argued on the basis of past records that many German officials were willing participants in the Holo- caust—not mere ordinary people forced to follow orders. Citing historical records, others have similarly argued that Nazi killers knew, believed in, and celebrated their mission (Cesarani, 2004; Haslam & Reicher, 2007; Vetle- sen, 2005).

Yet two lines of evidence suggest that laying blame on this subgroup of German people is too simple as an expla- nation of what happened. First, interviews with Nazi war criminals and doctors who worked in concentration camps suggested, at least to some, the provocative and disturb-

ing conclusion that these people were “utterly ordinary” (Arendt, 1963; Lifton, 1986; Von Lang & Sibyll, 1983). Second, the monstrous events of World War II do not stand alone in modern history. Even today, various crimes of obedience— which may include torture, suicide bombings, and public beheadings—are being committed in ruthless regimes, militaries, and terrorist organizations through- out the world (Haritos-Fatouros, 2002; Kelman & Hamilton, 1989; Victoroff & Kruglanski, 2009). As seen in recent Wall Street scandals, crimes of obedience are also found in the corporate world, where business leaders and their subordinates “morally disengage” from fraud and other unethical actions by denying personal respon- sibility, minimizing consequences, and dehumanizing victims (Beu & Buck- ley, 2004; Moore et al., 2012). On extraordinary but rare occasions, obedience is carried to its ultimate limit. In 1978, 900 members of the People’s Temple cult obeyed a command from Reverend Jim Jones to kill themselves by drink- ing poison. In 1997, Marshall Applewhite, leader of the Heaven’s Gate cult in California, killed himself and convinced 37 followers to do the same. Fanatic cult members had committed mass suicide before, and they will likely do so again (Galanter, 1999).

Milgram’s research: Forces of Destructive Obedience

During the time that Adolf Eichmann was being tried in Jerusalem for his Nazi war crimes, Stanley Milgram began a dramatic series of 18 experiments. The first was published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in 1963; the rest were reported later in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority. Milgram did not realize it at the time—and neither did his research participants—but they were about to make history in one of the most famous psychology research programs ever conducted.

For many years, the ethics of this research has been the focus of much de- bate. Those who say it was not ethical point to the potential psychological harm to which Milgram’s participants were exposed. In contrast, those who believe that these experiments met appropriate ethical standards emphasize the profound contribution it has made to our understanding of human nature and an important social problem. They conclude that on balance, the danger that destructive obedi- ence poses for all humankind justified Milgram’s unorthodox methods. Consider both sides of the debate, which were summarized in Chapter 2, and make your own judgment. Now, however, take a more personal look. Imagine yourself as one of the approximately 1,000 participants who found themselves in a situation much like the following.

The experience begins when you arrive at a Yale University laboratory and meet two men. One is the experimenter, a stern young man dressed in a gray lab coat and carrying a clipboard. The other is a middle-aged gentleman named Mr. Wallace, an accountant who is slightly overweight and average in appearance.

You exchange quick introductions, and then the experimenter explains that you and your co-participant will take part in a study on the effects of punishment on learning. After lots have been drawn, it is determined that you will serve as the teacher and that Mr. Wallace will be the learner. So far, so good.

Soon, however, the situation takes on a more ominous tone. You find out that your job is to test the learner’s memory and administer electric shocks of increas- ing intensity whenever he makes a mistake. You are then escorted into another room, where the experimenter straps Mr. Wallace into a chair, rolls up his sleeves, attaches electrodes to his arms, and applies “electrode paste” to prevent blisters and burns. Mr. Wallace is concerned but the experimenter responds by reassuring him that although the shocks will be painful, the procedure will not cause “per- manent tissue damage.” In the meantime, you can personally vouch for how pain- ful the shocks are because the experimenter stings you with one that is supposed to be mild. The experimenter then takes you back to the main room, where you are seated in front of a “shock generator,” a machine with 30 switches that range from 15 volts, labeled “slight shock,” to 450 volts, labeled “XXX.”

Your role in this experiment is straightforward. First you read a list of word pairs to Mr. Wallace through a microphone. Then you test his memory with a series of multiple-choice questions. The learner answers each question by pressing one of four switches that light up signals on the shock genera- tor. If his answer is correct, you move on to the next question. If it is incorrect, you announce the correct answer and shock him. When you press the appropriate shock switch, a red light flashes above it, relay switches click inside the machine, and you hear a loud buzzing sound go off in the learner’s room. After each wrong answer, you’re told, the intensity of the shock should be increased by 15 volts.

You aren’t aware, of course, that the experiment is rigged and that Mr. Wallace—who is actually a confederate—is never really shocked. As far as you know, he gets zapped each time you press one of the switches. As the session proceeds, the learner makes more and more errors, leading you to work your way up the shock scale. As you reach 75, 90, and 105 volts, you hear the learner grunt in pain. At 120 volts, he begins to shout. If you’re still in it at 150 volts, you can hear the learner cry out, “Experimenter! That’s all. Get me out of here. I re- fuse to go on!” Screams of agony and protest con- tinue. At 300 volts, he says he absolutely refuses to continue. By the time you surpass 330 volts, the learner falls silent and fails to respond—not to be heard from again. Table 7.4 lists his responses in grim detail.

Somewhere along the line, you turn to the experimenter for guidance. “What should I do? Don’t you think I should stop? Shouldn’t we at least check on him?” You might even confront the experimenter head-on and refuse to continue. Yet in answer to your inquiries, the experimenter— firm in his tone and seemingly unaffected by the learner’s distress—prods you along as follows:

Please continue (or, please go on).

The experiment requires that you continue.

It is absolutely essential that you continue.

You have no other choice; you must go on.

What do you do? In a situation that begins to feel more and more like a bad dream, do you follow your own conscience or obey the experimenter? Milgram described this procedure to psychiatrists, college students, and middle-class adults, and he asked them to predict how they would behave. On average, these groups estimated that they would call it quits at the 135-volt level. Not a single person thought he or she would go all the way to 450 volts. When asked to predict the percentage of other people who would deliver the maximum shock, those interviewed gave similar estimates. The psychiatrists estimated that only one out of a thousand people would exhibit that kind of extreme obedience. They were wrong. In the study just described, involving 40 men from the New Haven area, participants exhibited an alarming degree of obedience, administering an average of 27 out of 30 possible shocks. In fact, 26 of the 40 participants—that’s 65%—delivered the ultimate punishment of 450 volts.

The Obedient Participant At first glance, you may see these results as a lesson in the psychology of cruelty and conclude that Milgram’s participants were seriously disturbed. But research does not support such a simple explanation. To begin with, those in a “control group” who were not prodded along by an experimenter refused to continue early into the shock sequence. What’s more, Milgram found that virtu- ally all participants, including those who had administered severe shocks, were tor- mented by the experience. Many of them pleaded with the experimenter to let them stop. When he refused, they continued. But in the process, they trembled, stuttered, groaned, perspired, bit their lips, and dug their fingernails into their flesh. Some burst into fits of nervous laughter. On one occasion, said Milgram, “we observed a [participant’s] seizure so violently convulsive that it was necessary to call a halt to the experiment” (1963, p. 375).

Was Milgram’s 65% “baseline” level of obedience attributable to his unique sample of male participants? Not at all. Forty women who participated in a later study exhibited precisely the same level of obedience: 65% threw the 450-volt switch. Before you jump to the conclusion that something was amiss in New Haven, consider the fact that Milgram’s basic finding has been obtained in several cultures and with children as well as college students and older adults (Blass, 2012). Obedience in the Milgram situation is so universal that it led one author to ask, “Are we all Nazis?” (Askenasy, 1978).

The answer, of course, is no. An individual’s character makes a difference, and some people, depending on the situation, are far more obedient than oth- ers. In the aftermath of World War II, a group of social scientists—searching for the root causes of prejudice and bigotry—sought to identify individuals with an authoritarian personality and developed a questionnaire known as the F-Scale to measure it (Adorno et al., 1950; Stone et al., 1993). What they found is that people who get high scores on the F-Scale (F stands for “Fascist”) are rigid, dogmatic, sexually repressed, ethnocentric, intolerant of dissent, and punitive. They are sub- missive toward figures of authority but aggressive toward subordinates. Indeed, people with high F scores are also more willing than low scorers to administer high-intensity shocks in Milgram’s obedience situation (Elms & Milgram, 1966).

Although personality characteristics may make someone vulnerable or resistant to destructive obedience, it is clear that the situation in which people find themselves has a profound effect. By carefully altering particular aspects of his basic scenario, Milgram was able to identify factors that increase and decrease the 65% baseline rate f obedience in more than 20 variations of the basic experiment (see Figure 7.8). Three factors in particular are important: the authority figure, the proximity of the victim, and the experimental procedure (Blass, 1992; Miller, 1986).

The Authority What is perhaps most remarkable about Milgram’s findings is that an experimenter in a white lab coat is not a powerful figure of authority.

Unlike

military superiors, employers, coaches, or teachers, the experimenter in Milgram’s research could not ultimately enforce his commands. Still, his physical presence and apparent legitimacy played major roles in drawing obedience. When Milgram dimin- ished the experimenter’s status by moving his lab from the distinguished surround- ings of Yale University to a run-down urban office building in nearby Bridgeport, Connecticut, the rate of total obedience dropped to 48%. When the experimenter was replaced by an ordinary person—supposedly another participant—there was a sharp reduction to 20%. Similarly, Milgram found that when the experimenter was in charge but issued his commands by telephone, only 21% fully obeyed. (In fact, when the experimenter was not watching, many participants in this condition feigned obedience by pressing the 15-volt switch.) One conclusion, then, is clear. At least in the Milgram setting, destructive obedience requires the physical presence of a prestigious authority figure.

If an experimenter can exert such control over research participants, imagine the control wielded by truly powerful leaders—whether they are physically pres- ent or not. An intriguing field study examined the extent to which hospital nurses would obey unreasonable orders from a doctor. Using a fictitious name, a male physician called several female nurses on the phone and told them to administer a drug to a specific patient. His order violated hospital regulations: The drug was uncommon, the dosage was too large, and the effects could have been harmful. Yet out of the 22 nurses who were contacted, 21 had to be stopped as they pre- pared to obey the doctor’s orders (Hofling et al., 1966).

The Victim Situational characteristics of the victim are also important factors in destructive obedience. Milgram noted that Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann felt sick when he toured concentration camps but only had to shuffle papers from be- hind a desk to play his part in the Holocaust. Similarly the B-29 pilot who dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima in World War II said of his mission, “I had no thoughts, except what I’m supposed to do” (Miller, 1986, p. 228). These events suggest that because Milgram’s participants were physically separated from the learner, they were able to distance themselves emotionally from the consequences of their actions.

To test the impact of a victim’s proximity on destructive obedience, Milgram seated the learner in one of his studies in the same room as the participant. Under these conditions, only 40% fully obeyed. But when participants were required to physically grasp the victim’s hand and force it against his will onto a metal shock plate, full obedience dropped to 30%. These findings represent significant reductions from the 65% baseline. Still, 3 out of 10 participants were willing to use brute force in the name of obedience

Milgram ran one last variation, never published, that was only recently dis- covered in Yale University’s library, where Milgram’s records have been archived for historical purposes. Located in a rundown office building in a nearby city, he called it the “Bring-a-Friend” condition. In this situation, 20 male participants were told to bring a friend, neighbor, family member, or coworker. When they arrived, the two participants drew straws to determine who would be the teacher and who the learner. Unbeknownst to the teacher, Milgram then coached the learner on how to play the role and react to the shocks according to script, at times pleading to the teacher by name. Would participants obey less in this version? Yes. Compared to a Wallace-as-victim condition run in the same location, where the full obedience rate was 50%, the obedience rate in the friend condition was only 15%. Following in the footsteps of some German citizens who defied the Nazi regime by protecting friends they were ordered to report, Milgram’s participants were indeed capable of resistance when they had a prior relationship with the victim (Rochat & Blass, 2014)

The Procedure Finally, there is the carefully scripted situation created by Milgram. Looking at the dilemma that confronted Milgram’s participants, Burger (2014) points to four critical aspects of the experimental procedure that contributed to the surpris- ing results. First, participants were led to feel relieved of personal responsibility for the victim’s welfare. The experimenter said up front that he was accountable. Burger notes that in a partial replication of Milgram that he more recently conducted, a “Milgram-lite” version to be described later, only 12% of participants who exhibited full obedience gave any indication during their sessions that they bore any sense of responsibility. In fact, when participants are led to believe that they were respon- sible, their levels of obedience drop considerably (Tilker, 1970).

The ramifications of felt responsibility are immense. In the military, on Wall Street, in corporations and other organizations, individuals often occupy positions in a hierarchical chain of command. Eichmann was a mid-level bu- reaucrat who received orders from Hitler and transmitted them to others for implementation. Caught between individuals who make policy and those who carry it out, how personally responsible do those in the middle feel? Wesley Kilham and Leon Mann (1974) examined this issue in an obedience study that cast participants in one of two roles: the transmitter (who took orders from the experimenter and passed them on) and the executant (who actually pressed the shock levers). As they predicted, transmitters were more obedient (54%) than executants (28%).

The second feature of Milgram’s scenario that promoted obedience is the use of gradual escalation in small increments. Participants began the session by de- livering mild shocks and then only gradually escalated to voltage levels of high intensity. After all, what’s another 15 volts compared with the current level? By the time they realized the frightening implications of what they were doing—for example, choosing to align with the experimenter once the learner protested at 150 volts—it had become more difficult to stop (Gilbert, 1981; Packer, 2008). This sequence is much like the foot-in-the-door technique. In Milgram’s words, people become “integrated into a situation that carries its own momentum. The subject’s problem . . . is how to become disengaged from a situation which is moving in an altogether ugly direction” (1974, p. 73). We should point out that obedience by momentum is not unique to Milgram’s research paradigm. As reported by Am- nesty International, many countries still torture political prisoners, and those who are recruited for the dirty work are trained, in part, through an escalating series of commitments (Haritos-Fatouros, 2002).

According to Burger (2014), the third feature of Milgram’s situation that made it difficult for participants to resist is that participants found themselves in a novel situation, unimaginable, like no other they have been in before. As such, they did not know what the norms were, how others have reacted, or how they were sup- posed to respond. That is why, in a variation of Milgram’s research in which two confederates posed as co-participants who refused to continue, the full obedience rate plummeted to 10% (see Figure 7.8). The fourth aspect of the procedure that promoted obedience is that the task was quickly paced. At the outset, Milgram’s experimenter instructed participants to work at a “brisk pace.” Indeed, as one can plainly see in a film that Milgram had produced of his sessions, those who hesitated were immediately prompted to proceed. All this gave participants no time to ponder, consider their values and their options, think about possible consequences, or make careful decisions.

Milgram in the Twenty-First Century

When Stanley Milgram published the results of his first experiment in 1963, at the age of 28, a New York Times headline read: “Sixty-Five Percent in Test Blindly Obey Order to Inflict Pain.” Milgram had pierced the public consciousness and was poised to become an important and controversial figure in psychology—and beyond. In a biography, Thomas Blass (2004) tells of how Milgram became inter- ested in obedience and the impact his studies have had on social scientists, legal scholars, the U.S. military, and popular culture around the world (Milgram’s book has been translated into 11 languages). Now, in an age filled with threats of global conflict, extremism, terrorism, economic hardship, breaches to cybersecurity and privacy, and new forms of lethal weaponry, obedience to authority is an issue of such importance that social psychologists all over the world continue to ponder its ramifications (Benjamin & Simpson, 2009; Blass, 2009; Jetten & Mols, 2014; Reicher et al., 2014). Milgram himself died in 1984 at the age of 51.

Today, a grainy black-and-white film that Milgram produced in 1965 in which a number of sessions were recorded from a hidden camera stands as visual proof of this phenomenon. It is clear from looking at this film that this experiment was conducted in another era, a pre-computer, pre-digital era in which research participants called the young experimenter “sir.” Would these results be repeated today? Would you obey the commands of Milgram’s experimenter?

In an effort to answer this question, Dutch researchers Wim Meeus and Quinten Raaijmakers (1995) created a different but analogous situation. They constructed a moral dilemma much like Milgram’s. Rather than order participants to inflict physical pain on someone, however, they ordered them to cause psy- chological harm. When participants arrived at a university laboratory, they met a confederate supposedly there to take a test as part of a job interview. If the con- federate passed the test, he’d get the job; if he failed, he would not. As part of a study of performance under stress, the experimenter told participants to distract the test-taking applicant by making an escalating series of harassing remarks. On cue, the applicant pleaded with participants to stop, became angry, faltered, and eventually fell into a state of despair and failed. As in Milgram’s research, the question was straightforward: How many participants would obey orders through the entire set of 15 stress remarks, despite the apparent harm caused to a real- life job applicant? In a control group that lacked a prodding experimenter, no one persisted. But when the experimenter ordered them to go on, 92% exhibited complete obedience despite seeing the task as unfair and distasteful. It appears that obedience is a powerful aspect of human nature brought about by the docile manner in which people relate to figures of authority—even today.

In a more recent—and even more direct—attempt to revisit Milgram, Burger (2009) conducted a “partial replication” for which he paid $50 to 70 men and women, a diverse group that ranged from 20 to 81 years old, and used the same procedure. In the original experiment, the learner first protested and asked to stop at 150 volts, at which point nearly all participants paused and indicated a reluctance to continue. Some outright refused at this point. Of those participants who did continue, however, most went all the way. On the basis of this finding, Burger followed the Milgram protocol up to 150 volts in order to esti- mate the number of participants who would have pulled the switch at 450 volts. He also added a condition in which a defiant confederate posing as another participant refused to continue. In light of post-Milgram changes in standards for research ethics, he took additional precautions; he excluded from the study individuals he feared would experience too much stress and then in- formed and reminded participants three times that they could withdraw from the study at any time without penalty.

Despite all that has changed in 45 years, the obedience rate was not appreciably lower (see Figure 7.9). In the experiment that Burger modeled, 83% of Milgram’s participants had continued past 150 volts. In Burger’s more recent study, 70% did the same (it can be estimated, therefore, that 55% would have exhibited full 450-volt obedience in the original experiment). Two additional results proved interesting: (1) Just as Milgram had found, there were no dif- ferences between men and women, and (2) the obedience rate declined only slightly, to 63%, among participants who saw a defiant confeder- ate refuse to continue.

This recent replication has drawn a good deal of interest. Alan Elms (2009), a graduate student of Milgram’s in the 1960s, is cautious about comparing Burger’s “obedience lite” procedure to Milgram’s but eager to see it revitalize the research program Milgram had initiated. Arthur Miller (2009), author of The Obedience Experiments, voices the same cautious excitement. Blass (2009), author of the Milgram biography, The Man Who Shocked the World, sees Burger’s experiment as an important milestone that demonstrates the stability and resilience of obedi- ence in human social behavior. In contrast, Jean Twenge (2009), author of Gen- eration Me—a 2006 book on how Americans have become more self-centered and wholly focused on personal rights—is skeptical of that conclusion that noth- ing has changed. Making precise comparisons, Twenge notes that relative to an obedience rate of 83% among Milgram’s male participants, only 67% of Burger’s men exhibited 150-volt obedience, a decline that is statistically comparable to the alarming change in U.S. obesity rates during that same period of time. Although impressed with the power of Milgram’s situation, Twenge is hopeful that destruc- tive obedience is less prevalent today, in the twenty-first century, than in the past.

Lingering Questions

Before leaving the Milgram studies, let’s consider two important questions: Why exactly did Milgram’s participants follow orders, and what are the moral implica- tions of their behavior?

On the why question, Milgram had theorized that participants were swept up in a situational momentum he had created, leading them to exhibit obedience. What they displayed was not a “blind obedience,” as some commentators have suggested; the personal conflict they experienced was palpable—but it was obedi- ence nevertheless. In contrast, Alex Haslam, Stephen Reicher, and their colleagues recently offered an alternative account—an engaged followership explanation of the results (Reicher et al., 2012; Haslam et al., 2014). These researchers theorize that participants shocked the learner because they identified with the scientific enterprise and wanted to both help the experimenter and make a contribution.

From this perspective, their behavior indicated their engagement in the science, not obedience to authority. In support of this account, they noted that Milgram’s second prod, which appealed to science (“The experiment requires that you con- tinue”) was followed by more shock to the learner than his fourth prod, which took the form of a strong command (“You have no other choice, you must go on”).

To test this hypothesis in a single new experiment, Haslam et al. (2014) cre- ated an online procedure in which they asked participants to engage in a task that involved denigrating certain groups of people in a way that became increasingly unpleasant—much like climbing a shock scale. In this case, they randomly varied which prod came first and found, as predicted, that 64% of participants completed the study after receiving Prod 2, the science prod, compared to only 44% who received Prod 4, the obedience prod. This is an interesting result. But for two rea- sons it represents only a weak test of the obedience hypothesis. First, “You have no choice” is exactly the kind of command phrase that arouses psychological reac- tance and leads people in general to refuse in order to protect their threatened free- dom (see Chapter 6). Second, the participants completed this task via computer without the physical presence of an authority figure, which Milgram had shown to be necessary. Obedience or engaged followership? It will be interesting to see what future studies will be conducted to distinguish these possible explanations.

Then there is the moral question: By providing a situational explanation for the evils of Nazi Germany or modern-day terrorism, do social psychologists unwittingly excuse the perpetrators? Does focusing on situational forces let them off the hook of responsibility? Since many of Milgram’s participants were disobedient, indicating that they were free to choose resistance, one would hope not. Andrew Monroe and Glenn Reeder (2014) note that observers integrate information about the participant, his or her behavior, and the situation, in a manner that accounts for the subtle na- ture of the participant’s motives in light of the dilemma, “as caught between want- ing to help the learner and wanting to placate the experimenter” (p. 550).

In a series of studies, Miller and others (1999) found that after people were asked to come up with explanations for acts of wrongdoing, they tended to be more forgiving of those who committed the acts and they were seen as more forgiving by others. This appearance of forgiveness was certainly not Milgram’s intent, nor is it the intent of other researchers today who seek to understand hu- man cruelty, even while continuing to condemn it. Miller and his colleagues were thus quick to caution, “To explain is not to forgive” (p. 265).

Defiance: When People rebel

History books will call it the “Arab Spring.” On December 17, 2010, a young, un- employed, frustrated Tunisian man by the name of Mohamed Bouazizi set fire to himself in protest after police confiscated the fruits and vegetables he was selling on the street because he lacked a permit. Almost immediately, men and women took to the streets in protest. Despite the government’s determination to suppress dissent, the crowds grew in size, marching, holding rallies, and demanding the resignation of the prime minister. On January 14, 2011, the government was overthrown and set off protests in other countries throughout the Middle East. It’s no wonder the regimes in power sought to censor and block the social media (Howard & Hussain, 2011).

Reading Milgram’s research, it is easy to despair in light of the impressive forces that compel people toward blind obedience. But there’s also good news. Just as social influence processes can breed subservience to authority, social in- fluence processes can also breed rebellion and defiance. The Arab Spring is a modern-day example. A similar phenomenon was seen during World War II. In Re- sistance of the Heart, historian Nathan Stoltzfus (1996) described a civil protest in Berlin in which the non-Jewish wives of 2,000 newly captured Jews congregated outside the prison. The women were there initially to seek information about their husbands. Soon they were filling the streets, chanting and refusing to leave. After eight straight days of protest, the defiant women prevailed. Fearing the negative impact on public opinion, the Nazis backed down and released the men.

In addition to the role of social networking media, recent studies indicate that for better or for worse, synchrony of behavior—for example, walking in step with others, clapping, singing, chanting, or raising arms in unison—can have a unifying effect on people, increasing the tendency to follow what others are doing. In one study, pairs of participants were seated in rocking chairs, side by side, and asked to rock in unison. Other pairs also rocked, but they could not see each other and were not in rhythm. Those in the synchrony condition were later more “in synch” when working jointly to move a steel ball through a wooden maze (Valdesolo et al., 2010). Other studies have shown that acting in unison with others can also increase our tendency to feel so- cially connected, cooperate for the common good, and even comply with a request to aggress against another person (Wiltermuth, 2012; Wiltermuth & Heath, 2010).

Are the actions of a whole group harder to control than the behavior of a sin- gle individual? Consider the following study. Pretending to be part of a marketing research firm, William Gamson and others (1982) recruited people to participate in a supposed discussion of “community standards.” Scheduled in groups of nine, participants were told that their discussions would be videotaped for a large oil company that was suing the manager of a local service station who had spoken out against higher gas prices. After receiving a summary of the case, most par- ticipants sided with the station manager. But there was a hitch. The oil company wanted evidence to win its case, said the experimenter posing as the discussion coordinator. He told each of the group members to get in front of the camera and express the company’s viewpoint. Then he told them to sign an affidavit giving the company permission to edit the tapes for use in court.

You can see how the obedience script was supposed to unfold. Actually, only 1 of 33 groups even came close to following the script. In all others, people were incensed by the coordinator’s behavior and refused to continue. Some groups were so outraged that they planned to take action. One group even threatened to blow the whistle on the firm by calling the local newspapers. Faced with one emotionally charged mutiny after another, the researchers had to discontinue the experiment.

Why did this study produce such active, often passionate revolt when Milgram’s revealed such utterly passive obedience? Could it reflect a change in values from the 1960s, when Milgram’s studies were run? Many college students believe that people would conform less today than in the past, but an analysis of obedience studies has revealed that there is no correlation between the year a study was conducted and the level of obedience that it produced (Blass, 1999)— right up through Burger’s (2009) recent effort. So what accounts for the con- trasting results? One key difference is that people in Milgram’s studies took part alone and those in Gamson’s were in groups. Perhaps Michael Walzer was right: “Disobedience, when it is not criminally but morally, religiously, or politically motivated, is always a collective act” (quoted in Brown, 1986, p. 17).

Our earlier discussion of conformity indicated that the mere presence of one ally in an otherwise unanimous majority gives individuals the courage to dissent. The same may hold true for obedience. Notably, Milgram typically did not have more than one participant present in the same session. But in one experiment, he did use two confederates who posed as co-teachers along with the real partici- pant. In these sessions, one confederate refused to continue at 150 volts and the second refused at 210 volts. These models of disobedience had a profound influ- ence on participants’ willingness to defy the experimenter: In their presence, only 10% delivered the maximum level of shock (see Figure 7.8).

We should add that the presence of a group is not a guaranteed safeguard against destructive obedience. Groups can trigger aggression, as we’ll see in Chap- ter 11. For example, the followers of Jim Jones were together when they collec- tively followed his command to die. And lynch mobs are just that—groups, not individuals. Clearly, there is power in sheer numbers. That power can be destruc- tive, but it can also be used for constructive purposes. Indeed, the presence and support of others often provide the extra ounce of courage that people need to resist orders they find offensive.

The Continuum of Social Influence

As we have seen, social influence on behavior ranges from the implicit pressure of group norms to the traps set by direct requests to the powerful commands of au- thority. In each case, people choose whether to react with conformity or indepen- dence, with compliance or assertiveness, and with obedience or defiance. From all the research, it is tempting to conclude that the more pressure brought to bear on people, the greater the influence. Is it possible, however, that more produces less? In a series of studies, Lucian Conway and Mark Schaller (2005) cast partici- pants into a corporate decision-making task in which they were asked to choose between two business options after watching others make the same decision. Con- sistently, the participants followed the group more when its members had formed their opinions freely than when they were compelled by a leader. It appears that strong-arm tactics that force people to change their behavior may backfire when it comes to changing opinions.

At this point, let’s step back and ask two important questions. First, although different kinds of pressure influence us for different reasons, is it possible to pre- dict all effects with a single overarching principle? Second, what does all the theory and research on social influence say about human nature?

Social impact Theory

In 1981, Bibb Latané proposed that a common bond among the different processes involved in social influence leads people toward or away from such influence. Specifically, Latané proposed social impact theory, which states that social influ- ence of any kind—the total impact of others on a target person—is a function of the others’ strength, immediacy, and number. According to Latané, social forces act on individuals in the same way that physical forces act upon objects. Consider, for example, how overhead lights illuminate a surface. The total amount of light cast on a surface depends on the strength of the bulbs, their distance from the sur- face, and their number. As illustrated in the left portion of Figure 7.10, the same factors apply to social impact.

The strength of a source is determined by his or her status, ability, or rela- tionship to a target. The stronger the source, the greater the influence. When people view the other members of a group as competent, they are more likely to conform in their judgments. When it comes to compliance, sources enhance their strength by making targets feel obligated to reciprocate a small favor. And to elicit obedience, authority figures gain strength by wearing uniforms or flaunting their prestigious affiliations.

Immediacy refers to a source’s proximity in time and space to the target. The closer the source, the greater its impact. Milgram’s research offers the best example. Obedience rates were higher when the experimenter issued commands in person rather than from a remote location, and when the victim suffered in close prox- imity to the participant, he acted as a contrary source of influence and obedience levels dropped. Consistent with this hypothesis, Latané and others (1995) asked individuals to name up to seven people in their lives and to indicate how far away those people lived and how many memorable interactions they’d had with them. In three studies, the correlation was the same: The closer others are, geographically, the more impact they have on us.

Finally, the theory predicts that as the number of sources increases, so does their influence—at least up to a point. You may recall that when Asch (1956) increased the number of live confederates in his line- judgment studies from one to four, conformity levels

rose, yet further increases had only a negligible additional effect. Social impact theory also predicts that people sometimes resist social pressure. According to Latané, this resistance is most likely to occur when social impact is divided among many strong and distant targets, as seen in the right part of d Figure 7.10. There should be less impact on a target who is strong and far from the source than on one who is weak and close to the source, and there should be less impact on a target who is accompanied by other target persons than on one who stands alone. Thus, we have seen that conformity is reduced by the presence of an ally and that obedience rates drop when people are in the company of rebellious peers.

Over the years, social impact theory has been challenged, defended, and re- fined on various grounds (Jackson, 1986; Mullen, 1985; Sedikides & Jackson, 1990). On the one hand, critics say that it does not enable us to explain the processes that give rise to social influence or answer why questions. On the other hand, the theory enables us to predict the emergence of social influence and determine when it will occur. Whether the topic is conformity, compliance, or obedience, this theory provides a stage for interesting new research in the years to come. A number of social psychologists have recently argued that social impact is a fluid, dynamic, ever-changing process (Vallacher et al., 2002). Fifteen years before the Arab Spring became a reality, Latané and L’Herrou (1996) refined the theory in that vein. By having large groups of participants network through e-mail and by controlling their lines of communication, they found that the individuals within the net- work formed “clusters.” Over time, neighbors (participants who were in direct e-mail contact with each other) became more similar to each other than did those who were more distant (not in direct e-mail contact) within the network. Referring to the geometry of social space, Latané and L’Herrou note that in the real world, immediacy cannot be defined strictly in terms of physical distance. Speculating on the role of technology, they noted that social impact theory has to account for the type of events that unfolded in the Middle East, in 2011, and that fact that remote social media may diminish the importance of physical proximity.

Perspectives on Human Nature

From the material presented in this chapter, what general conclusions might you draw about human nature? Granted, social influence is more likely to occur in some situations than in others. But are people generally malleable or unyielding? Is there a tilt toward accepting influence or toward putting up resistance?

There is no single universal answer to these questions. As we saw earlier, some cultures value autonomy and independence; others place greater emphasis on conformity to one’s group. Even within a given culture, values may change over time. To demonstrate the point, ask yourself: If you were a parent, what traits would you like your child to have? When this question was put to American mothers in 1924, they chose “obedience” and “loyalty,” key characteristics of conformity. Yet when mothers were asked the same question in 1978, they cited “independence” and “tolerance of others,” key characteristics of autonomy.

Similar trends were found in surveys con- ducted not only in the United States but also in West Germany, Italy, England, and Japan (Alwin, 1990; Remley 1988) and in laboratory experiments, where conformity rates are somewhat lower today than in the past (Bond & Smith, 1996).

Is it possible that today’s children, tomorrow’s adults, will exhibit more re- sistance to the various forms of social influ- ence? If so, what effects will this trend have on society as a whole? And what will be the future effects of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media? Cast in a positive light, conformity, compliance, and obedience are good and necessary human responses. They promote group solidarity and agreement— qualities that keep groups from being torn

apart by dissension. Cast in a negative light, a lack of independence, assertive- ness, and defiance are undesirable behaviors that lend themselves to narrow- mindedness, cowardice, and destructive obedience, often with terrible costs. For each of us and for society as a whole, the trick is to strike a balance.

Chapter 8 Group Processes

It was a road trip like no other. On July 15, 2015, a vehicle reached a destination that had been a long time coming, and sent photos back home. When members of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) received the photos, celebrations erupted. Their spacecraft, New Horizons, had finally approached Pluto, which, depending on your classifica- tion scheme, is either the farthest planet in our solar system or the most beloved dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt. Either way, it’s far, far away, and this was an in- credible achievement. The historic scientific and engi- neering feat necessary to complete this nearly 10-year, 3-billion-mile journey to the far reaches of our solar system required not only the tireless work of a very large group of people, but also precise coordination among all its members. This is what groups can do at their best. While impressive, it may not seem surprising that this super-intelligent, hardworking group of people at NASA could pull this off. After all, they really are rocket scientists. But history, and social psychology, teach us that groups of even super-smart people can make re- ally bad decisions, and there is something about the dynamics of groups that can make this happen. For ex- ample, two of the biggest tragedies in NASA’s history, the explosions of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, in 1986 and 2003, respectively, occurred in no small part because of bad group processes—involving factors such as poor communication, biased sampling of information, and pres- sure toward conformity. This, unfortunately, is also what groups can do.

In short, people are often at their best—and their worst—in groups. It is through groups that individuals form communities, pool resources, and share suc- cesses. But it is also through groups that ideas stagnate in endless discussion, selfish impulses flourish in the anonymity of a crowd, and prejudices turn into genocide and war. Clearly, it is important that we understand how groups work and how individuals influence, and are influenced by, groups. In this chapter, we first introduce the fundamentals of what groups are and how they develop, then we examine groups on several levels: At the individual level, we explore how individuals are influenced by groups; at the group level, we explore how groups perform; and at the intergroup level, we explore how groups interact with each other in cooperation and competition.

The research we report in this chapter reveals a fascinating fact: Groups can be quite different from the sum of their parts. When you think about that statement, it suggests something almost mystical or magical about groups. How can a group be better—or worse—than its individual members? The math may not seem to add up, but the theory and research discussed in this chapter will help answer this question.

Fundamentals of Groups

We begin our exploration of groups by asking the basic questions: What is a group? Why do people join groups? We then focus on three important aspects of groups: roles, norms, and cohesiveness.

What Is a Group?

Why Join a Group?

What Is a Group? The question might seem quite simple, but if you step back and think about it, the answer is less obvious. For example, many students are mem- bers of a variety of groups on social media. Are these really groups? You may be part of a large social psychology class: Is this a group identity that is meaningful to you?

A group may be characterized as a set of individuals who have direct interactions with each other over a period of time and share a common fate, identity, or set of goals. A group can also consist of people who have joint membership in a social cat- egory based on sex, race, or other attributes; this characteristic is especially relevant for the issues discussed in Chapter 5 on Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination.

Groups vary in the extent to which they are seen as distinct entities, such as whether they have rigid boundaries that make them distinct from other groups. In other words, some groups seem more “groupy” (or in the unfortunate choice of word used by researchers on this issue: “entitative”) than others (Brewer, 2015; Hamilton et al., 2011). On the very low end of this dimension would be people attending a concert or working out near each other in a gym. These typically are not considered real groups. Such assemblages are sometimes called collectives— people engaging in a common activity but having little direct interaction with each other (Milgram & Toch, 1969). Much more integrated groups include tight-knit clubs, sports teams, or work teams—groups that engage in very purposeful activi- ties with a lot of interaction over time and clear boundaries of who is in and not in the group. People tend to identify more strongly with these more integrated, co- herent groups and to get more satisfaction from them (Crawford & Salaman, 2012).

Culture can also shape the nature of what makes a group a group. People in Western cultures are more likely to define and identify with groups based on what members do, whereas in Eastern cultures how group members relate to each other may be more important (Yuki, 2003).

As we will discuss later in this chapter, more groups today defy our traditional view of what is a group. Particularly in the worlds of business and technology, groups often consist of people who are dispersed widely across time and space and communicate exclusively through technol- ogy, and the dynamics of these groups may be extremely different from those of traditional groups. For example, these newer, more dis- persed types of groups tend to have more shift- ing boundaries and membership, and they tend to be more self-managed or have shared lead- ership (Hackman & Katz, 2010). Understanding these unique dynamics and determining how to help these groups reach their potential is one of the more exciting challenges in contemporary social psychological research on groups.

Why Join a Group?

The complexity and ambitions of human life require that we work in groups. Much of what we hope to produce and accomplish can be done only through collective action. Lone individuals cannot play symphonies or football

games, build cities or industries, or run governments or universities. At a more fundamental level, humans may have an innate need to belong to groups stemming from evolutionary pressures that increased people’s chances of survival and reproduction if they lived in groups rather than in isolation. Indeed, according to the social brain hypothesis, the unusually large size of humans’ brains evolved because of our unusually complex social worlds. As we wrote in the first paragraph of Chapter 1: We have such large brains in order to socialize

(Dunbar, 2014; Spunt et al., 2015; van Vugt & Kameda, 2014). For humans, attraction to group life serves not only to protect against threat and uncertainty in a physical sense but also to gain a greater sense of personal and social identity. According to social identity theory, which was discussed in Chapter 5, an important part of people’s feelings of self-worth comes from their identification with particular groups, and so people care a great deal about being part of groups and about how their groups are valued (Ellemers & Haslam, 2012; Greenaway et al., 2015; Hogg, 2014; Jetten et al., 2015). Beyond feelings of self- worth, our groups often give us meaning and purpose and, according to some scholars, perhaps even a symbolic sense of immortality as our most cherished groups live on beyond our lifetimes (Schimel & Greenberg, 2013). These cherished aspects of group membership are at the root of why being rejected by a group is one of life’s most painful experiences (Eisenberger, 2015)

Key Features of Groups:

Roles

, Norms, and

Cohesiveness

Once an individual has joined a group, a process of adjustment takes place as the individual is socialized to how things work in the group. This socialization process may be formal and explicit, such as through an initiation or orientation program, mentoring or supervision, or documentation, or it may be implicit, as newcomers observe how established members behave in the group. Effectively socializing new members can produce short-term and long-term benefits for the group as a whole (Levine & Choi, 2010; Moreland & Levine, 2002). One thing that newcomers can do to more quickly get older members to accept them and utilize their knowledge is to use more group-focused language (such as using “we” and “us” rather than “I” and “you”) with group members (Kane & Rink, 2015).

Two of the things that are especially important for newcomers to learn—and for more established members of the group to continue to understand or revise—are the roles they are expected to play in the group, and what the norms of the group are. Newcomers also learn how cohesive the group is. We focus on each of these three features of groups—roles, norms, and cohesiveness—in the following sections.

Roles

People’s roles in a group—their set of expected behaviors—can be formal “The individuals which took the

or informal. Formal roles are designated by titles: teacher or student in a class, vice president or account executive in a corporation. Informal roles are less obvious but still powerful. Robert Bales (1958) distinguished between two fundamental types of roles: an instrumental role to help the group achieve its tasks and an expressive role to provide emotional support and maintain morale. The same person can fill both roles, but often they are assumed by different individuals, and which of these roles is emphasized in groups may fluctuate over time, depending on the needs of the group.

One problem that can seriously harm the performance of groups is when there is a mismatch between members’ skills and what roles they occupy in the group. It is far too common in groups for members to be assigned or take on group roles in a way that is less than thoughtful and systematic. Members may be assigned roles simply based on who is available at a given point in time rather than who is best suited for the role. Groups function much better when members are assigned roles that best match their talents and personalities, and social psychologists are among the consultants often hired to help groups do this better (Woolley et al., 2007).

Group members sometimes are uncertain about exactly what their group roles are supposed to be. They may also find themselves in roles that conflict with other roles they have to play, either within the group (such as needing to be demanding while also being the source of emotional support) or between groups (such as between work and family). Role uncertainty, instability, and conflict are all associated with poorer job performance, as well a variety of other problems, including workplace bullying or other interpersonal conflicts, emotional exhaustion and burnout, and high turnover in the group (Bowling et al., 2015; Dishon-Berkovits, 2014; Kauppila, 2014; Tubre & Collins, 2000; Wilson & Baumann, 2015).

Sometimes an opposite problem of role uncertainty or conflict develops: Group members can become so absorbed in their role that they lose themselves—and their personal beliefs and sense of morality—in their group role. Interrogators of a prisoner or suspect may get so lost in their role that they fail to recognize the ethical lines they are crossing. One of the most disturbing studies in the history of social psychology examined this kind of issue, in what came to be known as The Stanford Prison Experiment (Haney et al., 1973). Participants in this study were randomly assigned to play the roles of prisoners or guards in a simulated prison. The guards in particular got so into their roles as protectors of the “prison” and enforcer of the rules that they soon became cruel and sadistic.

Even the social psychologist in charge of the study was so focused on his role as “prison warden” that he ignored his ethical responsibilities as a researcher. This fascinating but troubling study is discussed in detail in Chapter 12 on Law.

Norms

in addition to roles for its members, groups also establish norms, rules of conduct for members. Like roles, norms may be either formal or informal. Fraterni- ties and sororities, for example, usually have written rules for the behavior expected from their members. Informal norms are more subtle. What do I wear? How hard can I push for what I want? Who pays for this or that? What kind of language, joking, or socializing is typical? These norms provide individuals with a sense of what it means to be a good group member. Figuring out the unwritten rules of the group can take time and cause anxiety.

Groups often exert strong conformity pressures on individuals who deviate from group norms and perceive or treat these members very harshly, in part because de- viations from group norms can threaten group members’ sense of uniformity and social identity with the group (Hutchison et al., 2013; Packer, 2014). One way that low-status or new group members may try to establish a stronger position in the group is to be especially punishing of members who break group norms—especially if high-status group members would witness their harsh reaction to norm violators

(Jetten et al., 2010). On the other hand, group members who are highly identified with the group and care about its collective success may be willing to deviate from a group norm if they think that the norm is likely to harm the group (Jetten & Hornsey, 2014; Packer et al., 2014).

How tolerant groups are to violations of norms can be, itself, a kind of norm. Some groups, for example, pride themselves on how heterogeneous and free-thinking its members are. Others strongly value uniformity. Paul Hutchison and others (2011) designed an ex- periment to see if they could manipulate this sense of how uniform the group members are supposed to be. They asked some British students questions about their university that were designed to high- light the uniformity of the students’ backgrounds and attitudes at their school. For example, they were asked what percentage of the students preferred popular music over classical music, and what per- centage liked to watch movies. Because the large majority of the stu- dents would prefer popular music and would like movies, questions like these would prime the students to see their similarities. The re- searchers asked other students questions induced to make them see their school as full of diverse backgrounds and attitudes. They were asked to estimate the percentages of students who most preferred dance, rock, hip-hop, pop, or classical music, and what percentages most preferred movies featuring science fiction, love stories, comedy, martial arts, and so on. These questions would highlight the wide variety of opinions and tastes that were accepted at their university.

The students then read about a student who expressed an attitude about a war that was either typical or atypical of the students there. How would the participants react to this student? Participants in general rated the student with the typical attitude toward the war positively. If the student expressed an atypical attitude, however, they disliked him more if they were induced to see their university as very uniform than if they were induced to see their university as diverse and heterogeneous (see d Figure 8.1). In other words, a deviation from a group norm was met with more tolerance if the participants saw the group as more variable than if they saw their group as typically sharing similar background and values. Indeed, when a group develops a strong norm of encouraging diverse viewpoints, it can cause members to conform to the norm of not conforming!

Culture & Norms

Cultures vary in how much they tolerate behavior that deviates from the norm. Anthropolo- gist Pertii Pelto (1968) first described the difference be- tween “tight” and “loose” cultures. He proposed that tight cultures have strong norms and little tolerance for behav- ior that deviates from the norm, while loose cultures have relatively weaker norms and greater tolerance for deviant behavior. Michele Gelfand and others (2011, 2012) demon- strate that greater ecological and historical threats (such as resource scarcity or natural disasters), higher population density, and more restrictive governments and religious in- stitutions encourage the formation of tight societies. Loose societies, in contrast, are more likely to thrive in environ- ments that have fewer historical and ecological threats and are characterized by situations that have few constraints on individuals, allowing individuals to behave according to their own discretion. Analyzing the similarity between people’s values, norms, and behavior across 65 countries, Uz (2015) identified Egypt, Indonesia, and Morocco as the tightest countries and Belgium, Luxembourg, and France as the loosest countries (see Table 8.1). However, one does not have to travel to another country to experience differences in tightness and looseness. For example, within the United States, Harrington and Gelfand (2014) found that the southern states of Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas had the highest tightness rankings, while the western states of California, Oregon, and Washington had the highest looseness rankings.

Cohesiveness

Groups whose members share similar attitudes and closely follow the groups’ norms are more likely than other groups to be cohesive. Group cohe- siveness refers to the forces exerted on a group that push its members closer together (Cartwright & Zander, 1960; Festinger, 1950). Members of cohesive groups tend to feel commitment to the group task, feel positively toward the other group members, feel group pride, and engage in many—and often intense—interactions in the group (Dion, 2000; Rosh et al., 2012).

An interesting question is whether cohesiveness makes groups perform better. It may seem obvious that it should. Indeed, groups often strive to achieve cohesiveness, and if they feel that they are not very cohesive, they may take steps to improve it, such as ordering everyone to go through bonding exercises or hang out together at a rustic retreat. In fact, however, the relationship between cohesiveness and performance is not a simple one. The causal relationship works both ways: On the one hand, when a group is cohesive, group performance often improves; on the other hand, when a group performs well, it often becomes more cohesive. Many team athletes recognize that winning creates team chemistry even more than team chemistry creates winning.

Whatever the cause and effect, several longitudinal studies and meta-analyses of hundreds of studies have provided evidence showing that group cohesion is associated with better performance, but other variables tend to be important in predicting when and to what extent this re- lationship emerges, such as how large the group is, whether the cohesiveness is pri- marily about the group’s attraction to the task (task cohesion) or to each other (inter- personal cohesion), and what type of task the group performs (Castaño et al., 2013; Mathieu et al., 2015; Picazo et al., 2015). As we will see a bit later in the chapter, group cohesiveness can also lead to conformity and narrow-mindedness that can cause major problems for groups.

Culture and Cohesiveness

Group cohesiveness can be affected in

different ways as a function of cultural differences. For example, cohesiveness in collectivist cultures may be associated more with social harmony, cooperation, and interpersonal relations than in indi- vidualist cultures, where recognizing members’ unique skills, perspectives, and job-focused efforts may be more essential for group cohesiveness (Lai et al., 2013). Cultural differences exist also in norms about how leaders are expected to behave in groups, and this has consequences for group cohesiveness. Respect and obedience to leaders are more important to people from collectivist cultures than those in individualist cultures. Consistent with this point, Hein Wendt and others (2009) found in a study of over 150,000 individuals from 615 organizations across 80 countries that having a directive, controlling leader was associated with

greater group cohesiveness in collectivist societies than in individualist cultures. The extent to which groups are comfortable with conflict and heated debate among their members also varies across culture. This was demonstrated in a study by Roger Nibler and Karen Harris (2003) involving five-person groups of strangers and friends in China and the United States. Each group had to decide how to rank 15 items to be taken aboard a lifeboat from a ship that was about to sink. This task tends to trigger a fair amount of initial disagreement among group members before a consensus can be reached. With the Chinese groups and the groups of American strangers, these kinds of disagreements tended to be perceived as troubling and interfered with group performance. To the groups of American friends, in contrast, these disagreements were more likely to be seen as simply part of a freewheeling debate, and the sense of freedom to exchange opinions and disagree with one another tended to improve rather than hurt performance on this task. More recently, Daan Bisseling and Filipe Sobral (2011), using surveys and interviews of 366 members of companies from the Netherlands and Brazil, found that intragroup conflict was associated with reduced satisfaction and job performance among employees in the more collectivistic culture of Brazil, but not among the more individualistic Dutch workers.

Individuals in Groups: The Presence of Others

When we engage in activities in groups, we are in the presence (either physically or virtually) of others. It’s an obvious point, but some of its consequences are profound and surprising. In this section we focus on three important effects that the presence of others can have on individuals: social facilitation, social loafing, and deindividuation.

Social Facilitation: When Others Arouse us

Social psychologists have long been fascinated by how the presence of others affects behavior. In Chapter 1, we reported that Norman Triplett’s article, “The Dynamogenic Factors in Pacemaking and Competition” (1897–1898), is often cited as the earliest publication in the field. Triplett began his research by studying the official bicycle records from the Racing Board of the League of American Wheelmen for the 1897 sea- son. He noticed that cyclists who competed against others performed better than those who cycled alone against the clock. After dismissing various theories of the day (our favorite is “brain worry”), he proposed his own hypothesis: The presence of another rider releases the competitive instinct, which increases nervous energy and enhances performance. To test this proposition, Triplett got 40 children to wind up fishing reels, alternating between performing alone and working in parallel. Triplett reported that children were more likely to perform better when they worked side by side than when they worked alone. (In a contemporary twist on this classic, Michael Strube (2005) used modern statistical techniques to reanalyze Triplett’s original data and found that the results were quite weak and not as straightforward as Triplett’s report suggested.)

Later research following Triplett’s studies proved mixed. Sometimes the presence of others (side by side or with an audience out front) enhanced performance; at other times, performance declined. It seemed that Triplett’s promising lead had turned into a blind alley, and social psychologists had largely abandoned this research by World War II. But years later, Robert Zajonc (1965; 1980) saw a way to reconcile the con- tradictory results by integrating research from experimental psychology with social psychological research. Zajonc offered an elegant solution: The presence of others increases arousal, which can affect performance in different ways, depending on the task at hand. Let’s see how this works

The Zajonc Solution

Social Facilitation Research Today

Zajonc’s formulation revived interest in the issues raised by Triplett’s early research, and suddenly the inconsistent find- ings that had been reported began to make sense. The results of a meta-analysis of 241 studies were consistent with much of Zajonc’s account (Bond & Titus, 1983). And despite its long history, research today continues to demonstrate new examples of social facilitation and to test its scope and limitations. Rui-feng Yu and Xin Wu (2015), for example, found that the presence of an observer slowed down partici- pants’ screening of baggage in an X-ray security scan when the task was complex but sped up the performance when the task was simple. Social facilitation effects have been demonstrated in settings where individuals are taking driving tests (a word of advice: Don’t take your road test with another test-taker present in the car!), gambling electronically, and being given neuropsychological tests, and the effects have been found even when the “others” present were merely a photograph of a favorite TV character or a computer display of a “virtual” person (Eastvold et al., 2012; Gardner & Knowles, 2008; Park & Catrambone, 2007; Rockloff et al., 2012; Rosenbloom et al., 2007).

Alternative explanations for Social Facilitation

Social facilitation effects have been replicated across many domains, but not all of Zajonc’s theory has received universal support. Zajonc proposed that the mere presence of others is sufficient to produce social facilitation. Some have argued, however, that a better expla- nation is the evaluation apprehension theory, which proposes that performance will be enhanced or impaired only in the presence of others who are in a position to evaluate that performance (Geen, 1991; Henchy & Glass, 1968). In other words, it’s not simply because others are around that I’m so aroused and therefore inept as I try to learn to snowboard on a crowded mountain. Rather, it’s because I worry that the others are watching and probably laughing at me, possibly uploading a video of my performance to YouTube. These concerns increase my dominant response, which, unfortunately, is falling.

Another account of social facilitation, distraction–conflict theory, points out that being distracted while we’re working on a task creates attentional conflict (Baron, 1986; Sanders, 1981). We’re torn between focusing on the task and glancing at the distracting stimulus. When we are conflicted about where to pay attention, our arousal increases.

So is one of these theories right and the others wrong? Probably not. It seems likely that all three of the basic elements described by these theories (mere pres- ence, evaluation, and attention) can contribute to the impact others have on our own performance (Uziel, 2007). But as we are about to see in the next section, there is even more to the story of how individuals are affected by the presence of others.

Social Loafing: When Others Relax us

Collective effort Model

Culture and Social Loafing

Deindividuation

Trick or Treat: Field experiments on Halloween

Moving From Personal to Social Identity

Group Performance: Problems and Solutions

Losses and Gains in Groups

Brainstorming

Group Polarization

Groupthink

Preventing Groupthink

Research on Groupthink: Myth or Reality?

Communicating Information and utilizing expertise

Information Sharing and Biased Sampling

Information Processing and Transactive Memory

Goals and Plans in Groups

Training and Technology

Virtual Team

Culture and Diversity

Collective Intelligence: Are Some Groups Smarter Than Others?

Conflict: Cooperation and Competition Within and Between Groups

Mixed Motives and Social Dilemmas

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

Resource Dilemmas

Responding to Social Dilemmas: Groups and Individuals

Negotiation

Culture and Negotiation

Finding Common Ground