Question

1. What are your reactions to the results of the various studies? (Asch, Milgram, Zimbardo)

2. Describe a social situation you have been in which influence your behavior or opinions.

3. After reading about the experiments testing the influences of others on behavior, do you think social situations affect an individual’s personality? If so, are the effects lasting or temporary?

Answer 1

Solomon Asch, social psychologist, conducted an experiment to study influence of majority affect individual's perceptions. The experiment intended to study how conformity bias affect one's real perception. It was found that about one-third of subjects influenced with majority and perceived according to majority perception. Example: If majority people identifies wrong as correct answer, then other individuals also go with majority and identify in same manner. It is like identifying black crow as white crow if majority people are telling it as white crow. This factor hinders individual's perceptional independence, judgment, and rationality. Asch surprised by this confirmatory behavior and favoring responses of crowd rather than choosing what is right independently. Education system encouraging rationality, values, independent decision making, judgment ability should be practiced to reduce this confirmatory bias phenomenon.

Stanely Milgram conducted an experiment on obedience behavior of individuals. Milgram experiment focused on studying conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. In this experiment, volunteers were told by experimenter (actor dressed in laboratory coat and having authoritative look) to deliver shock to other person in cabin (usually actors appointed by Milgram) and about two-third of volunteers obeyed the orders of authority to deliver severe shock even though they knew it would kill any person. Here, the personal conscience of not harming a person overtaken by obedience to authority. It was concluded that common people are likely to follow the order given by authority even though it is against to their conscience. They tend to feel authoritative figure always has more knowledge and they can exercise influence, hence obeying the orders from authority (Milgram, Perils of Obedience, 1974). By going through the experiment details, we can infer that more rational decision making should be encouraged in people to avoid getting influenced by authoritative figure without reasoning.

Philip Zimbardo, psychology professor, conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971. The experiment attempted to study the psychological effects of perceived power. Here, volunteers are divided into prisoners and prison officers roles. They were given uniforms to suit their roles. This experiment observed internalizing the roles into real personality by the volunteers. We can also study cognitive dissonance in this experiment. The volunteers playing role of prisoner internalized the role and started to struggle for freedom even though they can quit from experiment anytime without struggle. Volunteers playing role of prison officers also internalized the role and tried to exert power. By going through this experiment literature, we can infer that behavior modification and role have correlation, thus affecting our social behavior in community.