Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

 
Module 53 
Social Infl uence and Groups 
595
Companies seeking to sell their products to consumers often use the tech-
niques identifi ed by social psychologists for promoting compliance. But employers 
also use them to bring about compliance and raise employees’ productivity in the 
workplace. In fact, industrial-organizational (I/O) psychology, a close cousin to 
social psychology, considers issues such as worker motivation, satisfaction, safety, 
and productivity. I/O psychologists also focus on the operation and design of 
organizations; they ask questions such as how decision making can be improved 
in large organizations and how the fi t between workers and their jobs can be 
maximized.
Obedience: Following 
Direct Orders
Compliance techniques are used to gently lead people toward agreement with a 
request. In some cases, however, requests aim to produce  obedience,  a change in 
behavior in response to the commands of others. Although obedience is considerably 
less common than conformity and compliance, it does occur in several specifi c kinds 
of relationships. For example, we may show obedience to our bosses, teachers, or 
parents merely because of the power they hold to reward or punish us.
To acquire an understanding of obedience, consider for a moment how you 
might respond if a stranger said to you:
I’ve devised a new way of improving memory. All I need is for you to teach people a 
list of words and then give them a test. The test procedure requires only that you give 
learners a shock each time they make a mistake on the test. To administer the shocks, 
you will use a “shock generator” that gives shocks ranging from 15 to 450 volts. You 
can see that the switches are labeled from “slight shock” through “danger: severe 
shock” at the top level, where there are three red Xs. But don’t worry; although the 
shocks may be painful, they will cause no permanent damage.
Presented with this situation, you would be likely to think that neither you nor 
anyone else would go along with the stranger’s unusual request. Clearly, it lies out-
side the bounds of what we consider good sense. 
Or does it? Suppose the stranger asking for your help was a psychologist con-
ducting an experiment. Or suppose the request came from your teacher, your 
employer, or your military commander—all people in authority with a seemingly 
legitimate reason for the request. 
If you still believe it’s unlikely that you would comply—think again. The situa-
tion presented above describes a classic experiment conducted by social psychologist 
Stanley Milgram in the 1960s. In the study, an experimenter told participants to give 
increasingly stronger shocks to another person as part of a study on learning (see 
Figure 2). In reality, the experiment had nothing to do with learning; the real issue 
under consideration was the degree to which participants would comply with the 
experimenter’s requests. In fact, the “learner” supposedly receiving the shocks was 
a confederate who never really received any punishment (Milgram, 2005). 
Most people who hear a description of Milgram’s experiment feel it is unlikely 
that any participant would give the maximum level of shock—or, for that matter, any 
shock at all. Even a group of psychiatrists to whom the situation was described 
predicted that fewer than 2% of the participants would fully comply and administer 
the strongest shocks. 
However, the actual results contradicted both experts’ and nonexperts’ predic-
tions. Some 65% of the participants eventually used the highest setting on the shock 
generator—450 volts—to shock the learner. This obedience occurred even though 
the learner, who had mentioned at the start of the experiment that he had a heart