Obedience and how it differs from conformity
Definition
Authority figure
An authority figure is someone seen as having a legitimate right to give orders, such as a teacher, a police officer or a boss.
- Obedience, doing what an authority figure tells you to do, is not the same as conformity, where you go along with a group that has given you no order at all.
- Obedience to authority figures is explained through two kinds of factor, personality and the situation.
Key Idea
- Situational factors are features of the setting, such as how close the authority figure is standing.
- Personality factors are features of you, such as how willing you are to challenge someone in charge.
- Obedience is to an authority figure, while conformity is to a group or majority.
How the situation changes obedience
- Proximity of the authority figure
- The closer they are, the harder the order is to ignore, so obedience is higher when they are standing over you and lower when the order arrives from another room or by message.
- The setting
- An order given somewhere that looks official carries extra weight, because the surroundings themselves suggest the order must be a proper one.
- Visible signs of authority
- A uniform, a badge or a job title tells you at a glance that this person is entitled to give orders, so you obey more readily than you would someone in ordinary clothes.
- Orders that grow a step at a time
- When an instruction starts small and is increased slightly each time, every new step feels only a little worse than the one you have already agreed to, which makes it hard to find a point at which to stop.
Example
- A new hospital porter told by a consultant in scrubs to move a patient at once will usually just do it, because the uniform, the setting and the consultant standing there all push the same way.
- The same porter sent the same instruction by message from someone they have never met is far more likely to check first.
- Nothing about the porter has changed between the two, so the difference has to be situational.
How personality changes obedience
- How much respect for authority you have
- Someone brought up to expect that people in charge are followed and rarely questioned tends to obey more than someone brought up to argue back.
- How confident you are
- Saying no to someone in charge takes nerve, so a confident person who is comfortable speaking up refuses more easily than someone who avoids confrontation.
- How strong your moral views are
- A firm view that something is wrong gives you something solid to weigh the order against, which makes refusing more likely.
- How much you feel for the person affected
- Noticing the harm an order would do to a real person makes it much harder to talk yourself into carrying it out.
Common Mistake
- Do not call a factor situational just because it happens at work or at school, because the label depends on whether it lies in the setting or in the person.
- Do not answer an obedience question with conformity material, because a group giving you a wrong answer is not an authority figure giving you an order.
- Do not stop at naming a factor, because the mark is usually for saying which way it moves obedience and why.
Weighing personality against the situation
- Both kinds of factor act at the same moment, so the situation sets the pressure and your personality decides how well you stand up to it.
- Haney, Banks and Zimbardo (1973) is the study to reach for when you want evidence that the situation does most of the work.
- Their participants were screened as normal, healthy men and given the roles of guard and prisoner at random, yet the guards' treatment of the prisoners still became harsh, which personality alone cannot explain.
- Individual differences did not vanish, because not all of the guards behaved cruelly, so the safest judgement is that the situation is the stronger influence without being the only one.
Turning this into marks
- Name the factor and then say which way it moves obedience and why, because a bare name takes one mark at most.
- When you are given a scenario, quote the detail from it, such as the manager standing over the desk or the badge on display.
- The mark most often lost is answering with conformity material, since a group giving a wrong answer is not an authority figure giving an order.
Self review
- What is the difference between obeying an authority figure and conforming to a group?
- Give two situational factors that raise obedience and say why each one works.
- Give two personality factors that make refusing an order easier.
- Why does Haney, Banks and Zimbardo (1973) support a situational explanation of obedience?
- How would you decide whether a factor in a scenario is personality or situation?
