Conformity And Obedience To Authority

Conformity is where people behave in terms of beliefs at a particular group of individuals that has control. This means that a person who conforms may deny the reality perceived by the five senses. In obedience, a person does not change their own personality when following orders (Celine, 2018). Both Conformity and obedience are social actions that are observed. Conformity is the act of following a certain group of people and adapting to their lifestyles and so it responds to straight order. Obedience requires direct authority orders (usually adults or people with power). Pressure and inspiration are obvious in both conformity and obedience. The reasons for conformity and obedience also differ. Non-conformity often ends with denial, while disobedience can result in punishment due to rejection. In both cases, loneliness can happen. Obedience allows authorities to have a system of order almost like social order for things to function in the way they want them to be. There are many ways that this is done within society like law, religion, morality, and norms which reflect this attempt to have a control that can control different types of people by statues and having a position. With no clear authority, people will their own actions and for themselves, therefore, there likely will be chaos within society. Obedience indicates that a person is under someone else’s rules, however, unlike in conformism, there is no change in their beliefs and feelings. The majority of people have certain expectations of the people within society as a whole. These expectations must be met or else, they will be rejected. For one to belong, one must follow ideals. To avoid rejection, a person deals with their beliefs and actions. In conclusion, Conformity and obedience are two forms of social actions that are obvious in human interactions.

Asch worked in a lab room to research conformity. He recruited fifty males to join in a visual test. Asch placed members in a place with seven confederates/stooges. Associates decided their answers when offered the duty. The member did not know anything about this and was believed that other ‘confederates/stooges’ were members like themselves. A limitation of the experiment is that members were male. As a result, the study lacks people validity and so it cannot be widespread to females as well as older age groups. Another about the experiment is that it was used as a false task to find out conformity judging line lengths. The research has low ecological validity because it cannot be widespread to other situations that are realistic of conformity. conformity study has many strengths. Firstly, it was carried in a highly controlled lab room. There was a control group and a group with other people, meaning that any major difference in results is only going to be due to that one change. Secondly, there was a simple right response to the questions given and it also showed that individuals give in to social pressures easily.

Moscovici believed that minority influence causes conformity. Moscovici created an experiment to study the influence of a stooge minority, that is a group of members who have been fixed in the study (aka psychology, 2019). In this test, members had to judge each color of blue-green slides. If the minority were consistent for a long period of time, they had the effect of changing the opinions of others in the group. As if people hold different views as to others. The problem was that only female members were used in the study, though women less likely had their voices heard back then. (thestudentroom, 2014)There has been researching to suggest that women are more conformist than men and so these findings cannot be applied to males and so it had low external validity. Another limitation is that members were betrayed in this study and so informed consent could not be gained, this raises ethical issues, however, as the deception was minor and undue anxiety to the people was not cause, some think that the deception can be justified. (thestudentroom, 2014)The advantage is that it repeated the exams 32 times and members have known each other for a while and so lowering the validity of the trial as more occurring with those that know each other.