Situations Matter

by Sam Sommers

  Conformity also occurs on a societal scale, as with hairstyles and fashion. In fits and starts, we adjust our sense of the acceptable range of possibilities for how to get coiffed or dressed. Then, one day, sometimes much to our surprise, we realize that these standards—the norms—have changed. Our old yearbook photos are now fodder for amusement and embarrassment. Much of our closet is suddenly ready for the thrift shop. Honestly, in ten years don’t you think we’re going to have a hard time explaining to kids why grown-ups used to go out in public wearing plastic clogs with Swiss cheese holes?

  Or take baby names. It’s the shifting sands of normative conformity that accounts for how a name can go from the punch line of a movie joke—the mermaid’s so naïve she picked “Madison” off a street sign—to the fourth-most popular girls’ name in America less than three decades later. I suppose we should just count ourselves lucky that the screenwriters of Splash didn’t have Daryl Hannah find herself on the other side of Central Park, on Amsterdam Avenue instead. In this case, all it took was one cinematic example to change prevailing norms, kick-starting the transformation of a name from comically unacceptable to utterly commonplace—not unlike how one book/movie about training horses can alter the common usage of the word whisper.

  In short, conformity is all around us. Asch’s lines provide a compelling demonstration of the extent to which we’ll go along with the group even when a correct, alternative response is apparent. But life is often less straightforward—less black-and-white—and conformity becomes even more likely when we navigate the ambiguity of the real world. Like the Jew who finds himself in a Catholic church for the first time for a wedding, forced to spend the whole service following the lead of those around him. How else would he know when to stand and when to sit? That the cushioned stool was a kneeler? Or that those wafers weren’t a midmorning snack to stave off low blood sugar?

  Of course, the same Gentile friends who found my church performance so amusing were just as clueless later on when they arrived at the synagogue for my wedding. Life never fails to present us with unfamiliar social terrain to navigate. And it pays to recognize how useful other people can be for resolving these confusing situations.

  CONFORMITY’S INVISIBLE HAND

  So we’re not as independent-minded as we think we are. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this tendency toward conformity is that it reflects an amazingly subtle form of social influence. That is, here’s a process by which our thoughts and actions are drastically changed by those around us but without other people having to make any sort of direct appeal. In the end, it’s an invisible hand that pulls our strings: this influence of those around us is all in our heads.

  In the Asch study, no one asks participants to give wrong answers; the idea of breaking with the group leads to self-generated discomfort. And except for Joan Rivers and some obnoxious girls I knew in middle school, few people in your life make explicit suggestions about how you should dress or wear your hair, yet we as a society still converge toward a “look” that comes to epitomize an era or geographical region. The next time you have a few minutes to waste at work, upload your photo to www.yearbookyourself.com to explore how you’d look with the clothes and hairstyles of different decades. Conformity is the official psychological sponsor of this enjoyable break from office productivity.

  So conformity is an internal process by which we sense a group’s norm and adjust accordingly. But this isn’t the way we usually think about social influence. What about intentional efforts to change someone’s attitudes? Explicit appeals for assistance? The car salesman who wants you to add the rustproofing package for just $399? Well, our tendency to conform to unspoken rules also provides insight into compliance with more direct, external forms of social influence like these.

  The success of many a direct solicitation also hinges on norms. For example, one time-tested strategy to get others to comply with your requests is to invoke the norm of reciprocity. As alluded to earlier, we feel obligated to return the favor to those who have helped us. Sometimes the return request is immediate, as when charities send free postcards, address labels, or other “tokens of appreciation” along with a donation card. Other people are content to bank return favors for use at a later date, à la Don Corleone on his daughter’s wedding day. Because, really, you never know when a bad tollbooth stop will leave you in need of a good embalmer.

  In one study of reciprocity, male college students were paired with a partner who either did an unexpected favor for him during the experiment—he went to buy a soda for himself and came back with two—or didn’t.9 Afterward, on their way out of the session, the partner asked if the participant would be willing to buy some raffle tickets he was selling for a fund-raiser. Students who had been given the free soda bought almost twice as many raffle tickets, even though the tickets were far more expensive than the drink they had received. Your small investment in reciprocity can pay handsome dividends.

  Efforts like this one to elicit compliance draw on many of the same processes implicated in conformity, even as they include a direct, external request not found in, say, Asch’s study. As with conformity, these compliance tactics don’t apply heavy-handed pressure. Instead, they amount to behind-the-scenes orchestrations based on the assumption that once you activate someone’s concerns about norms—like those regarding reciprocity—these concerns will apply all the force necessary to initiate action.

  Another motivating consideration is commitment. Once we agree to something, we don’t like to go back on our word. As an example, consider that there are few notions more unpleasant to your average college student than waking up early. I teach a class that ends at 11:45 a.m., and on a recent course evaluation one student complained that we met “too early in the morning.” Never mind that had the class ended fifteen minutes later, it literally wouldn’t have been morning anymore.

  Yet somehow, in one phone study, researchers were able to get 56 percent of the undergrads they called to agree to show up to a 7:00 a.m. experiment. How, pray tell, did they do this? By lowballing the students, only informing them of the start time after they had already agreed to participate.10 Only 31 percent agreed to show up when they knew about the timing from the start of the call (and I can only assume that these were students who still planned to be awake from the night before anyway).

  To be honest, boosting compliance doesn’t even require that much creativity. Just as conformity can emerge as if on autopilot, so do people often respond mindlessly to direct requests. Consider the following scenario: You’re at the library preparing to use the copy machine. Suddenly, someone approaches and asks if she can cut in front of you to make five copies because she’s in a rush. A reasonable request, you figure, so you agree. Indeed, 94 percent of library patrons approached in this manner let someone go in front of them.11 When the request was unaccompanied by an explanation—simply “Can I cut in front of you?”—agreement dropped to 60 percent.

  A good reason for cutting in line—being in a rush—increases compliance by more than 30 percentage points. What about a lousy reason, though? What about “Can I cut in front of you because I have to make copies?” By any rational basis, this query shouldn’t lead to any more compliance than the 60 percent rate observed absent an explanation. But it does. In fact, 93 percent of library patrons agreed to the empty request. Just hearing any explanation, even if it’s meaningless, can be as influential as a good explanation.

  It pays to remember that when it comes to the impact of others on how we think and act, both internal and external pressures are at play. Many of the same elements that explain our tendency to go with the flow also account for how we respond to direct requests: the impact of norms, the power of public commitment, mindless reactions to our surroundings. To be an expert of social influence, you have to draw upon all of these factors, capitalizing on the human tendencies toward conformity as well as compliance. Because, remember, the superfan asks people to get up and cheer, but he also sets the example through his own
behavior. Do as I ask and as I do is the mantra of the successful crowd whisperer.

  FOLLOW THE LEADER

  Conformity is a glue that helps hold society together. It keeps crowded city sidewalks in synchronized lockstep during an otherwise chaotic rush hour. It’s a compass for navigating unfamiliar situations, like those faced by the Jew in church or the straight guy at an Indigo Girls concert. But still, taking your cue from those in the know is only as effective as these other people are knowledgeable. Remember the participants in the dark room who had to judge how far a light had moved? They turned to fellow group members for guidance, but the information they gleaned was misleading: the light was actually stationary. Going with the flow can shepherd us through challenging situations, but it doesn’t guarantee accuracy or even a positive outcome. For that matter, in some instances the consequences of conformity can be downright destructive.

  In March 1997, thirty-nine bodies were discovered inside a rented house in Rancho Santa Fe, California. The dead were dressed identically: black sweat suits adorned by handmade arm patches, new black-and-white Nikes, and wallets with a five-dollar bill inside. We soon learned that the dead were members of a communal religious group called Heaven’s Gate. Their mass suicide by way of a vodka-phenobarbital cocktail—timed to coincide with the approach of the Hale-Bopp comet, which cult members believed would be followed by a UFO—reminded many of the even larger mass suicide at Jim Jones’s “Peoples Temple” in Guyana nearly two decades earlier. Though some of the more than nine hundred bodies found at Jonestown showed signs of gunshots or forcible injection, the vast majority had died after drinking a Kool-Aid-like drink laced with cyanide.

  Conformity isn’t limited to low-stakes situations—neither of these mass-suicide tragedies would have been possible without it. In fact, many of the details we’ve since learned about life in cults like these reflect tactics designed to create the very circumstances most likely to elicit conformity. They represent intentional efforts to manipulate situations: Uniform dress and the forsaking of given names reduce feelings of individuality. Communal living arrangements isolated from society heighten members’ dependence on one another and exaggerate norms of reciprocity. Inside the Heaven’s Gate house, investigators found labels indicating the function of every last shelf, cupboard, and light switch—the idea, apparently, was to facilitate mindlessness.

  You don’t have to look to the fringes of society to find groups that make use of conformity-boosting strategies. Nicknames and communal living? Uniform appearance and a mind-set to follow orders automatically? I could just as easily be talking about fraternities or the military. Of course, I’m not suggesting that these are cults, too. But many a group employs similar, cultlike tactics to promote cohesion and allegiance among its members—tactics that also make conformity that much more likely to occur.

  Recall how after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal of 2004, many were quick to attribute the abuse to the aberrational personalities of a few U.S. servicepeople. The public face of these “bad apples” came to be that of Lynndie England, a twenty-year-old West Virginian who had been depicted in photos smiling and giving a thumbs-up as prisoners were sexually humiliated. She must have a sadistic streak, we assumed. At the very least, she and her fellow perpetrators had to be overly compliant individuals.

  But no matter how closely you scrutinize the early years of England’s life, there aren’t red flags of personality. No stories of childhood abuse, either as perpetrator or victim. Her most egregious misconduct as a student apparently was passing notes that poked fun at a science teacher. And she was anything but a subservient wallflower, joining the military against her mother’s objections and quitting a job at a chicken-processing plant because management had ignored her complaints about worker safety and health-code violations. 12 That’s right—before becoming the poster child for military prison abuse, Lynndie England was a conformity-resisting whistle-blower.

  Half a decade later, we’ve learned that the methods used at Abu Ghraib predated Lynndie England’s arrival in Iraq and weren’t confined to just one prison. Moreover, we’ve discovered that these actions weren’t the creative inventions of individual service members but rather a response to clear directives issued by military superiors and modeled by intelligence officials. It may be difficult to fathom, but most of the personnel at Abu Ghraib had personalities little different from yours or mine:[T]he conclusions of researchers . . . hold that, although it is true that, in some situations, deranged and sadistic individuals have committed acts of torture for pleasure, in most cases in which torture is committed at the instigation of government officials, the torturers can best be described as normal individuals.13

  England’s own recollections read as if they had been lifted from a participant in a conformity experiment: “When we first got there, we were like, ‘what’s going on?’ Then you see staff sergeants walking around not saying anything.... You think, ‘OK, obviously it’s normal.’ ” 14 This conclusion doesn’t exonerate the perpetrators of abuse, but let’s face it, no analysis of what went on at Abu Ghraib is complete without considering the dramatic impact of the situation. Once again, WYSIWYG is just a cop-out.

  A UNIFYING THEME of the contexts of Heaven’s Gate, the Peoples Temple, and Abu Ghraib was the presence of strong, persuasive leadership. In the cult examples, there were the group leaders Marshall Applewhite and Jim Jones. In Iraq, the military intelligence officers, as well as a general culture emphasizing chain of command. Indeed, while people will go with the flow in a wide range of settings, there are few better ways to fan the flames of social influence than by having a forceful leader.

  Perhaps the most well-known demonstration of the power of situations on human nature examined this very idea of the easy impact of authority. In Stanley Milgram’s 1960s obedience studies at Yale15 participants were paired with a partner for what they thought was an investigation of how punishment affects learning. Through a rigged drawing, the participant was always assigned to the role of “Teacher” and the partner—actually an actor—became the “Learner.” The setup was straightforward: the Teacher would read a list of word pairs and then test the Learner on them, administering electric shocks of increasing severity for each wrong answer. You know, sort of a cross between East German police interrogation and Japanese game show.

  The shock panel had a long line of thirty switches. Each represented an increase of 15 volts from the one before it, up to a maximum of 450 volts. Descriptive labels appeared in increments of 60 volts, with 75 described as “Moderate Shock,” 135 as “Strong Shock,” and so on. At 375 volts, the label was “Danger: Severe Shock,” and by 435 you were off the scale entirely—it simply and ominously read “XXX.”

  Of course, no one was actually on the receiving end of all this electricity. While participants believed that they were administering increasingly painful shocks to their partner each time he missed a question, the actor in the other room wasn’t hooked up to the electrodes. The moans, complaints, and—eventually—screams heard through the intercom were all prerecorded.

  Like this response to the 150 volt shock: “Get me out of here. I told you I had heart trouble. My heart’s starting to bother me now. Get me out of here, please.”

  And at 180 volts: “I can’t stand the pain. Let me out of here!”

  At a shock of 300 volts, screams of anguish preceded the following: “I absolutely refuse to answer anymore. Get me out of here. You can’t hold me here. Get me out.”

  By 345 volts, the Learner stopped responding altogether to the test questions or the shocks.

  Before starting the study, Milgram famously asked dozens of psychiatrists to estimate what percentage of people would follow the instructions all the way to the end of the shock panel. On average, the psychiatrists guessed that one in one thousand—one-tenth of 1 percent—might be sadistic enough to keep administering shocks of apparently indescribable intensity to a partner who had become unresponsive.

  Their prediction proved low when
it came to participants left on their own to follow the study instructions. Closer to 3 percent of respondents proceeded all the way to 450 volts when left to their own devices.

  In the presence of a lab coat–clad experimenter, however, a remarkable 65 percent went to the end of the shock panel. In fact, not a single respondent in the original study stopped before 300 volts.16 And all the experimenter had to do was make innocuous comments like “Please go on” and “The experiment requires that you continue.” The content of these words was no more informative than the library patron’s request to cut the line because she “needs to make copies.” But authority is inherently influential.

  As Milgram emphasized, these participants were ordinary Americans: “postal clerks, high school teachers, salesmen, engineers, and laborers.” It wasn’t station in life, gender, or personality that predicted willingness to inflict harm. It was the situation. Sure, some people you know are less predisposed than others to conform to the masses or defer to authority—after all, every New England college campus has a guy who makes a point of wearing shorts and Birkenstocks each day, even in winter. Still, context plays a much bigger role than we give it credit for in determining whether we go with the flow.

  Variations on Milgram’s original study highlight this power of situations. When the research was moved from a university setting to an urban office building, fewer than 50 percent of the respondents went to the end of the shock panel. When the experimenter shed his lab coat—and, thus, some of his presumed authority—the rate fell below 20 percent. These are the factors that best predicted how respondents behaved, not their personality or profession or even the era when the research took place: in an updated version of the study in 2009, obedience levels were once again quite high.17