Week 8: Conformity & Ethics

         

Conformity Drawing; Retrieved from http://www.artorgan.com/art/Conformity%20Drawing.php

        The past and present implications of the Milgram Study are the same. When the study was repeated 45 years later, the results revealed that people still behave about the same way. The difference in the study was that the participants were allowed to leave the experiment at any time and the voltage went only as high as 150 so as not to cause unintended stress upon the participants. An astonishing seventy percent of the participants followed the orders. The study showed that ordinary, psychologically intact people have a tendency to blindly obey authority, even at the cost of causing harm to another person. Many of the participants delivered the “shocks” did so at the command of the researcher who stated he would be responsible for any adverse affect and that they would not be held responsible. It revealed that the situation caused the participants’ behavior, not anything in their inherent individual personalities.

This also relates to how groups have the ability to influence behavior of their members by promoting conformity. Milgram originally conducted the experiment to figure out why people allowed such atrocities such as the Holocaust to occur. In modern society, similar events related to groupthink, “the tendency of group members to conform, resulting in a narrow view of some issue,” are still taking place but on a smaller scale (Macionis, 2010, p. 165). One prime example is the reason for invading Iraq in 2003. Many officials knew they did not have the evidence that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction; still, they either kept quiet about the matter or were discouraged from challenging this false belief. People often conform to others because we want to be liked and accepted by them.