Study sheet: Social Influence and Obedience

📋 Course Outline

1. Social Influence and Its Vectors
2. From Ideas to Behavior
3. Identification and Naturalization
4. Cognitive Dissonance and Engagement
5. Compliance Weapons and Techniques
6. Obedience to Legitimate Authority
7. Milgram’s Experiment and Its Conditions

📖 1. Social Influence and Its Vectors

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Social influence : Doise, 1982 — The set of processes that modify an individual’s perceptions, judgments, attitudes, or behaviors when the individual is confronted with those of one or more other individuals.

★ Must-know

📌 A voluntary agreement to a request differs from obedience to an order because obedience is obtained through coercion or submission to a legitimate authority.

• The six vectors are:
  • personality factors
  • social perception
  • promises of need satisfaction and rewards
  • interpersonal interaction
  • group phenomena
  • organizational power

Further detail

• Social influence can occur between two isolated individuals, within a group, or within an organization, and it may be deliberate or perceived as natural and positive or negative depending on the point of view.

💡 Memory Hook

P-S-N-I-G-O: Personality, Social perception, Needs, Interaction, Groups, Organizations

📖 2. From Ideas to Behavior

★ Must-know

• The main ways of obtaining behavior are:

  • authority or coercion
  • information
  • persuasion
  • seduction
  • manipulation

• In Kurt Lewin’s 1944 experiment, behavior change was stronger when participants discussed and decided together according to shared beliefs and norms: 32% engaged in the group-decision condition compared with 3% in the control condition.

Further detail

• In Moriarty’s 1975 restaurant experiment, attempts to stop a thief occurred among 2% of participants without contact, 12% with contact, and 100% after an explicit engagement.

💡 Memory Hook

Free decision and engagement → stronger behavioral change

📖 3. Identification and Naturalization

★ Must-know

• Identification naturalizes a behavior by reinforcing the link between the behavior and the person’s personality and by raising identification toward higher social values.

• De-identification prevents a bad behavior from being reproduced by cutting the naturalization link between behavior and personality and establishing a contract about what the person proposes to prevent recurrence.

Further detail

• People commonly explain their behavior through their personality, values, or beliefs, thereby shifting from external determinism caused by circumstances to internal determinism attributed to the self.

💡 Memory Hook

Behavior → identification with personality → internalized self-explanation

📖 4. Cognitive Dissonance and Engagement

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Cognitive dissonance : Festinger, cognitive dissonance theory, 1957 — A state involving mutually conflicting attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors that produces discomfort and motivates a person to restore consistency.
• Engagement : C. Kiesler, 1960 — The link connecting an individual to their own actions through a promise to act or having already begun to act, activating personal responsibility and persistence.

★ Must-know

• Engagement is strengthened when an action is:
  • public
  • explicit
  • repeated
  • irrevocable
  • costly
  • consequential
  • freely performed

Further detail

• When people believe they freely engaged in an action, their behavior functions like a decision, freezes the range of possible choices, and is often maintained even when it has undesirable effects.

💡 Memory Hook

What we think versus what we do

📖 5. Compliance Weapons and Techniques

★ Must-know

📌 Reciprocity obtains compliance by creating an obligation to repay a gift or concession, whereas likeability increases agreement through positive emotion toward a familiar, similar, or attractive person.

• The six weapons are (Cialdini, 1984):

  • consistency
  • reciprocity
  • social proof
  • authority
  • likeability
  • scarcity

• The foot-in-the-door technique obtains compliance by first requesting an inexpensive behavior and then requesting a more costly behavior consistent with the first.

• The door-in-the-face technique first makes a very costly request that is expected to be refused and then makes a less costly request that appears comparatively reasonable.

Further detail

📌 Scarcity increases desirability because limited availability or threatened freedom of choice makes an opportunity seem more valuable and creates fear of loss.

• In Freedman and Fraser’s 1966 study, agreement to a costly consumption survey increased from 22% without a preparatory act to 53% after a preliminary three-question phone call. — Freedman and Frazer

💡 Memory Hook

Consistency, reciprocity, social proof, authority, likeability, scarcity

📖 6. Obedience to Legitimate Authority

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Agentic state : Milgram — A mental state in which an individual sees themselves as an instrument of a social, institutional, or ideological entity and transfers responsibility for their actions to that entity or its representatives.
• Legitimate authority : A socially recognized source of influence grounded in social, intellectual, symbolic, or institutional status.

📝 Essential Points

• People are conditioned from early childhood to conform to and comply with legitimate authority because obedience is praised and disobedience is punished.

💡 Memory Hook

Autonomous state versus agentic state

📖 7. Milgram’s Experiment and Its Conditions

★ Must-know

📌 Obedience increases when the authority figure has greater prestige or is physically closer, and it decreases when the authority gives instructions remotely or through a recording.

📌 Obedience decreases when the victim is physically closer or when other participants openly disobey, because visible suffering and disobedient models encourage resistance.

• In Milgram’s study, 65% of participants obeyed the experimenter and continued to the maximum apparent shock of 450 volts, although psychiatrists had predicted that almost nobody would pass 150 volts.

• In Milgram’s experiment, a true participant acting as teacher was instructed by an experimenter to administer increasingly intense apparent electric shocks to a confederate learner after incorrect answers.

Further detail

• When other supposed teachers disobeyed the experimenter, 90% of real participants disobeyed as well, showing that group influence can free individuals from authority.

💡 Memory Hook

Authority proximity increases obedience; victim proximity decreases it

📊 Synthesis Tables

Conditions Affecting Obedience

Condition	Effect on obedience	Mechanism
Authority proximity	Increases	Greater presence and legitimacy
Victim proximity	Decreases	Visible suffering triggers empathy
Disobedient models	Decreases	Group influence supports resistance
Remote authority	Decreases	Weaker direct pressure