Psychology Assignment, All Around Us

All around us

Before reading this chapter, I thought that conformity was the attitude that an individual takes by not setting personal goals to accomplish and falling into a mindset of complacency with him or herself. But after my reading, I found that I need to rectify my concept, and add that complacency is not only with ourselves, but also respect to society’s standards.

This was proven by Solomon Asch's research. The experiment was simple: using cards that each one has a line of a certain length drawn on one side, and three lines of different lengths on its other side, but one of them is of the same length as the first line. The subject of the experiment only had to recognize which of the three lines had the same length as the line on the other side. When the subjects of the experiment were alone, the vast majority had no problem answering correctly. In the second phase of the experiment, each experiment subject sat around a table with other people that were in complicity with the experimenter, and their function was to all of them give the same wrong answer, however, the subject believed that the other people were legitimate participants of the experiment, so the subject did not know of this complicity. The difference on the second phase is that, by peer pressure, the subjects were psychologically convinced to yield to the majority’s opinion and to give the wrong answer.

Obedience for me is to follow the behavior indicated by people that have authority over us, be those our parents at home, our supervisor at a job, or the government at a society. But obedience for me does not mean to follow blindly immoral or absurd orders.

Milgram’s experiment required three people: two researchers, one of them took the role of a student, and the subject of the experiment, who played the role of the teacher of the student. The experimenter explained to the participant that he had to act as a teacher, and that he must punish the student with electric shocks every time an answer is wrong. It began by giving both the teacher and the student a real discharge of 45 volts for the teacher to verify the pain of the punishment and the unpleasant feeling that his or her student will receive. If the answer was correct, it passed to the next word but, if the answer was erroneous, the student received from the teacher a first discharge of 15 volts that increased in intensity up to 30 levels, that is, up to 450 volts, that is what the subject believed he was applying. The teacher believed that he or she was punishing the student when in fact everything was a simulation. In general, when the teachers reached 75 volts, they became nervous at the pain complaints of their students and wished to stop the experiment, but the strong authority of the researcher made them continue. Some teachers required confirmation that they would not be responsible for the possible consequences. Some participants even