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How do nice people get corrupted? Throughout the path of life, everyone may come across this concept, experience or wonder this same question. Although every situation is unique, ordinary people, simply just doing their jobs can be a victim in a fraud or liaison in an egregious operation. In order to understand this social influence, the negative consequences starts from the analysis of what is the basis of conformity and obedience in the power of the situation.
Conformity is defined as a change in behavior or belief to accord with others. (Meyers 170) What other people do and say can gradually influence others to deviate from ones beliefs and conform to others. One of the most famous documented studies to better illustrate this was a procedure performed by social psychologist, Solomon Asch.
Asch’s Conformity Procedure was where participants were presented with a set of lines. In one case a single line and the other a trio of lines. The participant’s task was simply to find which line in the trio of lines matches the single line in length. When looking at the lines, there is only one line of the trio lines that obviously matches the single line. What Asch did was put participants in groups of collaborators, the actors, to turn in a specific answer. He did this so that the collaborators would give their answers first and then the participant who thinks he’s just one of the participants like the rest gives their answer. What concluded through this experimented was that if you have collaborators systematically giving the wrong answer, then majority of the people will give the wrong answer. (Meyers 158) The peer pressures created by a large group are such that the individual comes to decision radically different from the decision ...
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...rmines how he will act." — Stanley Milgram (Levine)
Milgram explained his results through all his experiments as the power of situation. We as a society are inclined toward obedience of what we take to be authority.
Conformity, obedience and the power of situation are a few of the many reasons why nice people get corrupted. Society influences us to define what is right and what is wrong. Society also defines what is correct behavior. There is an ethical implication on how we should act in a workplace. On one hand, they must be respectful of authority. On the other hand there must be a point in which the demands of such authority must be opposed and resisted.
Works Cited
Meyers, David. Exploring Social Psychology. 6th . New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012. 170.
Print
Levine, Robert. "Milgram's Progress." American Scientist. N.p., July 2004. Web. 7 Feb 2004.
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As stated above, conformity changes an individual 's belief and behaviour to match the groups, and while obedience often requires punishment and reward other studies suggest that "an individual...confronted with an authority recognized as legitimate, will behave in the direction of the expectations of this authority" (Pascual et al., 2013) without long-term effect on behaviour or beliefs. Sherif (as cited by Myers, 2014) found in his studies on norm formation that the group norm lasted even a year after the initial experiments, while Milgram (as cited by Myers, 2014) found physical proximity of the authority figure was a predictor of obedience in that obedience went down the further the authority figure physically was. Though conformity and obedience are not completely different, conformity obedience can be interchangeable when the hierarchy is seen as a group with which individuals can identify. Reicher, Haslam and Smith (2012) argue that Milgram 's (1965, 1974) famous obedience experiment isn 't simply blind obedience but individuals identifying with the figure of authority and conforming to expected norms. In some cases when individuals felt the authority figure 's beliefs were dissimilar to their own they immediately withdrew from