- reciprocity
- social proof
- public commitment
- Liking
- Authority
In most cases, that’s how things appeared to be going as faces reddened and gazes hardened when I finally admitted that my name wasn't Rob Caulder.
My last admission had cast the practitioners in the role of teachers; and teachers don’t hoard information. They disseminate it.
At this point, it was evident that the recipe for disharmony was quick and easy. Just separate the participants into groups and let them stew for a while in their own juices.
Then, at the height of the strife, they tried a strategy that was at once simple and effective.
interethnic cooperation.
Physical attractiveness engenders a halo effect that leads to the assignment of other traits such as talent, kindness, and intelligence.
A potentially effective strategy for reducing the unwanted influence of liking on compliance decisions requires sensitivity to the experience of undue liking for a requester.
Upon recognizing that we like a requester inordinately well under the circumstances, we should step back from the interaction, mentally separate the requester from his or her offer, and make any compliance decision based solely on the merits of the offer.
A fourth group received an appeal that incorporated the principle of authority in the form of a letter from their CEO extolling the importance of the program to the bank as well as the value of the selected charities to society;
Suppose while leafing through your local newspaper, you notice an ad for volunteers to take part in a “study of memory” being done in the psychology department of a nearby university.
clipboard.
electrode.
intercom.
At the 75-, 90-, and 105-volt levels, the pain makes you grunt audibly.
At 120 volts, you exclaim into the intercom that the shocks are really starting to hurt.
He responds only with the next test question—and with the next slashing shock—when your frenzied answer is incorrect.
You can’t hold down the panic any longer, the shocks are so strong now they make you writhe and shriek.
The ordeal continues in this way until, finally, the power of the shocks stuns you into near-paralysis.
Stop. There can be no reason to continue this experiment, but he proceeds relentlessly, calling out the test questions, announcing the horrid shock levels (above 400 volts now), and pulling the levers.
the Learner, who repeatedly cried out in agony for mercy and release, was not a true subject but an actor who only pretended to be shocked.
ordinary people
The answer is unsettling.
How many subjects would go all the way to the last (450-volt) shock. Invariably, the answers fell in the 1–2 percent range.
Female Teachers were just as likely to do so as were the males in Milgram’s initial study.
What’s more, later on, a battery of personality scales showed these people to be quite normal psychologically, with not a hint of psychosis as a group.
If he is right that his studies implicate us in their grisly findings, the unanswered question becomes an uncomfortably personal one, “What could make us do such things?”
It has to do, he said, with a deep-seated sense of duty to authority.
These conflicting directives reliably produced what may have been the project’s only humor: in tragicomic befuddlement and with eyes darting from one researcher to another, subjects would beseech the pair to agree on a single command to follow: “Wait, wait. Which is it going to be? When the researchers remained at loggerheads, the subjects tried frantically to determine the bigger boss.
some form of sadism or neurotic aggressiveness.
There are sobering implications of this finding for those concerned about the ability of another form of authority—government—to extract frightening levels of obedience from ordinary citizens.
After witnessing Milgram’s subjects squirming and sweating and suffering at their task, could anyone doubt the power of the force that held them there?
Because navy medical corpsmen at the scene refused to treat him or allow him to be taken to the hospital in their ambulance, onlookers—including Mr. Willson’s wife and son—were left to try to staunch the flow of blood for forty-five minutes until a private ambulance arrived.
They’re the fall guys.
Although the crew members shared Mr. Willson’s assessment of them as victims, they did not share his magnanimity.
Less blatant in its connotation than a uniform, but still effective, is another kind of attire that has traditionally indicated authority status in our culture: the business suit.
three-and-a-half times as many people swept into traffic behind the suited jaywalker.
Are combined deftly by con artists in a fraud called the bank examiner scheme.
The target of the swindle can be anyone, but elderly persons living alone are preferred. His white shirt is starched, wingtip shoes glow darkly, and suit is classic.
What they are is a pair of bunco artists who have recognized the capacity of carefully counterfeited uniforms to click us into mesmerized compliance with “authority.”
He had repented and wanted to move back in. When Sara told him her marriage plans, he begged her to change her mind; “There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.”
After what appeared to have been an embarrassingly clear collapse of their presentation, the meeting had somehow turned into a success, generating inexplicably high levels of compliance from the audience. Although more than a bit puzzled, I chalked up the audience’s response to a failure to understand the logic of my colleague’s arguments. As it turned out, just the reverse was true.
I found that they had understood his comments quite well, in fact, all too well. It was precisely the cogency of his claims that drove them to sign up for the program on the spot.
Twenty minutes later, I was wheeling out of the store with the “prize” I had obtained in my cart. Now, suppose instead of providing honest information, Brad fabricated the scarcity-related conditions surrounding the TV.