Readings about The Social Animal, 11th Edition

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Author: Joshua Aronson | Elliot Aronson

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READINGS ABOUT

The Social Animal



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Eleventh Edition READINGS ABOUT

The Social Animal

Edited by

Joshua Aronson New York University

Elliot Aronson University of California, Santa Cruz

Worth Publishers

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Senior Publisher: Catherine Woods Acquisitions Editor: Erik Gilg Marketing Manager: Jennifer Bilello Art Director: Babs Reingold Senior Designer: Kevin Kall Project Editor: Laura McGinn Production Manager: Sarah Segal Compositor: Northeastern Graphic, Inc. Printing and Binding: R. R. Donnelley Cover Drawing by Tom Durfee

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011924231 ISBN-13: 978-1-4292-3342-2 ISBN-10: 1-4292-3342-7 © 2012, 2008, 2004, 1999 by Worth Publishers ©1995, 1992, 1988, 1984, 1981, 1977, 1973 by W. H. Freeman and Company Printed in the United States of America First printing 2011

Worth Publishers 41 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10010 www.worthpublishers.com

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To my mentors, Ned Jones (1927–1993), Claude Steele, and Elliot Aronson (of course) —JA

To my bigger, smarter brother, Jason Aronson (1929–1961) —EA

“The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it’s comprehensible.”—Albert Einstein

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Contents

PREFACE XI AN OPEN LETTER TO THE READER

XIII

I. INTRODUCTION: REFLECTIONS ON THE RESEARCH PROCESS 1 1. Research in Social Psychology as a Leap of Faith Elliot Aronson 2. On Baseball and Failure Elliot Aronson

3

10

II. CONFORMITY AND OBEDIENCE 3. Opinions and Social Pressure Solomon E. Asch 4. Behavioral Study of Obedience Stanley Milgram

15

17 27

5. “From Jerusalem to Jericho”: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior 41 John M. Darley and C. Daniel Batson

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6. A Focus Theory of Normative Conduct: Recycling the Concept of Norms to Reduce Littering in Public Places 56 Robert B. Cialdini, Raymond R. Reno and Carl A. Kallgren 7. Making Sense of the Nonsensical: An Analysis of Jonestown Neal Osherow

III. MASS COMMUNICATION, PROPAGANDA, AND PERSUASION

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99

8. Effects of Varying the Recommendations in a Fear-Arousing Communication 101 James M. Dabbs Jr., and Howard Leventhal 9. Attribution Versus Persuasion as a Means for Modifying Behavior Richard L. Miller, Philip Brickman, and Diana Bolen 10. The Impact of Mass Media Violence on U.S. Homicides David P. Phillips

IV. SOCIAL COGNITION

112

132

147

11. Contrast Effects and Judgments of Physical Attractiveness: When Beauty Becomes a Social Problem 149 Douglas T. Kenrick and Sara E. Gutierres 12. The Effect of Attitude on the Recall of Personal Histories 164 Michael Ross, Cathy McFarland, and Garth J. O. Fletcher 13. The Peculiar Longevity of Things Not So Bad 176 Daniel T. Gilbert, Matthew D. Lieberman, Carey K. Morewedge, and Timothy D. Wilson 14. Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious Timothy D. Wilson 15. Self-Theories of Intelligence Carol S. Dweck

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V. SELF-JUSTIFICATION 16. Dissonance, Hypocrisy, and the Self-Concept Elliot Aronson

217 219

17. Compliance Without Pressure: The Foot-in-the-Door Technique Jonathan L. Freedman and Scott C. Fraser

237

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Contents 18. Reducing Weight by Reducing Dissonance: The Role of Effort Justification in Inducing Weight Loss 249 Danny Axsom and Joel Cooper 19. Dishonest Behavior as a Function of Differential Levels of Induced Self-Esteem 263 Elliot Aronson and David R. Mettee 20. Using Cognitive Dissonance to Encourage Water Conservation 275 Chris Ann Dickerson, Ruth Thibodeau, Elliot Aronson, and Dayna Miller 21. A Self-Affirmation Intervention to Reduce the Racial Achievement Gap 288 Geoffrey L. Cohen, Julio Garcia, Nancy Apfel, and Allison Master

VI. HUMAN AGGRESSION 22. The Effects of Observing Violence Leonard Berkowitz

301

303

23. Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? Catharsis, Rumination, Distraction, Anger, and Aggressive Responding 315 Brad J. Bushman 24. Peacetime Casualties: The Effects of War on the Violent Behavior of Noncombatants 329 Dane Archer and Rosemary Gartner 25. Deindividuation and Anger-Mediated Interracial Aggression: Unmasking Regressive Racism 341 Ronald W. Rogers and Steven Prentice-Dunn 26. Predictors of Naturalistic Sexual Aggression Neil M. Malamuth

VII. PREJUDICE

357

379

27. The Nonverbal Mediation of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies in Interracial Interaction 381 Carl O. Word, Mark P. Zanna, and Joel Cooper 28. Low Numbers: Stereotypes and the Underrepresentation of Women in Math and Science 394 Joshua Aronson 29. Experiments in Group Conflict Muzafer Sherif

415

30. Jigsaw Groups and the Desegregated Classroom: In Pursuit of Common Goals 425 Elliot Aronson and Diane Bridgeman

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31. Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson, and the Social Psychology of Affirmative Action 436 Anthony R. Pratkanis and Marlene E. Turner 32. Prejudice as Self-Image Maintenance: Affirming the Self Through Derogating Others 445 Steven Fein and Steven J. Spencer 33. The Positive Feedback Bias Kent Harber

475

VIII. LIKING, LOVING, AND INTERPERSONAL SENSITIVITY

495

34. Lending a Hand: Social Regulation of the Neural Response to Threat James A. Coan, Hillary S. Schaefer, and Richard J. Davidson

497

35. The Search for a Romantic Partner: The Effects of Self-Esteem and Physical Attractiveness on Romantic Behavior 512 Sara B. Kiesler and Roberta L. Baral 36. Social Perception and Interpersonal Behavior: On the Self-Fulfilling Nature of Social Stereotypes 521 Mark Snyder, Elizabeth Decker Tanke, and Ellen Berscheid 37. Some Evidence for Heightened Sexual Attraction Under Conditions of High Anxiety 536 Donald G. Dutton and Arthur P. Aron 38. Cognitive, Interpersonal, and Behavioral Effects of Social Exclusion: How People Respond to Rejection 550 Roy F. Baumeister and Dianne M. Tice 39. Arbitrary Social Norms Influence Sex Differences in Romantic Selectivity 568 Eli J. Finkel and Paul W. Eastwick NAME INDEX SUBJECT INDEX

581 594

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Preface

In The Social Animal, we attempt to paint a clear picture of the current state of our social-psychological knowledge and how such knowledge might be applied to alleviate some problems plaguing us in the world today. The Social Animal is intended to be concise, brisk, and lively. It is almost totally unencumbered by graphs, charts, tables, statistical analysis, or detailed methodological discussions. Although that kind of presentation provides an easy and even enjoyable introduction to the world of social psychology, many readers express a need to delve more deeply into the details of the research that forms the backbone of The Social Animal. To meet that need, we have edited this book, Readings About the Social Animal. We have selected the readings that appear in this book in such a way that they both complement and supplement the material contained in the eleventh edition of The Social Animal. Not only are the sections organized to coincide with chapters in The Social Animal, but the specific readings also represent an attempt to amplify and elaborate on the major themes covered in that book. Moreover, we have been especially careful to choose readings that provide a mixture of classic and contemporary research. Some of the articles have been classics for decades. Others are quite recent. This combination will expose the reader to a glimpse of the history of social psychology as well as its future. There is another way of classifying the articles in this collection. Most are reports of specific research as originally published in technical journals; others are more general pieces summarizing several studies on a given topic written by one of the major contributors to that area. A specific report, though not always easy to read, has the advantage of providing the detail necessary for enabling the reader to gain some understanding of exactly what goes into a piece of research. The summary article is usually less technical and, therefore, easier to read, offering a more panoramic overview of the subject by the people who know it best. In effect,

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it enables the reader to look over an investigator’s shoulder and see how he or she views an array of research on a given topic. For this, the eleventh edition, we continue the process of blending the classic with the contemporary—and the specific with the panoramic. As the years roll by, it is gratifying to note that some of the articles first selected as contemporary for the 1972 edition of this book have now taken their place as genuine classics in 2011. Our hope is that today’s contemporaries will likewise take their place as classics in the decades to come. Joshua Aronson, New York, New York Elliot Aronson, Santa Cruz, California

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An Open Letter to the Reader

Welcome backstage. As mentioned in the Preface, there are two kinds of articles contained in this volume. Some selections are descriptions of research programs. These make exciting reading in that they describe in some detail a series of experiments aimed at explicating or extending a single idea. Other selections are reports of individual pieces of empirical research. These are equally exciting but sometimes get rather technical. We are sure some of you (teachers, graduate students, statisticians, and other dedicated types) will want to understand thoroughly every sentence of every article on the following pages, perhaps in the hope of planning some research of your own. Bon voyage! For your benefit, we have not abridged or changed a line of the original. Our guess is that most of you do not require that amount of detail. Chances are, what you would like to get out of these articles is an understanding of what the investigator was trying to find out, how he or she went about the task, and how successful the outcome was. There is no better way to understand the research process than to read original reports. The adventure of reading an original report lies in your ability as the reader to put yourself in the shoes of the investigator as he or she transforms an idea into a viable set of research operations and tries to make sense of the results, which occasionally do not conform precisely to the predictions. Each of the original research reports contains four principal sections: (1) First there is an introduction, in which the author states the idea, where it came from, and why it’s important, and distills the idea down to a hypothesis or series of hypotheses. (2) This is followed by a procedure section, in which the author tests the hypothesis by translating the idea into a concrete set of operations. In social psychology this frequently becomes a full-blown scenario designed to provide the participant (or subject) with a reasonable justification for responding to events without being allowed to know the true purpose of the procedure. The procedure section of a good piece of research is often the most interesting part because it requires a great deal of ingenuity for the

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An Open Letter to the Reader

investigator to achieve precision without sacrificing realism or impact. (3) In the results section the investigator states as clearly and succinctly as possible what the findings were. The investigator uses various statistical procedures to ascertain the extent to which the data are reliable. (4) Finally there is a discussion section, in which the researcher evaluates and interprets the data presented in the preceding section and tries to make sense of them in the context of previous research. The creative researcher can also use this section to speculate about the implications of the data and to point the way toward future research. To those of you who do not yet have much experience in reading research reports, we offer a few suggestions about which parts of the study to read carefully and which parts to skim. If the article contains a summary (either at the beginning or at the end), we recommend that you read that first to familiarize yourself with the general idea behind the piece of research and to learn quickly what the results were. Next, read the introduction carefully to learn the history of the idea and to understand the hypothesis thoroughly. Then read the procedure section pretty carefully. Finally, skim the results section just to see the extent to which the findings agreed with the predictions. If the findings did not fit the predictions, look closely at the discussion section to see how the author made sense of the results he or she did get and whether or not the explanation seems plausible to you. Unless you are adept at and/or intrigued by statistical analyses, we would advise you to skim that section. For those of you who have little or no knowledge of statistical procedures, it would be terribly frustrating and would serve no useful purpose to bog yourself down in some of the details of the statistical analyses. These articles were selected because they were well done. It is probably safe for you to accept on faith that the analysis was performed competently.

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I INTRODUCTION: REFLECTIONS ON THE RESEARCH PROCESS




1 Research in Social Psychology as a Leap of Faith Elliot Aronson

It is an honor and a pleasure to be here among such a distinguished group of dedicated experimental social psychologists. When I was asked to deliver an Invited Address at this meeting, the suggested topic was: “What Ever Became of Elliot Aronson?” I’m sure the committee selecting the title had their tongues at least partly in their cheeks. At the same time, I think there may have been a kernel of seriousness embedded in that choice of a title. Because I haven’t published a laboratory experiment in a few years, I suspect that there may be a feeling abroad that I might have decided to abandon the laboratory in favor of doing research in the imprecise domain of what some of us laughingly call “the real world.” And I suppose that the folks who invited me might have been tweaking my nose about that alleged decision. Well, whether or not my nose was being tweaked, I decided to take the request seriously. Initially, my decision was to describe the research project in the “real world” that has me so excited that it has occupied a large proportion of my

This chapter was delivered as an invited address at the 1976 Meeting of the Society of Experimental Social Psychologists at the University of California at Los Angeles. A slightly modified version appeared in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 3, No. 2, Spring 1977, pp. 190–195, by permission of Division 8 of the American Psychological Association and of Sage Publications. Copyright © Sage Publications. Reprinted by permission.


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Introduction: Reflections on the Research Process

research time for the past four or five years. This is an action research project aimed at exploring the consequences of building cooperative learning groups in elementary schools, and is a project I’m very excited about: Among other things, we are finding that the loss of self-esteem among ethnic children following desegregation (discovered by Gerard and Miller, 1975) is largely a function of the competitiveness of the traditional classroom. When we placed kids in cooperative learning groups (of a special kind) we reversed this trend and produced sharp increases in self-esteem and test performance among black and Chicano children (Aronson et al., 1975; Lucker et al., 1976; Aronson et al., 1966). But after I arrived here, I realized that a heavy dose of data would be inappropriate for an after-dinner speech. My data might be too heavy a dessert. Besides, ever since I’ve been here, several of you have been urging me to keep it light and perhaps even to make it humorous. So, I decided to talk to you about the philosophy of science. After all, graduate students consider my approach to the philosophy of science to be extraordinarily light and some even find it to be hilarious. In 1968 Merrill Carlsmith and I wrote a chapter in The Handbook of Social Psychology on experimentation in social psychology. We spent most of that chapter talking about sticky problems: the trials and tribulations involved in designing and conducting an experiment in this area. We wrote about ethical issues, about experimenter bias, about random samples, experimental realism, debriefing, and all kinds of things to watch out for. After we finished it, we read the thing over and we realized that it made experimentation sound like a terrible drag. Further, we realized that this impression didn’t reflect our own excitement and enthusiasm about doing research in social psychology. So we included another paragraph in which we said, in effect, “Hey, it does sound like doing research in social psychology is difficult, problematical, and occasionally a pain in the ass—and this is all true—but we will have really misled you if we don’t convey our major feeling about doing research in social psychology—and that is that, all things considered, it is great fun.” It’s now several years since that chapter was published, and I think that it’s about time that I explained at least some of what we meant by the statement that experimentation is fun. And I’d like to do it in terms of a metaphor. The metaphor I’d like to make use of occurs in a novel by Camus called The Plague. The backdrop of the novel involves bubonic plague that is ravaging a town on the coast of Algeria. One of the major characters is Monsieur Grand—an amiable sort of man who is writing a book. He wants that book to be absolutely perfect. He wants every sentence to be flawless, every paragraph to be magnificent, every page to be fantastically beautiful. He wants it to be perfect to the extent that, when he sends it to a publisher, the publisher will read the first sentence and be so struck by it that he will stand up and say to his colleagues, “Ladies and Gentlemen, hats off.” Monsieur Grand spends a lot of time writing that first sentence—the sentence is about a woman riding a horse in the park, but not just any woman, horse, or park. “One fine morning in the month of May an elegant young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrell mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne.”


Research in Social Psychology as a Leap of Faith

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But he’s not satisfied. Does each noun have too many qualifiers? Too few? Does each qualifier convey precisely what he intends? Does each word properly convey the rhythm of a cantering horse? Would “flower-strewn” be preferable to “flowery”? Eight or nine months go by and he’s still working on that first sentence—he has 50 manuscript pages all on that first sentence, because, as you know, he wants to be so good that the publisher will say to his colleagues, “Ladies and Gentlemen, hats off.” One day as he is working on his manuscript, he becomes ill; as his symptoms develop, it soon becomes clear that he has contracted bubonic plague. His physician—who is also his friend—examines him and says, “I’m really sorry to have to tell you this, but you’re going to die; you don’t have much longer to live.” So Monsieur Grand orders his physician to destroy his manuscript. He issues this order with such assertiveness and such strength that the physician immediately takes the manuscript—this 50 pages of one sentence meticulously honed and sharpened— and throws it into the fire. The next day Monsieur Grand recovers. And he says to his friend, “I think I acted too hastily.” This is incredibly ironic, of course; the one action on his part that was spontaneous was in the interest of destroying the thing that he had created with anything but spontaneity. So much for the metaphor. Basically, I believe that there are two very different ways to do science. One is in the slow, methodical, one-step-at-a-time manner exemplified by Monsieur Grand. This involves a great deal of meticulous honing, sharpening, and polishing of the design and operations. This may require several months. When the researcher is ready to leave the drawing board, he runs the study, and after he runs a few subjects he realizes that there are some things about it that are not perfect. So he stops and brings it back to the drawing board and works some more, sharpening and honing. He then runs a few more subjects and notices something else that can be improved. Several years later he may have the kind of experiment that, when he submits it to the journal, the editor will say to his colleagues, “Ladies and Gentlemen, hats off.”1 There’s another way to do science. This involves, in effect, sketching a study in quick, broad strokes, pilot testing it—seeing where you went wrong, recasting it, and then running it as best as you can at the moment. As you finish the study and begin to write it up, you may realize that if you had it all to do over again you would have done it better. Of course; learning always takes place as a function of experience—even in the researcher. But in this approach, instead of going back to the drawing board to design that mythical “perfect” study that will produce a “hats off” response, you finish the write-up and submit it for publication—relying on the notion that science is a selfcorrective enterprise. Self-corrective in the following sense: I know that if I do a study that isn’t perfect, it will soon be improved upon by others. Thus, my goal is to get it into the literature to give my colleagues a chance to look at it, be stimulated by it, be provoked by it, annoyed by it, and then go ahead and do it better—even if their intent 1Even under these circumstances the “hats off” response is unlikely; chances are the editor will find some flaws that the author overlooked.


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is to prove me wrong, and even if they succeed in proving me wrong. That’s the exciting thing about science; it progresses by people taking off on one another’s work. This is what William James (1956) called the “leap of faith.” I have faith that if I do an imperfect piece of work, someone will read it and will be provoked to demonstrate this imperfection in a really interesting way. This will almost always lead to a greater understanding of the phenomenon under investigation. And maybe, after that other person does his research, the editor and the publisher and the world at large will say, “Hey, hats off.” And that’s OK. Needless to say, I prefer the second way—as those of you who are familiar with my imperfect research can readily gather. And this leap of faith forms a vital aspect of my philosophy of science. Namely, that we don’t have to make things perfect before we expose them to other people’s thinking, criticism, and actions. It’s more exciting, it’s more yeasty, it’s more provocative to treat science in big, broad brush strokes rather than meticulously polishing and honing and taking several years before coming out with a finished product. Since I believe that science is a self-correcting enterprise, I would prefer to be provocative than right. Of course, it goes without saying that I do not attempt to be wrong or sloppy. I attempt to do the best I can at the moment and share that less than perfect product with you—my colleagues and critics. William James maintains that there is an immense class of cases where faith creates its own verification. To use one of James’s examples—if while climbing a mountain you must leap over a precipice, your belief that you can do it increases the probability of a successful outcome. To extrapolate our confidence that others will be excited by our research and provoked to carry it further or prove it wrong induces us to conduct research in a manner and publish it at a time that maximizes the probability of the research providing the yeast for this kind of empirical convocation. It is now several years since Carlsmith and I wrote that chapter in the Handbook in which we very blithely announced that experimentation in social psychology was fun. And as I read the journals, it seems to me that a lot of the fun has gone out of social psychology. One of the reasons for this, I think, is that we’ve gotten much too cautious, much too careful, much too afraid to be wrong, and it’s taken a lot of the zest and a lot of the yeast out of the research in social psychology. One of the by-products of excessive caution is excessive self-consciousness. Indeed, one of the most characteristic aspects of contemporary social psychology is a recent trend toward discipline-wide self-consciousness, handwringing, and “kvetching.” By conservative estimate, in the past five or six years I must have been invited to at least a half dozen symposia with titles like “Where Is Social Psychology Heading?” or “What Must We Do About Social Psychology?” or “Whither Social Psychology?” (with or without the “h” in whither). This kind of self-consciousness is a bore. Let me be clear. I’m not opposed to a certain degree of self-consciousness on an individual level. Indeed, I believe that any individual scientist should take stock of herself every few years and give herself the opportunity to re-order her priorities. Every few years it is probably quite useful to ask: What is important? What are my ethical and societal concerns? Although this process is important for an individual, when an entire discipline does it, the implication is that there



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is a particular place we should all be going, a particular methodology we should all be using, particular topics we should all be studying. I think that that kind of selfconsciousness is deadly and stultifying. The proper question is “What might individuals be doing?”, not “What should the field be doing?” I like to think of the discipline of social psychology as a really large circus tent where a lot of different acts are going on and the acts occasionally cross, intermingle, and overlap. In that way each individual is doing what that person thinks is the most interesting or useful thing to do and is being challenged all the time by the existence of other people in the science who are engaged in overlapping topics employing different methods or different topics employing overlapping methods. Watch out—I feel another metaphor coming on. There is a short story by J. D. Salinger entitled Seymour: An Introduction in which Buddy Glass, who is a budding writer, presents his short stories as he writes them to his older brother, Seymour, for criticism. Seymour, who is a wise and good man, generally writes these criticisms in the form of a letter. After one story, Seymour writes Buddy a letter (which Buddy keeps for many years afterwards) in which he says, in effect “You really are a terrific craftsman. You really know how to write. You really know how to put a sentence together; you’ve mastered the technique. You know how to take these sentences and string them together into paragraphs. Your stories are constructed beautifully. The one thing you haven’t learned yet is what to write about, and that’s a really important problem. As I was thinking about it, I came up with a solution that was so simple and so direct and so “obvious” that it boggles the mind. The solution is this: Just remember that before you were a writer you were a reader. Then, all you have to do is think about the one story, the one thing that you always wanted to read, and then sit down and write it.” As a scientist, I continually find myself trying to make some use of Seymour’s advice. In effect, I say to myself: “Hey, remember that before you were a researcher you were a consumer of research. If you want to know what to do research on, just think of the one experiment on human social behavior that you always wanted to read about, and then go out and do it.” I have always tried to follow my translation of Seymour’s advice, and occasionally I have succeeded. It would be very dangerous to say to a group like this that I always succeed—that every experiment I do involves the one question that I always wanted to know the answer to— because that would open me up to ridicule. I can just hear you saying, “You mean the one thing you always wanted to know about human nature is what happens when people spill coffee all over themselves?” (Aronson, Willerman, and Floyd, 1966). It’s quite a dangerous statement even if it were true—and it’s not true. But I’ve had my moments, and I can tell when I’m following Seymour’s advice because I can feel my excitement rise, and I think I’m onto one of those questions now. My current research questions are: How can we turn the educational experience of millions of elementary school children into a less dehumanizing experience? How can we counteract the trend in American education toward lowering self-concepts of minority group people? How can we teach skills of cooperation painlessly and easily in the ordinary classroom situation? How can we make learning an exciting, interesting,


8


social psychological, as well as educational, venture? Since public schools are institutions that 95 percent of us and 95 percent of our children and 95 percent of our grandchildren are going to be going through, I see these as important issues. But I promised you I wouldn’t dwell on the research itself. What I do want to dwell on are my failures as a scientist—the times when I don’t follow Seymour’s advice. Occasionally I do research that I’m not particularly excited about. How come? Sometimes I find myself between ideas. Or sometimes the research I’m interested in is too hard to do or is taking a lot of time to set up. When this happens, instead of doing nothing, I get scared. Scared of what? Let me backtrack. Yesterday when we had a symposium about the editorial policy of our journals, my friend and former student, Darwyn Linder, talked to us eloquently about what he thought the major function of journals should be. He presented a discussion of three separate functions: One is the archival function; the journal serves as a permanent body of knowledge so that 50 years from now when people want to know what was going on in social psychology in the 1970s, they can look in the back issues of the journals. A second function it serves is as a way of exchanging information; if you want to know what is going on in various labs across the country right now at this moment, or at least what went on three years ago when the researchers did the experiment that finally got published, you can look in the current journal. The third function that Linder mentioned was that for the younger social psychologists— people who are teaching at universities without tenure—it serves a pragmatic function. That is, publishing in journals convinces deans that the young social psychologist is doing his job by piling up vast numbers of publications. But what I want to say is that the third function is not one that is limited to younger people who are desirous of tenure. I think it is something that afflicts some of us old guys, too, in a very different way. Whereas our jobs aren’t dependent on publications, something else is. And that something—for a lack of a better term—I would call collegial esteem. What keeps me from consistently doing research on the one thing that I always wanted to find out about is that I get scared once in a while that if I’m not always active, not always producing things—anything—then perhaps some of my colleagues might think that I’ve lost it, and they may begin to ask questions like “Whatever became of Elliot Aronson?” which was indeed the suggested topic of this talk. It is conceivable to me that I’m not the only person here who has experienced that fear. If my suspicion is correct, then perhaps by discussing that hobgoblin we can, if nothing else, get rid of what Harry Stack Sullivan called “the fallacy of uniqueness.” This may help us all to lay the hobgoblin to rest and get on with our proper business: for each of us in his own way to pursue as best as we can the answer to the one question he always wanted to know.

References ARONSON, E., BLANEY, N., SIKES, J., STEPHAN, C., AND SNAPP, M. Busing and racial tension: The jig-saw route to learning and liking. Psychology Today, 1975, 8, 43–50.



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ARONSON, E., AND CARLSMITH, M. Experimentation in social psychology. In G. Lindzey and E. Aronson (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology. Vol. 2 (2nd ed.). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1968. ARONSON, E., WILLERMAN, B., AND FLOYD, J. The effect of a pratfall on increasing interpersonal attractiveness. Psychonomic Science, 1966, 4, 227–228. BLANEY, N., ROSENFIELD, R., STEPHAN, C., ARONSON, E., AND SIKES, J. Interdependence in the classroom: A field study. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1977, 69, 139–146. GERARD, H., AND MILLER, N. School desegregation. New York: Plenum, 1975. JAMES, W. The will to believe. New York: Dover, 1956. LUCKER, W., ARONSON, E., ROSENFIELD, D., AND SIKES, J. Performance in the interdependent classroom: A field study. American Educational Research Journal, 1976, 13, No. 2, 115–123.


2 On Baseball and Failure Elliot Aronson

Acceptance Speech, SESP Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award, October 1994

I am deeply touched by this honor. I cannot imagine a more meaningful honor for a social psychologist than having one’s scientific research recognized by this group. I have always believed that experimentation in social psychology is a family business. And, if that’s true, then you are the family. The people in this room are the best scientists in this business. No one knows better than you about what it takes to do a good experiment in this area. Every person in this room is well aware that there is an art to this wonderful science of ours. And it is a demanding art, indeed. It is arguably more difficult to do an experiment in social psychology than in any other scientific discipline for one simple and powerful reason: In social psychology, we are testing our theories and hypotheses on participants who are almost always intelligent, curious, experienced human beings who have spent their entire lives in a social environment—and have, therefore, formed their own theories and hypotheses about precisely the behaviors we are trying to study in the laboratory. That is to say, everyone in the world, including the participants in our experiments, is a social psychological theorist. That simple fact makes doing experiments in social psychology both challenging and exciting. Our challenge is to find a way to circumvent or neutralize the theories that our participants walk in with—so that we can observe their true behavior—not how they think they should behave if their own theory were true. Our excitement? Ahhh, that’s what the rest of this so-called speech is about! Actually, it’s not a speech at all. As a chronic and habitual storyteller, it seems appropriate for me to This speech was prepared for delivery at the annual convention of the Society of Experimental Social Psychologists in 1994 by the recipient of its 12th annual Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award. Portions of this speech were published in Dialogue (a publication of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology), Spring 1995, pp. 4–5.


On Baseball and Failure

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tell you a story. The story takes place early in 1941, when I was nine years old. That was an important year for me; it was the year I discovered social psychology. I grew up in Revere, Massachusetts—a small, run-down, blue-collar city near Boston. Ours was the only Jewish family in a rough, passionately anti-Semitic neighborhood. When I was a child, my parents insisted that I attend Hebrew school, in addition to public school. The Hebrew classes were held very late in the afternoon, four days a week. Alas, the Hebrew school building was located clear on the other side of town, which meant that I used to have to walk through my own hostile neighborhood carrying my Hebrew books. I was like a walking advertisement, a beacon to the antiSemitic kids: “Hey, look at me—I’m Jewish!” Simply getting to and from Hebrew school every day was something of an adventure: I was forever trying to find creative routes, zig-zag paths that would take me away from the greatest areas of danger. But, in spite of my best efforts, I was frequently waylaid, pushed around, and occasionally roughed up by gangs of teenaged tough guys who yelled anti-Semitic slogans. One of my most vivid childhood memories involves sitting on a curb, nursing a bloody nose and a split lip, and wondering how these kids could possibly hate me so much when they didn’t even know me. I wondered if they were born hating Jews, or if they needed to be taught such hatred; I wondered if there might be any way to get them to hate me less—like, if they had gotten to know me better as a person, before they knew I was Jewish, would that have diminished their hatred? I didn’t realize it at the time, of course, but these were profound social psychological questions. And some 10 years later, as an economics major at Brandeis, I wandered into an Intro. Psych. class being taught by Abraham Maslow—quite by accident. As it happened, Maslow was lecturing on the social psychology of prejudice, and I was astonished and delighted to discover that there was an entire profession where people actually got paid for thinking about those things and raising the same kinds of questions that I had raised when I was nine years old. I could hardly believe my ears! Wow, I thought, what a racket! And I immediately switched my major to psychology. And I’ve been thinking, Wow, what a racket, ever since! For over 35 years, I have been having so much fun doing social psychology that I keep expecting to hear a knock on my door in the middle of the night; the cops are going to arrest me for accepting money under false pretenses! What’s more, to my great personal satisfaction, some 30 years after I was sitting on that curb nursing my bloody nose and my split lip, I was able to invent a social psychological strategy for reducing prejudice in the schools—a strategy that not only teaches us something about human nature and human behavior, but one that really works—that really reduces prejudice and violence and thereby improves human lives. I feel blessed. One of the things I love about social psychology is precisely that: It affords us the opportunity of doing both of those things simultaneously—of illuminating something important about human nature and doing some good in the world. In my judgment, it is part and parcel of the mission of social psychology to uncover a lot of unappetizing things about human behavior—about mindless


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conformity, about blind obedience to authority, about violence, about prejudice, and the like. This could be depressing if it were not for the fact that this discipline of ours offers us the opportunity for redemption in the form of application: in the form of finding ways to reduce mindless conformity, blind obedience, prejudice, and violence. And, of course, this redemption—this applied research—if it is done well, comes full circle and informs our theories and basic research. That is what I love about social psychology. Needless to say, social psychology was not my first love. When I was nine years old, sitting on that curbstone in Revere, I sure as hell did not want to be a social psychologist. I did not even know there was such a thing. But even if I had known about social psychology, at that time I wanted to be a professional baseball player. Actually, my desire was much more specific than that: I wanted to play center field for the Boston Red Sox. (Of course, the Sox already had a center fielder at that time; but I was not greedy or impatient: I was willing to wait until he retired; I figured that would take about 10 years, and, by then, I would be ready!) When I was a little kid, I worked hard at achieving my dream. Every spring, starting in late February, even before the snow had completely melted off the baseball field, a few of us were out there, shagging flies—hour, after hour, after hour. And, with all that practice, I got pretty good at shagging flies—but I have a confession: In spite of hundreds of hours of practice, I never made the Red Sox. As a matter of fact, I could not even get to play center field on my high school team. I was much too slow a runner for that, and besides, I could not hit a curve ball to save my life. Indeed, as a ballplayer, I reached my peak at about the age of 14, since then, it has been downhill all the way! It is kind of sad to reach a peak at anything at age 14, but there you have it. Fortunately, as I said, I eventually discovered social psychology. As a social psychologist, I expect to reach my peak any time now—or as we Red Sox fans are fond of saying, maybe next year! Although I never made it as a ballplayer, I learned a few things playing baseball that proved to be useful to me as a social psychologist. It goes without saying that the game of baseball is vastly overused as a metaphor—but what the hell, why should I let a little thing like that stop me? One of the things I like most about baseball is contained in the box score of a game: In baseball, they tally runs, hits, and errors. I like that because, generally speaking, we live in a society that is contemptuous of failure and punishes mistakes of all kinds. Because of this, we are under enormous pressure to deny our mistakes or minimize their importance. The danger of this attitude is that it makes people afraid to make mistakes and when people are afraid to make mistakes, they usually do not take many risks but play it close to the vest. Aronson’s second law: People who are afraid to make mistakes are unlikely to make anything of great value. Moreover, if we are unselfconscious about our mistakes, we can look at them carefully and perhaps learn something important from them.


On Baseball and Failure

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Playing baseball taught me how to deal with failure. It was a lesson I learned well when I was very young and for that, I will always be grateful. It goes without saying that I’ve made more than my share of mistakes—in life and in social psychology. (I will spare you my confessions of all my important failures as a human being and simply make reference to my failures in the lab.) In doing experiments, I screw up a lot—usually because I’m not as smart or skillful as I would like to be. Occasionally, I screw up merely because I’m trying to tackle a hypothesis that is elusive or difficult to test. I don’t ever want to be deterred from trying to tackle a difficult hypothesis by my fear of screwing up. In baseball, by including errors in the box score, they are saying, in effect, that it’s not such a terrible thing to screw up—it’s not desirable, of course, but screwing up is part of the game: a part of the game of baseball, a part of the game of life, a part of the game of social psychology. I’ve often thought that we should have a journal devoted to publishing interesting ideas that didn’t work—and that people should submit these interesting failures with pride. There are at least three good reasons for this: (1) Someone else may be able to pick up our fumble and run with it. (Whoops, a mixed athletic metaphor!) (2) It would be good for the self-confidence of our graduate students if they saw some of our failures on display as well as our successes. When grad students read the current journals, it creates the illusion that we old-timers are much more clever than we are. This would be harmless, except for the fact that they might get discouraged by this—concluding, erroneously, that they themselves would have a lot of difficulty measuring up. (3) Most important, it would make failure a legitimate part of the social psychology game—not just success. Like in baseball, errors are certainly not sought out—they are not desirable, per se—but the fear of error should not keep us from going after the difficult problems. In the baseball box score, errors are tallied in the fielding part of the game—but the same kind of tolerance for imperfection is reflected in hitting. Consider this: If, as a batter, a ballplayer screws up two out of three times at bat, that will give him a lifetime batting average of .333; with a batting average of .333, he is likely to make it to the Hall of Fame! When I thought about that for a little while, I realized that while I could never do nearly that well in hitting a baseball, .333 is just about my average as an experimentalist—that is, in designing and conducting experiments, I fail about twice as often as I succeed. If this honor you have so graciously given me today can be considered social psychology’s equivalent of baseball’s Hall of Fame, then I guess that means that I made it after all—even though I still can’t hit a curve ball to save my life! I am very grateful that you found a way to make the dreams of a nine-year-old kid come true—after a fashion!




II CONFORMITY AND OBEDIENCE




3 Opinions and Social Pressure Solomon E. Asch

Exactly what is the effect of the opinions of others on our own? In other words, how strong is the urge toward social conformity? The question is approached by means of some unusual experiments.

That social influences shape every person’s practices, judgments, and beliefs is a truism to which anyone will readily assent. A child masters his “native” dialect down to the finest nuances; a member of a tribe of cannibals accepts cannibalism as altogether fitting and proper. All the social sciences take their departure from the observation of the profound effects that groups exert on their members. For psychologists, group pressure upon the minds of individuals raises a host of questions they would like to investigate in detail. How, and to what extent, do social forces constrain people’s opinions and attitudes? This question is especially pertinent in our day. The same epoch that has witnessed the unprecedented technical extension of communication has also brought into existence the deliberate manipulation of opinion and the “engineering of consent.” There are many good reasons why, as citizens and as scientists, we should be concerned with studying the ways in which human beings form their opinions and the role that social conditions play. Studies of these questions began with the interest in hypnosis aroused by the French physician Jean Martin Charcot (a teacher of Sigmund Freud) toward the end of the nineteenth century. Charcot believed that only hysterical patients could be fully hypnotized, but this view was soon challenged by two other physicians, Hyppolyte Bernheim and A. A. Liébault, who demonstrated that they could put

Reprinted with permission from the author and Scientific American, Vol. 193, No. 5, 1955 (Scientific American Offprint 450). Copyright © 1955 by Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved.


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Conformity and Obedience

most people under the hypnotic spell. Bernheim proposed that hypnosis was but an extreme form of a normal psychological process which became known as “suggestibility.” It was shown that monotonous reiteration of instructions could induce in normal persons in the waking state involuntary bodily changes such as swaying or rigidity of the arms, and sensations such as warmth and odor. It was not long before social thinkers seized upon these discoveries as a basis for explaining numerous social phenomena, from the spread of opinion to the formation of crowds and the following of leaders. The sociologist Gabriel Tarde summed it all up in the aphorism: “Social man is a somnambulist.” When the new discipline of social psychology was born at the beginning of this century, its first experiments were essentially adaptations of the suggestion demonstration. The technique generally followed a simple plan. The subjects, usually college students, were asked to give their opinions or preferences concerning various matters; some time later they were again asked to state their choices, but now they were also informed of the opinions held by authorities or large groups of their peers on the same matters. (Often the alleged consensus was fictitious.) Most of these studies had substantially the same result: confronted with opinions contrary to their own, many subjects apparently shifted their judgments in the direction of the views of the majorities or the experts. The late psychologist Edward L. Thorndike reported that he had succeeded in modifying the esthetic preferences of adults by this procedure. Other psychologists reported that people’s evaluations of the merit of a literary passage could be raised or lowered by ascribing the passage to different authors. Apparently the sheer weight of numbers or authority sufficed to change opinions, even when no arguments for the opinions themselves were provided. Now the very ease of success in these experiments arouses suspicion. Did the subjects actually change their opinions, or were the experimental victories scored only on paper? On grounds of common sense, one must question whether opinions are generally as watery as these studies indicate. There is some reason to wonder whether it was not the investigators who, in their enthusiasm for a theory, were suggestible, and whether the ostensibly gullible subjects were not providing answers which they thought good subjects were expected to give. The investigations were guided by certain underlying assumptions, which today are common currency and account for much that is thought and said about the operations of propaganda and public opinion. The assumptions are that people submit uncritically and painlessly to external manipulation by suggestion or prestige, and that any given idea or value can be “sold” or “unsold” without reference to its merits. We should be skeptical, however, of the supposition that the power of social pressure necessarily implies uncritical submission to it: independence and the capacity to rise above group passion are also open to human beings. Further, one may question on psychological grounds whether it is possible as a rule to change a person’s judgment of a situation or an object without first changing his knowledge or assumptions about it.


Opinions and Social Pressure

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FIGURE 3.1 Experiment is repeated in the Laboratory of Social Relations at Harvard University. Seven student subjects are asked by the experimenter (right) to compare the length of lines. Six of the subjects have been coached beforehand to give unanimously wrong answers. The seventh (sixth from the left) has merely been told that it is an experiment in perception. (Photograph by William Vandivert.)

In what follows I shall describe some experiments in an investigation of the effects of group pressure which was carried out recently with the help of a number of my associates. The tests not only demonstrate the operations of group pressure upon individuals but also illustrate a new kind of attack on the problem and some of the more subtle questions that it raises. A group of seven to nine young men, all college students, are assembled in a classroom for a “psychological experiment” in visual judgment. The experimenter informs them that they will be comparing the lengths of lines. He shows two large white cards (see Figure 3.2). On one is a single vertical black line—the standard whose length is to be matched. On the other card are three vertical lines of various lengths. The subjects are to choose the one that is of the same length as the line on the other card. One of the three actually is of the same length; the other two are substantially different, the difference ranging from three quarters of an inch to an inch and three quarters. The experiment opens uneventfully. The subjects announce their answers in the order in which they have been seated in the room, and on the first round every person chooses the same matching line. Then a second set of cards is exposed; again the group is unanimous. The members appear ready to endure politely another boring experiment. On the third trial there is an unexpected disturbance. One person near the end of the group disagrees with all the others in his selection of the matching line. He looks surprised, indeed incredulous, about the disagreement. On the following trial he disagrees again, while the others remain unanimous in their choice. The dissenter becomes more and more worried and hesitant


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FIGURE 3.2 Subjects were shown two cards. One bore a standard line. The other bore three lines, one of which was the same length as the standard. The subjects were asked to choose this line.

as the disagreement continues in succeeding trials; he may pause before announcing his answer and speak in a low voice, or he may smile in an embarrassed way. What the dissenter does not know is that all the other members of the group were instructed by the experimenter beforehand to give incorrect answers in unanimity at certain points. The single individual who is not a party to this prearrangement is the focal subject of our experiment. He is placed in a position in which, while he is actually giving the correct answers, he finds himself unexpectedly in a minority of one, opposed by a unanimous and arbitrary majority with respect to a clear and simple fact. Upon him we have brought to bear two opposed forces: the evidence of his senses and the unanimous opinion of a group of his peers. Also, he must declare his judgments in public, before a majority which has also stated its position publicly. The instructed majority occasionally reports correctly in order to reduce the possibility that the naive subject will suspect collusion against him. (In only a few cases did the subject actually show suspicion; when this happened, the experiment was stopped and the results were not counted.) There are 18 trials in each series, and on 12 of these the majority responds erroneously. How do people respond to group pressure in this situation? I shall report first the statistical results of a series in which a total of 123 subjects from three institutions of higher learning (not including my own, Swarthmore College) were placed in the minority situation described above. Two alternatives were open to the subject: he could act independently, repudiating the majority, or he could go along with the majority, repudiating the evidence of his senses. Of the 123 put to the test, a considerable percentage yielded to the majority. Whereas in ordinary circumstances individuals matching the lines will make mistakes less than 1 percent of the time, under group pressure the minority subjects swung to acceptance of the misleading majority’s wrong judgments in 36.8 percent of the selections. Of course individuals differed in response. At one extreme, about one quarter of the subjects were completely independent and never agreed with the erroneous



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judgments of the majority. At the other extreme, some individuals went with the majority nearly all the time. The performances of individuals in this experiment tend to be highly consistent. Those who strike out on the path of independence do not, as a rule, succumb to the majority even over an extended series of trials, while those who choose the path of compliance are unable to free themselves as the ordeal is prolonged. The reasons for the startling individual differences have not yet been investigated in detail. At this point we can only report some tentative generalizations from talks with the subjects, each of whom was interviewed at the end of the experiment. Among the independent individuals were many who held fast because of staunch confidence in their own judgment. The most significant fact about them was not absence of responsiveness to the majority but a capacity to recover from doubt and to reestablish their equilibrium. Others who acted independently came to believe that the majority was correct in its answers, but they continued their dissent on the simple ground that it was their obligation to call the play as they saw it. Among the extremely yielding persons we found a group who quickly reached the conclusion: “I am wrong, they are right.” Others yielded in order “not to spoil your results.” Many of the individuals who went along suspected that the majority were “sheep” following the first responder, or that the majority were victims of an optical illusion; nevertheless, these suspicions failed to free them at the moment of decision. More disquieting were the reactions of subjects who construed their difference from the majority as a sign of some general deficiency in themselves, which at all costs they must hide. On this basis they desperately tried to merge with the majority, not realizing the longer-range consequences to themselves. All the yielding subjects underestimated the frequency with which they conformed. Which aspect of the influence of a majority is more important—the size of the majority or its unanimity? The experiment was modified to examine this question. In one series the size of the opposition was varied from one to fifteen persons. The results showed a clear trend. When a subject was confronted with only a single individual who contradicted his answers, he was swayed little: he continued to answer independently and correctly in nearly all trials. When the opposition was increased to two, the pressure became substantial: minority subjects now accepted the wrong answer 13.6 percent of the time. Under the pressure of a majority of three, the subjects’ errors jumped to 31.8 percent. But further increases in the size of the majority apparently did not increase the weight of the pressure substantially. Clearly the size of the opposition is important only up to a point. Disturbance of the majority’s unanimity had a striking effect. In this experiment the subject was given the support of a truthful partner—either another individual who did not know of the prearranged agreement among the rest of the group, or a person who was instructed to give correct answers throughout.


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The presence of a supporting partner depleted the majority of much of its power. Its pressure on the dissenting individual was reduced to one-fourth: that is, subjects answered incorrectly only one-fourth as often as under the pressure of a unanimous majority (see Figure 3.6). The weakest persons did not yield as readily. Most interesting were the reactions to the partner. Generally the feeling toward him was one of warmth and closeness; he was credited with inspiring confidence. However, the subjects repudiated the suggestion that the partner decided them to be independent. Was the partner’s effect a consequence of his dissent, or was it related to his accuracy? We now introduced into the experimental group a person who was instructed to dissent from the majority but also to disagree with the subject. In some experiments the majority was always to choose the worst of the comparison lines and the instructed dissenter to pick the line that was closer to the length of the standard one; in others the majority was consistently intermediate and the dissenter most in error. In this manner we were able to study the relative influence of “compromising” and “extremist” dissenters. Again the results are clear. When a moderate dissenter is present, the effect of the majority on the subject decreases by approximately one-third, and extremes of yielding disappear. Moreover, most of the errors the subjects do make are moderate, rather than flagrant. In short, the dissenter largely controls the choice of errors. To this extent the subjects broke away from the majority even while bending to it. On the other hand, when the dissenter always chose the line that was more flagrantly different from the standard, the results were of quite a different kind. The extremist dissenter produced a remarkable freeing of the subjects; their errors dropped to only 9 percent. Furthermore, all the errors were of the moderate variety. We were able to conclude that dissent per se increased independence and moderated the errors that occurred, and that the direction of dissent exerted consistent effects. In all the foregoing experiments each subject was observed only in a single setting. We now turned to studying the effects upon a given individual of a change in the situation to which he was exposed. The first experiment examined the consequences of losing or gaining a partner. The instructed partner began by answering correctly on the first six trials. With his support the subject usually resisted pressure from the majority: eighteen of twenty-seven subjects were completely independent. But after six trials the partner joined the majority. As soon as he did so, there was an abrupt rise in the subjects’ errors. Their submission to the majority

FIGURE 3.3 Experiment proceeds as follows: In the top picture, the subject (center) hears rules of experiment for the first time. In the second picture, he makes his first judgment of a pair of cards, disagreeing with the unanimous judgment of the others. In the third, he leans forward to look at another pair of cards. In the fourth, he shows the strain of repeatedly disagreeing with the majority. In the fifth, after twelve pairs of cards have been shown, he explains that “he has to call them as he sees them.” This subject disagreed with the majority on all twelve trials. Seventy-five percent of experimental subjects agree with the majority in varying degrees. (Photographs by William Vandivert.)



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FIGURE 3.4 Error of 123 subjects, each of whom compared lines in the presence of six to eight opponents, is plotted in the gray curve. The accuracy of judgment not under pressure is indicated in black.

FIGURE 3.5 Size of majority that opposed them had an effect on the subjects. With a single opponent, the subject erred only 3.6 percent of the time; with two opponents he erred 13.6 percent; with three, 31.8 percent; with four, 35.1 percent; with six, 35.2 percent; with seven, 37.1 percent; with nine, 35.1 percent; with fifteen, 31.2 percent.

FIGURE 3.6 Two subjects supporting each other against a majority made fewer errors (gray curve) than one subject did against a majority (black curve).

FIGURE 3.7 Partner left subject after six trials in a single experiment. The gray curve shows the error of the subject when the partner “deserted” to the majority. The black curve shows error when partner merely left the room.



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was just about as frequent as when the minority subject was opposed by a unanimous majority throughout. It was surprising to find that the experience of having had a partner and of having braved the majority opposition with him had failed to strengthen the individuals’ independence. Questioning at the conclusion of the experiment suggested that we had overlooked an important circumstance; namely, the strong specific effect of “desertion” by the partner to the other side. We therefore changed the conditions so that the partner would simply leave the group at the proper point. (To allay suspicion it was announced in advance that he had an appointment with the dean.) In this form of the experiment, the partner’s effect outlasted his presence. The errors increased after his departure, but less markedly than after a partner switched to the majority. In a variant of this procedure the trials began with the majority unanimously giving correct answers. Then they gradually broke away until on the sixth trial the naive subject was alone and the group unanimously against him. As long as the subject had anyone on his side, he was almost invariably independent, but as soon as he found himself alone, the tendency to conform to the majority rose abruptly. As might be expected, an individual’s resistance to group pressure in these experiments depends to a considerable degree on how wrong the majority is. We varied the discrepancy between the standard line and the other lines systematically, with the hope of reaching a point where the error of the majority would be so glaring that every subject would repudiate it and choose independently. In this we regretfully did not succeed. Even when the difference between the lines was seven inches, there were still some who yielded to the error of the majority. The study provides clear answers to a few relatively simple questions, and it raises many others that await investigation. We would like to know the degree of consistency of persons in situations which differ in content and structure. If consistency of independence or conformity in behavior is shown to be a fact, how is it functionally related to qualities of character and personality? In what ways is independence related to sociological or cultural conditions? Are leaders more independent than other people, or are they adept at following their followers? These and many other questions may perhaps be answerable by investigations of the type described here. Life in society requires consensus as an indispensable condition. But consensus, to be productive, requires that each individual contribute independently out of his experience and insight. When consensus comes under the dominance of conformity, the social process is polluted and the individual at the same time surrenders the powers on which his functioning as a feeling and thinking being depends. That we have found the tendency to conformity in our society so strong that reasonably intelligent and wellmeaning young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct. Yet anyone inclined to draw too pessimistic conclusions from this report would do well to remind himself that the capacities for independence are not to be underestimated. He may also draw some consolation from a further observation: those


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who participated in this challenging experiment agreed nearly without exception that independence was preferable to conformity.

References ASCH, S. E. Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments. In H. Guetzdow (Ed.), Groups, leadership, and men. Carnegie Press, 1951. ASCH, S. E. Social psychology. Prentice-Hall, 1952. MILLER, N. E., AND DOLLARD, J. Social learning and imitation. Yale University Press, 1941.


4 Behavioral Study of Obedience Stanley Milgram

This chapter describes a procedure for the study of destructive obedience in the laboratory. It consists of ordering a naive S to administer increasingly more severe punishment to a victim in the context of a learning experiment. Punishment is administered by means of a shock generator with 30 graded switches ranging from Slight Shock to Danger: Severe Shock. The victim is a confederate of the E. The primary dependent variable is the maximum shock the S is willing to administer before he refuses to continue further. Twenty-six Ss obeyed the experimental commands fully, and administered the highest shock on the generator. Fourteen Ss broke off the experiment at some point after the victim protested and refused to provide further answers. The procedure created extreme levels of nervous tension in some Ss. Profuse sweating, trembling and stuttering were typical expressions of this emotional disturbance. One unexpected sign of tension—yet to be explained—was the regular occurrence of nervous laughter, which in some Ss developed into uncontrollable seizures. The variety of interesting behavioral dynamics observed in the experiment, the reality of the situation for the S, and the possibility of parametric variation within the framework of the procedure, point to the fruitfulness of further study.

Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to. Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only the man dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, through defiance or submission, to the commands of others. Obedience, as a determinant of behavior, is of particular relevance to our time. It has been reliably established that from 1933–1945 millions of innocent persons were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only be carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of persons obeyed orders.

Reprinted with permission from Alexandra Milgram. From The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 67, No. 4, 1963. Copyright © 1991 by Alexandra Milgram. This research was supported by a grant (NSF G-17916) from the National Science Foundation. Exploratory studies conducted in 1960 were supported by a grant from the Higgins Fund at Yale University. The research assistance of Alan E. Elms and Jon Wayland is gratefully acknowledged.


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Obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose. It is the dispositional cement that binds men to systems of authority. Facts of recent history and observation in daily life suggest that for many persons obedience may be a deeply ingrained behavior tendency, indeed, a prepotent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct. C. P. Snow (1961) points to its importance when he writes: When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion. If you doubt that, read William Shirer’s “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.” The German Officer Corps were brought up in the most rigorous code of obedience . . . in the name of obedience they were party to, and assisted in, the most wicked large scale actions in the history of the world [p. 24].

While the particular form of obedience dealt with in the present study has its antecedents in these episodes, it must not be thought all obedience entails acts of aggression against others. Obedience serves numerous productive functions. Indeed, the very life of society is predicated on its existence. Obedience may be ennobling and educative and refer to acts of charity and kindness, as well as to destruction.

General Procedure A procedure was devised which seems useful as a tool for studying obedience (Milgram, 1961). It consists of ordering a naive subject to administer electric shock to a victim. A simulated shock generator is used, with 30 clearly marked voltage levels that range from 15 to 450 volts. The instrument bears verbal designations that range from Slight Shock to Danger: Severe Shock. The responses of the victim, who is a trained confederate of the experimenter, are standardized. The orders to administer shocks are given to the naive subject in the context of a “learning experiment” ostensibly set up to study the effects of punishment on memory. As the experiment proceeds the naive subject is commanded to administer increasingly more intense shocks to the victim, even to the point of reaching the level marked Danger: Severe Shock. Internal resistances become stronger, and at a certain point the subject refuses to go on with the experiment. Behavior prior to this rupture is considered “obedience,” in that the subject complies with the commands of the experimenter. The point of rupture is the act of disobedience. A quantitative value is assigned to the subject’s performance based on the maximum intensity shock he is willing to administer before he refuses to participate further. Thus for any particular subject and for any particular experimental condition the degree of obedience may be specified with a numerical value. The crux of the study is to systematically vary the factors believed to alter the degree of obedience to the experimental commands. The technique allows important variables to be manipulated at several points in the experiment. One may vary aspects of the source of command, content and form


Behavioral Study of Obedience

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of command, instrumentalities for its execution, target object, general social setting, etc. The problem, therefore, is not one of designing increasingly more numerous experimental conditions, but of selecting those that best illuminate the process of obedience from the sociopsychological standpoint.

Related Studies The inquiry bears an important relation to philosophic analyses of obedience and authority (Arendt, 1958; Friedrich, 1958; Weber, 1947), an early experimental study of obedience by Frank (1944), studies in “authoritarianism” (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford, 1950; Rokeach, 1961), and a recent series of analytic and empirical studies in social power (Cartwright, 1959). It owes much to the long concern with suggestion in social psychology, both in its normal forms (e.g., Binet, 1900) and in its clinical manifestations (Charcot, 1881). But it derives, in the first instance, from direct observation of a social fact; the individual who is commanded by a legitimate authority ordinarily obeys. Obedience comes easily and often. It is a ubiquitous and indispensable feature of social life.

METHOD Subjects The subjects were 40 males between the ages of 20 and 50, drawn from New Haven and the surrounding communities. Subjects were obtained by a newspaper advertisement and direct mail solicitation. Those who responded to the appeal believed they were to participate in a study of memory and learning at Yale University. A wide range of occupations is represented in the sample. Typical subjects were postal clerks, high school teachers, salesmen, engineers, and laborers. Subjects ranged in educational level from one who had not finished elementary school, to those who had doctorate and other professional degrees. They were paid $4.50 for their participation in the experiment. However, subjects were told that payment was simply for coming to the laboratory, and that the money was theirs no matter what happened after they arrived. Table 4.1 shows the proportion of age and occupational types assigned to the experimental condition.

Personnel and Locale The experiment was conducted on the grounds of Yale University in the elegant interaction laboratory. (This detail is relevant to the perceived legitimacy of the


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TABLE 4.1 Distribution of age and occupational types in the experiment Occupations Workers, skilled and unskilled Sales, business, and white-collar Professional Percentage of total (age)

20–29 years n

30–39 years n

40–50 years n

Percentage of total (occupations)

4

5

6

37.5

3 1

6 5

7 3

40.0 22.5

20

40

40

Note: Total N = 40.

experiment. In further variations, the experiment was dissociated from the university, with consequences for performance.) The role of experimenter was played by a 31-year-old high school teacher of biology. His manner was impassive, and his appearance somewhat stern throughout the experiment. He was dressed in a gray technician’s coat. The victim was played by a 47-year-old accountant, trained for the role; he was of Irish-American stock, whom most observers found mild-mannered and likable.

Procedure One naive subject and one victim (an accomplice) performed in each experiment. A pretext had to be devised that would justify the administration of electric shock by the naive subject. This was effectively accomplished by the cover story. After a general introduction on the presumed relation between punishment and learning, subjects were told But actually, we know very little about the effect of punishment on learning, because almost no truly scientific studies have been made of it in human beings. For instance, we don’t know how much punishment is best for learning—and we don’t know how much difference it makes as to who is giving the punishment, whether an adult learns best from a younger or an older person than himself—or many things of that sort. So in this study we are bringing together a number of adults of different occupations and ages. And we’re asking some of them to be teachers and some of them to be learners. We want to find out what effect different people have on each other as teachers and learners, and also what effect punishment will have on learning in this situation.



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Therefore, I’m going to ask one of you to be the teacher here tonight and the other one to be the learner. Does either of you have a preference?

Subjects then drew slips of paper from a hat to determine who would be the teacher and who would be the learner in the experiment. The drawing was rigged so that the naive subject was always the teacher and the accomplice always the learner. (Both slips contained the word “Teacher.”) Immediately after the drawing the teacher and learner were taken to an adjacent room and the learner was strapped into an “electric chair” apparatus. The experimenter explained that the straps were to prevent excessive movement while the learner was being shocked. The effect was to make it impossible for him to escape from the situation. An electrode was attached to the learner’s wrist, and electrode paste was applied “to avoid blisters and burns.” Subjects were told that the electrode was attached to the shock generator in the adjoining room. To improve credibility the experimenter declared, in response to a question by the learner: “Although the shocks can be extremely painful, they cause no permanent tissue damage.”

Learning task. The lesson administered by the subject was a paired-associate learning task. The subject read a series of word pairs to the learner, and then read the first word of the pair along with four terms. The learner was to indicate which of the four terms had originally been paired with the first word. He communicated his answer by pressing one of four switches in front of him, which in turn lit up one of four numbered quadrants in an answer-box located atop the shock generator. Shock generator. The instrument panel consists of 30 lever switches set in a horizontal line. Each switch is clearly labeled with a voltage designation that ranges from 15 to 450 volts. There is a 15-volt increment from one switch to the next going from left to right. In addition, the following verbal designations are clearly indicated for groups of four switches going from left to right: Slight Shock, Moderate Shock, Strong Shock, Very Strong Shock, Intense Shock, Extreme Intensity Shock, Danger: Severe Shock. (Two switches after this last designation are simply marked XXX.) Upon depressing a switch: a pilot light corresponding to each switch is illuminated in bright red; an electric buzzing is heard; an electric blue light, labeled “voltage energizer,” flashes; the dial on the voltage meter swings to the right; various relay clicks are sounded. The upper left-hand corner of the generator is labeled Shock Generator, Type ZLB, Dyson Instrument Company, Waltham, Mass. Output 15 Volts–450 Volts. Details of the instrument were carefully handled to insure an appearance of authenticity. The panel was engraved by precision industrial engravers, and all


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components were of high quality. No subject in the experiment suspected that the instrument was merely a simulated shock generator.1

Sample shock. Each naive subject is given a sample shock on the shock generator, prior to beginning his run as teacher. This shock is always 45 volts, and is applied by pressing the third switch of the generator. The shock is applied to the wrist of the naive subject, and has its source in a 45-volt battery wired into the generator. This further convinces the subject of the authenticity of the generator. Shock instructions. The subject is told to administer a shock to the learner each time he gives a wrong response. Moreover—and this is the key command— the subject is instructed to “move one lever higher on the shock generator each time the learner flashes a wrong answer.” He is also instructed to announce the voltage level before administering a shock. This serves to continually remind subjects of the increasing intensity of shocks administered to the learner. Preliminary and regular run. Pretests revealed that the procedure of reading words and administering shocks requires some practice before it can be handled smoothly. Therefore, immediately preceding the regular run, the teacher is given a preliminary series of 10 words to read to the learner. There are 3 neutral words in the practice series (i.e., words that the learner answers correctly), so that shocks are administered for 7 of the words, with the maximum shock at 105 volts (moderate shock). Almost all subjects master the procedure by the time the preliminary run is over. Subjects are then presented with a second list, and are told that the procedure is the same as for the first list; the experimenter adds, however, When you get to the bottom of the list, repeat it over again, and continue giving shocks, until the learner has learned all the pairs correctly.

The experimenter instructs the subject to start from 15 volts and increase the shock level one step each time the learner gives a wrong answer.

Feedback from the victim. In all conditions the learner gives a predetermined set of responses to the word pair test, based on a schedule of approximately three wrong answers to one correct answer. In the present experimental condition 1 A related technique, making use of a shock generator, was reported by Buss (1961) for the study of aggression in the laboratory. Despite the considerable similarity of technical detail in the experimental procedures, each investigator proceeded in ignorance of the other’s work. Milgram provided plans and photographs of his shock generator, experimental procedure, and first results in a report to the National Science Foundation in January 1961. This report received only limited circulation. Buss reported his procedure six months later, but to a wider audience. Subsequently, technical information and reports were exchanged. The present article was first received in the editor’s office on December 27, 1961; it was resubmitted with deletions on July 27, 1962.



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no vocal response or other sign of protest is heard from the learner until Shock Level 300 is reached. When the 300-volt shock is administered, the learner pounds on the wall of the room in which he is bound to the electric chair. The pounding can be heard by the subject. From this point on, the learner’s answers no longer appear on the four-way panel. At this juncture, subjects ordinarily turn to the experimenter for guidance. The experimenter instructs the subject to treat the absence of a response as a wrong answer, and to shock the subject according to the usual schedule. He advises the subjects to allow 5–10 seconds before considering no response as a wrong answer, and to increase the shock level one step each time the learner fails to respond correctly. The learner’s pounding is repeated after the 315-volt shock is administered; afterwards he is not heard from, nor do his answers reappear on the four-way signal box.

Experimenter feedback. At various points in the experiment the subject may turn to the experimenter for advice on whether he should continue to administer shocks. Or he may indicate that he does not wish to go on. It was important to standardize the experimenter’s responses to these inquiries and reactions. If the subject indicated his unwillingness to go on, the experimenter responded with a sequence of “prods,” using as many as necessary to bring the subject into line. Prod 1: Prod 2: Prod 3: Prod 4:

Please continue. or Please go on. The experiment requires that you continue. It is absolutely essential that you continue. You have no other choice, you must go on.

The prods were always made in sequence: Only if Prod 1 had been unsuccessful, could Prod 2 be used. If the subject refused to obey the experimenter after Prod 4, the experiment was terminated. The experimenter’s tone of voice was at all times firm, but not impolite. The sequence was begun anew on each occasion that the subject balked or showed reluctance to follow orders.

Special prods. If the subject asked if the learner was liable to suffer permanent physical injury, the experimenter said: Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on. [Followed by Prods 2, 3, and 4 if necessary.]

If the subject said that the learner did not want to go on, the experimenter replied: Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly. So please go on. [Followed by Prods 2, 3, and 4 if necessary.]

Dependent Measures The primary dependent measure for any subject is the maximum shock he administers before he refuses to go any further. In principle this may vary from 0 (for


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a subject who refuses to administer even the first shock) to 30 (for a subject who administers the highest shock on the generator). A subject who breaks off the experiment at any point prior to administering the thirtieth shock level is termed a defiant subject. One who complies with experimental commands fully, and proceeds to administer all shock levels commanded, is termed an obedient subject.

Further records. With few exceptions, experimental sessions were recorded on magnetic tape. Occasional photographs were taken through one-way mirrors. Notes were kept on any unusual behavior occurring during the course of the experiments. On occasion, additional observers were directed to write objective descriptions of the subjects’ behavior. The latency and duration of shocks were measured by accurate timing devices. Interview and dehoax. Following the experiment, subjects were interviewed; open-ended questions, projective measures, and attitude scales were employed. After the interview, procedures were undertaken to assure that the subject would leave the laboratory in a state of well being. A friendly reconciliation was arranged between the subject and the victim, and an effort was made to reduce any tensions that arose as a result of the experiment.

RESULTS Preliminary Notions Before giving an account of the experimental results, it is instructive to consider how persons predict others will perform when commanded to administer powerful shocks to another person. Fourteen Yale seniors, all psychology majors, were provided with a detailed description of the experimental situation. They were asked to reflect carefully on it, and to predict the behavior of 100 hypothetical subjects. More specifically, they were instructed to plot the distribution of obedience of “100 Americans of diverse occupations, and ranging in age from 20 to 50 years,” who were placed in the experimental situation. There was considerable agreement among the respondents on the expected behavior of hypothetical subjects. All respondents predicted that only an insignificant minority would go through to the end of the shock series. (The estimates ranged from 0 to 3 percent; i.e., the most “pessimistic” member of the class predicted that of 100 persons, 3 would continue through to the most potent shock available on the shock generator—450 volts.) The class mean was 1.2 percent. The question was also posed informally to colleagues of the author, and the most general feeling was that few if any subjects would go beyond the designation Very Strong Shock.



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Result of Experiment I Subjects accept situation. With few exceptions subjects were convinced of the reality of the experimental situation, that they were administering shocks to another person, and the most potent shocks were extremely painful. In the postexperimental interview subjects were asked: “How painful to the learner were the last few shocks that you administered to him?” Subjects were instructed to indicate their answers on a printed 14-point scale ranging from “Not at all painful” to “Extremely painful.” The modal response was 14 (Extremely painful) with the mean at 13.42. Signs of extreme tension. Many subjects showed signs of nervousness in the experimental situation, and especially upon administering the more powerful shocks. In a large number of cases the degree of tension reached extremes that are rarely seen in sociopsychological laboratory studies. Subjects were observed to sweat, tremble, stutter, bite their lips, groan, and dig their fingernails into their flesh. These were characteristic rather than exceptional responses to the experiment. One sign of tension was the regular occurrence of nervous laughing fits. Fourteen of the 40 subjects showed definite signs of nervous laughter and smiling. The laughter seemed entirely out of place, even bizarre. Full-blown, uncontrollable seizures were observed for 3 subjects. On one occasion we observed a seizure so violently convulsive that it was necessary to call a halt to the experiment. The subject, a 46-year-old encyclopedia salesman, was seriously embarrassed by his untoward and uncontrollable behavior. In the postexperimental interviews subjects took pains to point out that they were not sadistic types, and that the laughter did not mean they enjoyed shocking the victim. Distribution of scores. It had been conjectured that persons would not, in general, agree to administer shocks beyond the level designated as Very Strong Shock. The distribution of maximum shocks for this experiment is shown in Table 4.2. The obtained distribution of scores deviates radically from the prediction. Upon command of the experimenter, each of the 40 subjects went beyond the expected break-off point. No subject stopped prior to administering Shock Level 20. (At this level—300 volts—the victim kicks on the wall and no longer provides answers to the teacher’s multiple-choice questions.) Of the 40 subjects, 5 refused to obey the experimental commands beyond the 300-volt level. Four more subjects administered one further shock, and then refused to go on. Two broke off at the 330-volt level, and 1 each at 345, 360, and 375 volts. Thus a total of 14 subjects defied the experimenter. It is instructive to reprint their remarks at the point of defiance, as transcribed from the tape record. [0124] I think he’s trying to communicate, he’s knocking . . . Well it’s not fair to shock the guy . . . these are terrific volts. I don’t think this is very humane . . . Oh, I


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Conformity and Obedience TABLE 4.2 Distribution of break-off points Verbal designation and voltage indication Slight Shock 15 30 45 60 Moderate Shock 75 90 105 120 Strong Shock 135 150 165 180 Very Strong Shock 195 210 225 240 Intense Shock 255 270 285 300 Extreme Intensity Shock 315 330 345 360 Danger: Severe Shock 375 390 405 420 XXX 435 450

Number of subjects for whom this was maximum shock 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 5 4 2 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 26

can’t go on with this; no, this isn’t right. It’s a hell of an experiment. The guy is suffering in there. No, I don’t want to go on. This is crazy. [Subject refused to administer more shocks.] [0123] He’s banging in there. I’m gonna chicken out. I’d like to continue, but I can’t do that to a man . . . I’m sorry I can’t do that to a man. I’ll hurt his heart. You take your check . . . No really, I couldn’t do it.

These subjects were frequently in a highly agitated and even angered state. Sometimes, verbal protest was at a minimum, and the subject simply got up from his



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chair in front of the shock generator, and indicated that he wished to leave the laboratory. Of the 40 subjects, 26 obeyed the orders of the experimenter to the end, proceeding to punish the victim until they reached the most potent shock available on the shock generator. At that point, the experimenter called a halt to the session. (The maximum shock is labeled 450 volts, and is two steps beyond the designation: Danger: Severe Shock.) Although obedient subjects continued to administer shocks, they often did so under extreme stress. Some expressed reluctance to administer shocks beyond the 300-volt level, and displayed fears similar to those who defied the experimenter; yet they obeyed. After the maximum shocks had been delivered, and the experimenter called a halt to the proceedings, many obedient subjects heaved sighs of relief, mopped their brows, rubbed their fingers over their eyes, or nervously fumbled cigarettes. Some shook their heads, apparently in regret. Some subjects had remained calm throughout the experiment, and displayed only minimal signs of tension from beginning to end.

DISCUSSION The experiment yielded two findings that were surprising. The first finding concerns the sheer strength of obedient tendencies manifested in this situation. Subjects have learned from childhood that it is a fundamental breach of moral conduct to hurt another person against his will. Yet, 26 subjects abandon this tenet in following the instructions of an authority who has no special powers to enforce his commands. To disobey would bring no material loss to the subject; no punishment would ensue. It is clear from the remarks and outward behavior of many participants that in punishing the victim they are often acting against their own values. Subjects often expressed deep disapproval of shocking a man in the face of his objections, and others denounced it as stupid and senseless. Yet the majority complied with the experimental commands. This outcome was surprising from two perspectives: first, from the standpoint of predictions made in the questionnaire described earlier. (Here, however, it is possible that the remoteness of the respondents from the actual situation, and the difficulty of conveying to them the concrete details of the experiment, could account for the serious underestimation of obedience.) But the results were also unexpected to persons who observed the experiment in progress, through one-way mirrors. Observers often uttered expressions of disbelief upon seeing a subject administer more powerful shocks to the victim. These persons had a full acquaintance with the details of the situation, and yet systematically underestimated the amount of obedience that subjects would display. The second unanticipated effect was the extraordinary tension generated by the procedures. One might suppose that a subject would simply break off or continue


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as his conscience dictated. Yet, this is very far from what happened. There were striking reactions of tension and emotional strain. One observer related I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse. He constantly pulled on his earlobe, and twisted his hands. At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered: “Oh God, let’s stop it.” And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter, and obeyed to the end.

Any understanding of the phenomenon of obedience must rest on an analysis of the particular conditions in which it occurs. The following features of the experiment go some distance in explaining the high amount of obedience observed in the situation. 1. The experiment is sponsored by and takes place on the grounds of an institution of unimpeachable reputation, Yale University. It may be reasonably presumed that the personnel are competent and reputable. The importance of this background authority is now being studied by conducting a series of experiments outside of New Haven, and without any visible ties to the university. 2. The experiment is, on the face of it, designed to attain a worthy purpose— advancement of knowledge about learning and memory. Obedience occurs not as an end in itself, but as an instrumental element in a situation that the subject construes as significant, and meaningful. He may not be able to see its full significance, but he may properly assume that the experimenter does. 3. The subject perceives that the victim has voluntarily submitted to the authority system of the experimenter. He is not (at first) an unwilling captive impressed for involuntary service. He has taken the trouble to come to the laboratory presumably to aid the experimental research. That he later becomes an involuntary subject does not alter the fact that, initially, he consented to participate without qualification. Thus he has in some degree incurred an obligation toward the experimenter. 4. The subject, too, has entered the experiment voluntarily, and perceives himself under obligation to aid the experimenter. He has made a commitment, and to disrupt the experiment is a repudiation of this initial promise of aid. 5. Certain features of the procedure strengthen the subject’s sense of obligation to the experimenter. For one, he has been paid for coming to the laboratory. In part this is canceled out by the experimenter’s statement that Of course, as in all experiments, the money is yours simply for coming to the laboratory. From this point on, no matter what happens, the money is yours.2

6. From the subject’s standpoint, the fact that he is the teacher and the other man the learner is purely a chance consequence (it is determined by drawing lots) and he, the subject, ran the same risk as the other man in being assigned the role of 2 Forty-three subjects, undergraduates at Yale University, were run in the experiment without payment. The results are very similar to those obtained with paid subjects.



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learner. Since the assignment of positions in the experiment was achieved by fair means, the learner is deprived of any basis of complaint on this count. (A similar situation obtains in Army units, in which—in the absence of volunteers—a particularly dangerous mission may be assigned by drawing lots, and the unlucky soldier is expected to bear his misfortune with sportsmanship.) 7. There is, at best, ambiguity with regard to the prerogatives of a psychologist and the corresponding rights of his subject. There is a vagueness of expectation concerning what a psychologist may require of his subject, and when he is overstepping acceptable limits. Moreover, the experiment occurs in a closed setting, and thus provides no opportunity for the subject to remove these ambiguities by discussion with others. There are few standards that seem directly applicable to the situation, which is a novel one for most subjects. 8. The subjects are assured that the shocks administered to the subject are “painful but not dangerous.” Thus they assume that the discomfort caused the victim is momentary, while the scientific gains resulting from the experiment are enduring. 9. Through Shock Level 20 the victim continues to provide answers on the signal box. The subject may construe this as a sign that the victim is still willing to “play the game.” It is only after Shock Level 20 that the victim repudiates the rules completely, refusing to answer further. These features help to explain the high amount of obedience obtained in this experiment. Many of the arguments raised need not remain matters of speculation, but can be reduced to testable propositions to be confirmed or disproved by further experiments.3 The following features of the experiment concern the nature of the conflict which the subject faces. 10. The subject is placed in a position in which he must respond to the competing demands of two persons: the experimenter and the victim. The conflict must be resolved by meeting the demands of one or the other; satisfaction of the victim and the experimenter are mutually exclusive. Moreover, the resolution must take the form of a highly visible action, that of continuing to shock the victim or breaking off the experiment. Thus the subject is forced into a public conflict that does not permit any completely satisfactory solution. 11. While the demands of the experimenter carry the weight of scientific authority, the demands of the victim spring from his personal experience of pain and suffering. The two claims need not be regarded as equally pressing and legitimate. The experimenter seeks an abstract scientific datum; the victim cries out for relief from physical suffering caused by the subject’s actions. 12. The experiment gives the subject little time for reflection. The conflict comes on rapidly. It is only minutes after the subject has been seated before the 3 A series of recently completed experiments employing the obedience paradigm is reported in Milgram (1965).


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shock generator that the victim begins his protests. Moreover, the subject perceives that he has gone through but two-thirds of the shock levels at the time the subject’s first protests are heard. Thus he understands that the conflict will have a persistent aspect to it, and may well become more intense as increasingly more powerful shocks are required. The rapidity with which the conflict descends on the subject, and his realization that it is predictably recurrent may well be sources of tension to him. 13. At a more general level, the conflict stems from the opposition of two deeply ingrained behavior dispositions: first, the disposition not to harm other people, and second, the tendency to obey those whom we perceive to be legitimate authorities.

References ADORNO, T., FRENKEL-BRUNSWIK, E., LEVINSON, D. J., AND SANFORD, R. N. The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper, 1950. ARENDT, H. What was authority? In C. J. Friedrich (Ed.), Authority. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958, pp. 81–112. BINET, A. La suggestibilité. Paris: Schleicher, 1900. BUSS, A. H. The psychology of aggression. New York: Wiley, 1961. CARTWRIGHT, S. (Ed.) Studies in social power. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, 1959. CHARCOT, J. M. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Bureaux du Progrès Médical, 1881. FRANK, J. D. Experimental studies of personal pressure and resistance. J. Gen. Psychol., 1944, 30, 23–64. FRIEDRICH, C. J. (Ed.) Authority. Cambridge: Harvard Univer. Press, 1958. MILGRAM, S. Dynamics of obedience. Washington: National Science Foundation, 25 January 1961. (Mimeo) MILGRAM, S. Some conditions of obedience and disobedience to authority. Hum. Relat., 1965, 18, 57–76. ROKEACH, M. Authority, authoritarianism, and conformity. In I. A. Berg and B. M. Bass (Eds.), Conformity and deviation. New York: Harper, 1961, pp. 230–257. SNOW, C. P. Either-or. Progressive, 1961 (Feb.), 24. WEBER, M. The theory of social and economic organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947.


5 “From Jerusalem to Jericho”: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior John M. Darley and C. Daniel Batson

The influence of several situational and personality variables on helping behavior was examined in an emergency situation suggested by the parable of the Good Samaritan. People going between two buildings encountered a shabbily dressed person slumped by the side of the road. Subjects in a hurry to reach their destination were more likely to pass by without stopping. Some subjects were going to give a short talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan, others on a nonhelping relevant topic; this made no significant difference in the likelihood of their giving the victim help. Religious personality variables did not predict whether an individual would help the victim. However, if a subject did stop to offer help, the character of the helping response was related to his type of religiosity.

Helping other people in distress is, among other things, an ethical act. That is, it is an act governed by ethical norms and precepts taught to children at home, in school, and in church. From Freudian and other personality theories, one would expect individual differences in internalization of these standards that would lead to differences between individuals in the likelihood with which they would help others. But recent research on bystander intervention in emergency situations (Bickman, 1969; Darley and Lantané, 1968; Korte, 1969; but see also Schwartz and Clausen, 1970) has had bad luck in finding personality determinants of helping behavior. Although personality variables that one might expect to correlate with helping behavior have been measured (Machiavellianism, authoritarianism, social de-

Reprinted with permission of the authors and The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 27, No. 1, 1973. Copyright © 1973 by The American Psychological Association. For assistance in conducting this research thanks are due Robert Wells, Beverly Fisher, Mike Shafto, Peter Sheras, Richard Detweiler, and Karen Glasser. The research was funded by National Science Foundation Grant GS-2293.


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sirability, alienation, and social responsibility), these were not predictive of helping. Nor was this due to a generalized lack of predictability in the helping situation examined, since variations in the experimental situation, such as the availability of other people who might also help, produced marked changes in rates of helping behavior. These findings are reminiscent of Hartshorne and May’s (1928) discovery that resistance to temptation, another ethically relevant act, did not seem to be a fixed characteristic of an individual. That is, a person who was likely to be honest in one situation was not particularly likely to be honest in the next (but see also Burton, 1963). The rather disappointing correlation between the social psychologist’s traditional set of personality variables and helping behavior in emergency situations suggests the need for a fresh perspective on possible predictors of helping and possible situations in which to test them. Therefore, for inspiration we turned to the Bible, to what is perhaps the classical helping story in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the parable of the Good Samaritan. The parable proved of value in suggesting both personality and situational variables relevant to helping. “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down the road; and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, and went to him and bound his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And the next day he took out two dennarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to him who fell among the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed mercy on him.” And Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.” [Luke 10: 29–37 RSV]

To psychologists who reflect on the parable, it seems to suggest situational and personality differences between the nonhelpful priest and Levite and the helpful Samaritan. What might each have been thinking and doing when he came upon the robbery victim on that desolate road? What sort of persons were they? One can speculate on differences in thought. Both the priest and the Levite were religious functionaries who could be expected to have their minds occupied with religious matters. The priest’s role in religious activities is obvious. The Levite’s role, although less obvious, is equally important: The Levites were necessary participants in temple ceremonies. Much less can be said with any confidence about what the Samaritan might have been thinking, but, in contrast to the others, it was most likely not of a religious nature, for Samaritans were religious outcasts. Not only was the Samaritan most likely thinking about more mundane matters than the priest and Levite, but, because he was socially less important, it seems likely that he was operating on a quite different time schedule. One can imagine the priest and Levite, prominent public figures, hurrying along with little black


“From Jerusalem to Jericho”

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books full of meetings and appointments, glancing furtively at their sundials. In contrast, the Samaritan would likely have far fewer and less important people counting on him to be at a particular place at a particular time, and therefore might be expected to be in less of a hurry than the prominent priest or Levite. In addition to these situational variables, one finds personality factors suggested, as well. Central among these, and apparently basic to the point that Jesus was trying to make, is a distinction between types of religiosity. Both the priest and Levite are extremely “religious.” But it seems to be precisely their type of religiosity that the parable challenges. At issue is the motivation for one’s religion and ethical behavior. Jesus seems to feel that the religious leaders of his time, though certainly respected and upstanding citizens, may be “virtuous” for what it will get them, both in terms of the admiration of their fellowmen and in the eyes of God. New Testament scholar R. W. Funk (1966) noted that the Samaritan is at the other end of the spectrum. The Samaritan does not love with side glances at God. The need of neighbor alone is made self-evident, and the Samaritan responds without other motivation [pp. 218–219].

That is, the Samaritan is interpreted as responding spontaneously to the situation, not as being preoccupied with the abstract ethical or organizational do’s and don’ts of religion as the priest and Levite would seem to be. This is not to say that the Samaritan is portrayed as irreligious. A major intent of the parable would seem to be to present the Samaritan as a religious and ethical example, but at the same time to contrast his type of religiosity with the more common conception of religiosity that the priest and Levite represent. To summarize the variables suggested as affecting helping behavior by the parable, the situational variables include the content of one’s thinking and the amount of hurry in one’s journey. The major dispositional variable seems to be differing types of religiosity. Certainly these variables do not exhaust the list that could be elicited from the parable, but they do suggest several research hypotheses.

Hypothesis 1. The parable implies that people who encounter a situation possibly calling for a helping response while thinking religious and ethical thoughts will be no more likely to offer aid than persons thinking about something else. Such a hypothesis seems to run counter to a theory that focuses on norms as determining helping behavior because a normative account would predict that the increased salience of helping norms produced by thinking about religious and ethical examples would increase helping behavior. Hypothesis 2. Persons encountering a possible helping situation when they are in a hurry will be less likely to offer aid than persons not in a hurry. Hypothesis 3. Concerning types of religiosity, persons who are religious in a Samaritan-like fashion will help more frequently than those religious in a priest or Levite fashion.


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Obviously, this last hypothesis is hardly operationalized as stated. Prior research by one of the investigators on types of religiosity (Batson, 1971), however, led us to differentiate three distinct ways of being religious: (a) for what it will gain one (cf. Freud, 1927, and perhaps the priest and Levite), (b) for its own intrinsic value (cf. Allport and Ross, 1967), and (c) as a response to and quest for meaning in one’s everyday life (cf. Batson, 1971). Both of the latter conceptions would be proposed by their exponents as related to the more Samaritanlike “true” religiosity. Therefore, depending on the theorist one follows, the third hypothesis may be stated like this: People (a) who are religious for intrinsic reasons (Allport and Ross, 1967) or (b) whose religion emerges out of questioning the meaning of their everyday lives (Batson, 1971) will be more likely to stop to offer help to the victim. The parable of the Good Samaritan also suggested how we would measure people’s helping behavior—their response to a stranger slumped by the side of one’s path. The victim should appear somewhat ambiguous—ill-dressed, possibly in need of help, but also possibly drunk or even potentially dangerous. Further, the parable suggests a means by which the incident could be perceived as a real one rather than part of a psychological experiment in which one’s behavior was under surveillance and might be shaped by demand characteristics (Orne, 1962), evaluation apprehension (Rosenberg, 1965), or other potentially artifactual determinants of helping behavior. The victim should be encountered not in the experimental context but on the road between various tasks.

METHOD In order to examine the influence of these variables on helping behavior, seminary students were asked to participate in a study on religious education and vocations. In the first testing session, personality questionnaires concerning types of religiosity were administered. In a second individual session, the subject began experimental procedures in one building and was asked to report to another building for later procedures. While in transit, the subject passed a slumped “victim” planted in an alleyway. The dependent variable was whether and how the subject helped the victim. The independent variables were the degree to which the subject was told to hurry in reaching the other building and the talk he was to give when he arrived there. Some subjects were to give a talk on the jobs in which seminary students would be most effective, others, on the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Subjects The subjects for the questionnaire administration were 67 students at Princeton Theological Seminary. Forty-seven of them, those who could be reached by tele-



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phone, were scheduled for the experiment. Of the 47, 7 subjects’ data were not included in the analyses—3 because of contamination of the experimental procedures during their testing and 4 because of suspicion of the experimental situation. Each subject was paid $1 for the questionnaire session and $1.50 for the experimental session.

Personality Measures Detailed discussion of the personality scales used may be found elsewhere (Batson, 1971), so the present discussion will be brief. The general personality construct under examination was religiosity. Various conceptions of religiosity have been offered in recent years based on different psychometric scales. The conception seeming to generate the most interest is the Allport and Ross (1967) distinction between “intrinsic” versus “extrinsic” religiosity (cf. also Allen and Spilka, 1967, on “committed” versus “consensual” religion). This bipolar conception of religiosity has been questioned by Brown (1964) and Batson (1971), who suggested three-dimensional analyses instead. Therefore, in the present research, types of religiosity were measured with three instruments which together provided six separate scales: (a) a doctrinal orthodoxy (D-O) scale patterned after that used by Glock and Stark (1966), scaling agreement with classic doctrines of Protestant theology; (b) the Allport-Ross extrinsic (AR-E) scale, measuring the use of religion as a means to an end rather than as an end in itself; (c) the Allport-Ross intrinsic (AR-I) scale, measuring the use of religion as an end in itself; (d) the extrinsic external scale of Batson’s Religious Life Inventory (RELI-EE), designed to measure the influence of significant others and situations in generating one’s religiosity; (e) the extrinsic internal scale of the Religious Life Inventory (RELI-EI), designed to measure the degree of “driveness” in one’s religiosity; and (f) the intrinsic scale of the Religious Life Inventory (RELI-I), designed to measure the degree to which one’s religiosity involves a questioning of the meaning of life arising out of one’s interactions with his social environment. The order of presentation of the scales in the questionnaire was RELI, AR, D-O. Consistent with prior research (Batson, 1971), a principal-component analysis of the total scale scores and individual items for the 67 seminarians produced a theoretically meaningful, orthogonally rotated three-component structure with the following loadings: Religion as means received a single very high loading from AR-E (.903) and therefore was defined by Allport and Ross’s (1967) conception of this scale as measuring religiosity as a means to other ends. This component also received moderate negative loadings from D-O (⫺.400) and AR-I (⫺.372) and a moderate positive loading from RELI-EE (.301). Religion as end received high loadings from RELI-EI (.874), RELI-EE (.725), AR-I (.768), and D-O (.704). Given this configuration, and again following Allport


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and Ross’s conceptualization, this component seemed to involve religiosity as an end in itself with some intrinsic value. Religion as quest received a single very high loading from RELI-I (.945) and a moderate loading from RELI-EE (.75). Following Batson, this component was conceived to involve religiosity emerging out of an individual’s search for meaning in his personal and social world. The three religious personality scales examined in the experimental research were constructed through the use of complete-estimation factor score coefficients from these three components.

Scheduling of Experimental Study Since the incident requiring a helping response was staged outdoors, the entire experimental study was run in 3 days, December 14–16, 1970, between 10 A.M. and 4 P.M. A tight schedule was used in an attempt to maintain reasonably consistent weather and light conditions. Temperature fluctuation according to the New York Times for the 3 days during these hours was not more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit. No rain or snow fell, although the third day was cloudy, whereas the first two were sunny. Within days the subjects were randomly assigned to experimental conditions.1

Procedure When a subject appeared for the experiment, an assistant (who was blind with respect to the personality scores) asked him to read a brief statement which explained that he was participating in a study of the vocational careers of seminary students. After developing the rationale for the study, the statement read What we have called you in for today is to provide us with some additional material which will give us a clearer picture of how you think than does the questionnaire material we have gathered thus far. Questionnaires are helpful, but tend to be somewhat oversimplified. Therefore, we would like to record a 3–5-minute talk you give based on the following passage. . . .

Variable 1: Message. In the task-relevant condition the passage read With increasing frequency the question is being asked: What jobs or professions do seminary students subsequently enjoy most, and in what jobs are they most effective? The answer to this question used to be so obvious that the question was not 1 An error was made in randomizing that increased the number of subjects in the intermediate-hurry conditions. This worked against the prediction that was most highly confirmed (the hurry prediction) and made no difference to the message variable tests.



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even asked. Seminary students were being trained for the ministry, and since both society at large and the seminary student himself had a relatively clear understanding of what made a “good” minister, there was no need even to raise the question of for what other jobs seminary experience seems to be an asset. Today, however, neither society nor many seminaries have a very clearly defined conception of what a “good” minister is or of what sorts of jobs and professions are the best context in which to minister. Many seminary students, apparently genuinely concerned with “ministering,” seem to feel that it is impossible to minister in the professional clergy. Other students, no less concerned, find the clergy the most viable profession for ministry. But are there other jobs and/or professions for which seminary experience is an asset? And, indeed, how much of an asset is it for the professional ministry? Or, even more broadly, can one minister through an “establishment” job at all?

In the helping-relevant condition, the subject was given the parable of the Good Samaritan exactly as printed earlier in this article. Next, regardless of condition, all subjects were told You can say whatever you wish based on the passage. Because we are interested in how you think on your feet, you will not be allowed to use notes in giving the talk. Do you understand what you are to do? If not, the assistant will be glad to answer questions.

After a few minutes the assistant returned, asked if there were any questions, and then said Since they’re rather tight on space in this building, we’re using a free office in the building next door for recording the talks. Let me show you how to get there [draws and explains map on 3 5 card]. This is where Professor Steiner’s laboratory is. If you go in this door [points at map], there’s a secretary right here, and she’ll direct you to the office we’re using for recording. Another of Professor Steiner’s assistants will set you up for recording your talk. Is the map clear?

Variable 2: Hurry. In the high-hurry condition the assistant then looked at his watch and said, “Oh, you’re late. They were expecting you a few minutes ago. We’d better get moving. The assistant should be waiting for you so you’d better hurry. It shouldn’t take but just a minute.” In the intermediate-hurry condition he said, “The assistant is ready for you, so please go right over.” In the lowhurry condition he said, “It’ll be a few minutes before they’re ready for you, but you might as well head on over. If you have to wait over there, it shouldn’t be long.” The incident. When the subject passed through the alley, the victim was sitting slumped in a doorway, head down, eyes closed, not moving. As the subject went by, the victim coughed twice and groaned, keeping his head down. If the subject stopped and asked if something was wrong or offered to help, the victim, startled and somewhat groggy, said, “Oh, thank you [cough]. . . . No, it’s all right. [Pause] I’ve got this respiratory condition [cough]. . . . The doctor’s given me these pills to take, and I just took one. . . . If I just sit and rest for a few minutes I’ll be O.K. . . . Thanks very much for stopping though [smiles weakly].” If the subject


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persisted, insisting on taking the victim inside the building, the victim allowed him to do so and thanked him.

Helping ratings. The victim rates each subject on a scale of helping behavior, as follows: 0 = failed to notice the victim as possibly in need at all; 1 = perceived the victim as possibly in need but did not offer aid; 2 = did not stop but helped indirectly (e.g., by telling Steiner’s assistant about the victim); 3 = stopped and asked if victim needed help; 4 = after stopping, insisted on taking the victim inside and then left him.

The victim was blind to the personality scale scores and experimental conditions of all subjects. At the suggestion of the victim, another category was added to the rating scales, based on his observations of pilot subjects’ behavior: 5 = after stopping, refused to leave the victim (after 3–5 minutes) and/or insisted on taking him somewhere outside experimental context (e.g., for coffee or to the infirmary).

(In some cases it was necessary to distinguish Category 0 from Category 1 by the postexperimental questionnaire and Category 2 from Category 1 on the report of the experimental assistant.) This 6-point scale of helping behavior and a description of the victim were given to a panel of 10 judges (unacquainted with the research) who were asked to rank order the (unnumbered) categories in terms of “the amount of helping behavior displayed toward the person in the doorway.” Of the 10, 1 judge reversed the order of Categories 0 and 1. Otherwise there was complete agreement with the ranking implied in the presentation of the scale above.

The speech. After passing through the alley and entering the door marked on the map, the subject entered a secretary’s office. She introduced him to the assistant who gave the subject time to prepare and privately record his talk. Helping behavior questionnaire. After recording the talk, the subject was sent to another experimenter, who administered “an exploratory questionnaire on personal and social ethics.” The questionnaire contained several initial questions about the interrelationship between social and personal ethics, and then asked three key questions: (a) “When was the last time you saw a person who seemed to be in need of help?” (b) “When was the last time you stopped to help someone in need?” (c) “Have you had experience helping persons in need? If so, outline briefly.” These data were collected as a check on the victim’s ratings of whether subjects who did not stop perceived the situation in the alley as one possibly involving need or not. When he returned, the experimenter reviewed the subject’s questionnaire, and, if no mention was made of the situation in the alley, probed for reactions to it and then phased into an elaborate debriefing and discussion session.



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Debriefing In the debriefing, the subject was told the exact nature of the study, including the deception involved, and the reasons for the deception were explained. The subject’s reactions to the victim and to the study in general were discussed. The role of situational determinants of helping behavior was explained in relation to this particular incident and to other experiences of the subject. All subjects seemed readily to understand the necessity for the deception, and none indicated any resentment of it. After debriefing, the subject was thanked for his time and paid, then he left.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Overall Helping Behavior The average amount of help that a subject offered the victim, by condition, is shown in Table 5.1. The unequal-N analysis of variance indicates that while the hurry variable was significantly (F = 3.56, df = 2/34, p < .05) related to helping behavior, the message variable was not. Subjects in a hurry were likely to offer less help than were subjects not in a hurry. Whether the subject was going to give a speech on the parable of the Good Samaritan or not did not significantly affect his helping behavior on this analysis.

TABLE 5.1 Means and analysis of variance of graded helping responses M Hurry Message

Low

Medium

High

Summary

Helping relevant Task relevant Summary

3.800 1.667 3.000

2.000 1.667 1.818

1.000 .500 .700

2.263 1.333

Analysis of variance Source

SS

df

MS

F

Message (A) Hurry (B) AB Error

7.766 20.884 5.237 99.633

1 2 2 34

7.766 10.442 2.619 2.930

2.65 3.56* .89

Note: N = 40. *p < .05.


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Other studies have focused on the question of whether a person initiates helping action, rather than on scaled kinds of helping. The data from the preset study can also be analyzed on the following terms: Of the 40 subjects, 16 (40%) offered some form of direct or indirect aid to the victim (Coding Categories 2–5), 24 (60%) did not (Coding Categories 0 and 1). The percentages of subjects who offered aid by situational variable were, for low hurry, 63% offered help, intermediate hurry 45%, and high hurry 10%; for helping-relevant message 53%, task-relevant message 29%. With regard to this more general question of whether help was offered, an unequal-N analysis of variance (arc sine transformation of percentages of helpers, with low- and intermediate-hurry conditions pooled) indicated that again only the hurry main effect was significantly (F = 5.22, p < .05) related to helping behavior; the subjects in a hurry were more likely to pass by the victim than were those in less of a hurry. Reviewing the predictions in the light of these results, the second hypothesis, that the degree of hurry a person is in determines his helping behavior, was supported. The prediction involved in the first hypothesis concerning the message content was based on the parable. The parable itself seemed to suggest that thinking pious thoughts would not increase helping. Another and conflicting prediction might be produced by a norm salience theory. Thinking about the parable should make norms for helping salient and therefore produce more helping. The data, as hypothesized, are more congruent with the prediction drawn from the parable. A person going to speak on the parable of the Good Samaritan is not significantly more likely to stop to help a person by the side of the road than is a person going to talk about possible occupations for seminary graduates. Since both situational hypotheses are confirmed, it is tempting to stop the analysis of these variables at this point. However, multiple regression analysis procedures were also used to analyze the relationship of all of the independent variables of the study and the helping behavior. In addition to often being more statistically powerful because of the use of more data information, multiple regression analysis has an advantage over analysis of variance in that it allows for a comparison of the relative effect of the various independent variables in accounting for variance in the dependent variable. Also, multiple regression analysis can compare the effects of continuous as well as nominal independent variables on both continuous and nominal dependent variables (through the use of point biserial correlations, rpb) and shows considerable robustness to violation of normality assumptions (Cohen, 1965, 1968). Table 5.2 reports the results of the multiple regression analysis using both help versus no help and the graded helping scale as dependent measures. In this table the overall equation Fs show the F value of the entire regression equation as a particular row variable enters the equation. Individual variable Fs were computed with all five independent variables in the equation. Although the two situational variables, hurry and message condition, correlated more highly with the dependent measure than any of the religious dispositional variables, only hurry was a significant predictor of whether one will help (column 1) or of the overall amount

R

F

4.537* 1.495 .081 .003 .000

⫺.37 .25 ⫺.03 ⫺.03 .06

1. Hurryb 2. Messagec 3. Religion as quest 4. Religion as means 5. Religion as end

.37 .41 .42 .42 .42

5.884* 3.834* 2.521 1.838* 1.430

Note: N = 40. Helping is the dependent variable. df = 1/34. aIndividual variable correlation coefficient is a point biserial where appropriate. bVariables are listed in order of entry into stepwise regression equations. cHelping-relevant message is positive. *p < .05. **p < .01.

F

ra

Step

Step 1. Hurry 2. Message 3. Religion as quest 4. Religion as means 5. Religion as end

⫺.42 .25 ⫺.16 ⫺.08 ⫺.07

r

6.665* 1.719 1.297 .018 .001

F

Individual variable

Individual variable

Overall equation

Graded helping

Help vs. no help

TABLE 5.2 Stepwise multiple regression analysis

.42 .46 .50 .50 .50

R

F 8.196** 5.083* 3.897* 2.848* 2.213

Variable equation


“From Jerusalem to Jericho” 51


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of help given (column 2). These results corroborate the findings of the analysis of variance.2 Notice also that neither form of the third hypothesis, that types of religiosity will predict helping, received support from these data. No correlation between the various measures of religiosity and any form of the dependent measure ever came near statistical significance, even though the multiple regression analysis procedure is a powerful and not particularly conservative statistical test.

Personality Difference Among Subjects Who Helped To further investigate the possible influence of personality variables, analyses were carried out using only the data from subjects who offered some kind of help to the victim. Surprisingly (since the number of these subjects was small, only 16) when this was done, one religiosity variable seemed to be significantly related to the kind of helping behavior offered. (The situational variables had no significant effect.) Subjects high on the religion as quest dimension appear likely, when they stop for the victim, to offer help of a more tentative or incomplete nature than are subjects scoring low on this dimension (r = ⫺.53, p < .05). This result seemed unsettling for the thinking behind either form of Hypothesis 3. Not only do the data suggest that the Allport-Ross–based conception of religion as end does not predict the degree of helping, but the religion as quest component is a significant predictor of offering less help. This latter result seems counterintuitive and out of keeping with previous research (Batson, 1971), which found that this type of religiosity correlated positively with other socially valued characteristics. Further data analysis, however, seemed to suggest a different interpretation of this result. It will be remembered that one helping coding category was added at the suggestion of the victim after his observation of pilot subjects. The correlation of religious personality variables with helping behavior dichotomized between the added category (1) and all of the others (0) was examined. The correlation between religion as quest and this dichotomous helping scale was essentially unchanged (rpb = ⫺.54, p < .05). Thus, the previously found correlation between the helping scale and religion as quest seems to reflect the tendency of those who score low on the quest dimension to offer help in the added helping category. What does help in this added category represent? Within the context of the experiment, it represented an embarrassment. The victim’s response to persistent offers of help was to assure the helper he was all right, had taken his medicine, just needed to rest for a minute or so, and, if ultimately necessary, to request the helper 2 To check the legitimacy of the use of both analysis of variance and multiple regression analysis, parametric analyses, on this ordinal data, Kendall rank correlation coefficients were calculated between the helping scale and the five independent variables. As expected, ␶ approximated the correlation quite closely in each case and was significant for hurry only (hurry, ␶ = ⫺.38, p < .001).



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to leave. But the super helpers in this added category often would not leave until the final appeal was repeated several times by the victim (who was growing increasingly panicky at the possibility of the arrival of the next subject). Since it usually involved the subject’s attemping to carry through a preset plan (e.g., taking the subject for a cup of coffee or revealing to him the strength to be found in Christ), and did not allow information from the victim to change that plan, we originally labeled this kind of helping as rigid—an interpretation supported by its increased likelihood among highly doctrinal orthodox subjects (r = .63, p < .01). It also seemed to have an inappropriate character. If this more extreme form of helping behavior is indeed effectively less helpful, then the second form of Hypothesis 3 does seem to gain support. But perhaps it is the experimenters rather than the super helpers who are doing the inappropriate thing; perhaps the best characterization of this kind of helping is as different rather than as inappropriate. This kind of helper seems quickly to place a particular interpretation on the situation, and the helping response seems to follow naturally from this interpretation. All that can safely be said is that one style of helping that emerged in this experiment was directed toward the presumed underlying needs of the victim and was little modified by the victim’s comments about his own needs. In contrast, another style was more tentative and seemed more responsive to the victim’s statements of his need. The former kind of helping was likely to be displayed by subjects who expressed strong doctrinal orthodoxy. Conversely, this fixed kind of helping was unlikely among subjects high on the religion as quest dimension. These latter subjects, who conceived their religion as involving an ongoing search for meaning in their personal and social world, seemed more responsive to the victim’s immediate needs and more open to the victim’s definitions of his own needs.

CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS A person not in a hurry may stop and offer help to a person in distress. A person in a hurry is likely to keep going. Ironically, he is likely to keep going even if he is hurrying to speak on the parable of the Good Samaritan, thus inadvertently confirming the point of the parable. (Indeed, on several occasions, a seminary student going to give his talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan literally stepped over the victim as he hurried on his way!) Although the degree to which a person was in a hurry had a clearly significant effect on his likelihood of offering the victim help, whether he was going to give a sermon on the parable or on possible vocational roles of ministers did not. This lack of effect of sermon topic raises certain difficulties for an explanation of helping behavior involving helping norms and their salience. It is hard to think of a context in which norms concerning helping those in distress are more salient than for a person thinking about the Good Samaritan, and yet it did not significantly increase helping behavior. The results were in the direction suggested by the norm


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salience hypothesis, but they were not significant. The most accurate conclusion seems to be that salience of helping norms is a less strong determinant of helping behavior in the present situation than many, including the present authors, would expect. Thinking about the Good Samaritan did not increase helping behavior, but being in a hurry decreased it. It is difficult not to conclude from this that the frequently cited explanation that ethics becomes a luxury as the speed of our daily lives increases is at least an accurate description. The picture that this explanation conveys is of a person seeing another, consciously noting his distress, and consciously choosing to leave him in distress. But perhaps this is not entirely accurate, for, when a person is in a hurry, something seems to happen that is akin to Tolman’s (1948) concept of the “narrowing of the cognitive map.” Our seminarians in a hurry noticed the victim in that in the postexperiment interview almost all mentioned him as, on reflection, possibly in need of help. But it seems that they often had not worked this out when they were near the victim. Either the interpretation of their visual picture as a person in distress or the empathic reactions usually associated with that interpretation had been deferred because they were hurrying. According to the reflections of some of the subjects, it would be inaccurate to say that they realized the victim’s possible distress, then chose to ignore it; instead, because of the time pressures, they did not perceive the scene in the alley as an occasion for an ethical decision. For other subjects it seems more accurate to conclude that they decided not to stop. They appeared aroused and anxious after the encounter in the alley. For these subjects, what were the elements of the choice that they were making? Why were the seminarians hurrying? Because the experimenter, whom the subject was helping, was depending on him to get to a particular place quickly. In other words, he was in conflict between stopping to help the victim and continuing on his way to help the experimenter. And this is often true of people in a hurry; they hurry because somebody depends on their being somewhere. Conflict, rather than callousness, can explain their failure to stop. Finally, as in other studies, personality variables were not useful in predicting whether a person helped. But in this study, unlike many previous ones, considerable variations were possible in the kinds of help given, and these variations did relate to personality measures—specifically to religiosity of the quest sort. The clear light of hindsight suggests that the dimension of kinds of helping would have been the appropriate place to look for personality differences all along; whether a person helps is an instant decision likely to be situationally controlled. How a person helps involves a more complex and considered number of decisions, including the time and scope to permit personality characteristics to shape them.

References ALLEN, R. O., AND SPILKA, B. Committed and consensual religion. A specification of religionprejudice relationships. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1967, 6, 191–206.



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ALLPORT, G. W., AND ROSS, J. M. Personal religious orientation and prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1967, 5, 432–443. BATSON, C. D. Creativity and religious development: Toward a structural-functional psychology of religion. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Princeton Theological Seminary, 1971. BICKMAN, L. B. The effect of the presence of others on bystander intervention in an emergency. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, City College of the City University of New York, 1969. BROWN, L. B. Classifications of religious orientation. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1964, 4, 91–99. BURTON, R. V. The generality of honesty reconsidered. Psychological Review, 1963, 70, 481–499. COHEN, J. Multiple regression as a general data-analytic system. Psychological Bulletin, 1968, 70, 426–443. COHEN, J. Some statistical issues in psychological research. In B. B. Wolman (Ed.), Handbook of clinical psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965. DARLEY, J. M., AND LATANÉ, B. Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1968, 8, 377–383. FREUD, S. The future of an illusion. New York: Liveright, 1953. FUNK, R. W. Language, hermeneutic, and word of God. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. GLOCK, C. Y., AND STARK, R. Christian beliefs and anti-Semitism. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. HARTSHORNE, H., AND MAY, M. A. Studies in the nature of character. Vol. 1. Studies in deceit. New York: Macmillan, 1928. KORTE, C. Group effects on help-giving in an emergency. Proceedings of the 77th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, 1969, 4, 383–384. (Summary) ORNE, M. T. On the social psychology of the psychological experiment: With particular reference to demand characteristics and their implications. American Psychologist, 1962, 17, 776–783. ROSENBERG, M. J. When dissonance fails: On eliminating evaluation apprehension from attitude measurement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1965, 1, 28–42. SCHWARTZ, S. H., AND CLAUSEN, G. T. Responsibility, norms, and helping in an emergency. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1970, 16, 299–310. TOLMAN, E. C. Cognitive maps in rats and men. Psychological Review, 1948, 55, 189–208.


6 A Focus Theory of Normative Conduct: Recycling the Concept of Norms to Reduce Littering in Public Places Robert B. Cialdini, Raymond R. Reno, and Carl A. Kallgren

Past research has generated mixed support among social scientists for the utility of social norms in accounting for human behavior. We argue that norms do have a substantial impact on human action; however, the impact can only be properly recognized when researchers (a) separate two types of norms that at times act antagonistically in a situation—injunctive norms (what most others approve or disapprove) and descriptive norms (what most others do)—and (b) focus Ss attention principally on the type of norm being studied. In five natural settings, focusing Ss on either the descriptive norms or the injunctive norms regarding littering caused Ss littering decisions to change only in accord with the dictates of the then more salient type of norm.

Although social norms have a long history within social psychology, support for the concept as a useful explanatory and predictive device is currently quite mixed. Some researchers have used and championed the concept as important to a proper understanding of human social behavior (e.g., Berkowitz, 1972; Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975; McKirnan, 1980; Pepitone, 1976; Sherif, 1936; Staub, 1972; Triandis, 1977). Others have seen little of value in it, arguing that the concept is vague and overly general, often contradictory, and ill-suited to empirical testing (e.g., Darley and Latané, 1970; Krebs, 1970; Krebs and Miller, 1985; Marini, 1984). In

Reprinted with permission of the authors and The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 58, No. 1, 1973. Copyright © 1973 by the American Psychological Association. The authors thank Lisa Cramer, Cathy Daly, Ann Hazan, Bethel Kaminski, and Kim Whiting for their help in conducting Study 5, which served as the master’s thesis for Raymond R. Reno.


A Focus Theory of Normative Conduct

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addition, a parallel controversy has developed within academic sociology where ethnomethodological and constructionist critics have faulted the dominant normative paradigm of that discipline (Garfinkel, 1967; Mehan and Wood, 1975). The effect of these criticisms has been positive in pointing out problems that must be solved before one can have confidence in the utility of normative explanations. One such problem is definitional. Both in common parlance and academic usage, norm has more than one meaning (Shaffer, 1983). When considering normative influence on behavior, it is crucial to discriminate between the is (descriptive) and the ought (injunctive) meaning of social norms, because each refers to a separate source of human motivation (Deutsch and Gerard, 1955). The descriptive norm describes what is typical or normal. It is what most people do, and it motivates by providing evidence as to what will likely be effective and adaptive action: “If everyone is doing it, it must be a sensible thing to do.” Cialdini (1988) has argued that such a presumption offers an information-processing advantage and a decisional shortcut when one is choosing how to behave in a given situation. By simply registering what most others are doing there and by imitating their actions, one can usually choose efficiently and well. Researchers have repeatedly found that the perception of what most others are doing influences subjects to behave similarly, even when the behaviors are as morally neutral as choosing a consumer product (Venkatesan, 1966) or looking up at the sky (Milgram, Bickman, and Berkowitz, 1969). The injunctive meaning of norms refers to rules or beliefs as to what constitutes morally approved and disapproved conduct. In contrast to descriptive norms, which specify what is done, injunctive norms specify what ought to be done. That is, rather than simply informing one’s actions, these norms enjoin it through the promise of social sanctions. Because what is approved is often what is typically done, it is easy to confuse these two meanings of norms. However, they are conceptually and motivationally distinct, and it is important for a proper understanding of normative influence to keep them separate, especially in situations where both are acting simultaneously. A second source of confusion surrounding the concept of social norms is that, although they are said to characterize and guide behavior within a society, they should not be seen as uniformly in force at all times and in all situations. That is, norms should motivate behavior primarily when they are activated (i.e., made salient or otherwise focused on); thus, persons who are dispositionally or temporarily focused on normative considerations are most likely to act in norm-consistent ways (Berkowitz, 1972; Berkowitz and Daniels, 1964; Gruder, Romer, and Korth, 1978; Miller and Grush, 1986; Rutkowski, Gruder, and Romer, 1983; Schwartz and Fleishman, 1978). Of course, salience procedures should be effective for both descriptive and injunctive norms. In fact, in situations with clear-cut descriptive and injunctive norms, focusing individuals on is versus ought information should lead to behavior change that is consistent only with the now more salient type of norm. One purpose of this research was to test this assertion as it applies to individuals’ decisions to litter in public places. The choice of littering behavior for this study occurred for several reasons: (a) it provides a clearly observable action that


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is governed by a widely held injunctive norm (Bickman, 1972; Heberlein, 1971; Keep America Beautiful, Inc., 1968) and (b) it constitutes a growing social problem of considerable aesthetic, financial, and health-related costs to the culture. In California alone, for example, litter has increased by 24% over a recent span of 15 years, requiring $100 million annually in cleanup costs (California Waste Management Board, 1988) and posing health threats to humans and wildlife through water pollution, fire hazards, rodent and insect infestations, highway accidents, and thousands of injuries suffered from discarded cans and broken bottles (Geller, Winett, and Everett, 1982). Thus, a better understanding of the normative factors moderating deliberate littering would be of both conceptual and practical value. A common finding in the literature on littering is that the act is significantly more likely in a littered setting than in a clean setting (e.g., Finnie, 1973; Geller, Witmer, and Tuso, 1977; Heberlein, 1971; Krauss, Freedman, and Whitcup, 1978; Reiter and Samuel, 1980). Although this finding is congruent with the normative view that, in most settings, individuals tend to act in accordance with the clear behavioral norm there (Krauss et al., 1978), it is also consistent with other motivational accounts. For example, it might be argued that the tendency to litter more in a littered environment is due to simple imitation. Or, it might be argued that individuals are more likely to litter into a littered environment because they perceive that their litter will do less damage to the state of the environment than if it were clean.

STUDY 1 In our first experiment, subjects were given the opportunity to litter into either a previously clean or a fully littered environment after witnessing a confederate who either littered into the environment or walked through it. By varying the state of the environment (clean vs. littered), we sought to manipulate the perceived descriptive norm for littering in the situation. By manipulating whether the confederate dropped litter into the environment, we sought to affect the extent to which subjects were drawn to focus attention on the state of the environment and, consequently, on the relevant descriptive norm there. We had two main predictions: First, we expected that subjects would be more likely to litter into an already littered environment than into a clean one. This expectation is consistent with the findings of prior research on littering (e.g., Krauss et al., 1978; Reiter and Samuel, 1980) and with the view that, in most settings, individuals are at least marginally aware of the existing norms and tend to act in accordance with them. Second, and more important, we expected the effect of the descriptive norm for littering in the situation (as indicated by the state of the environment) to be significantly enhanced when subjects’ attention was drawn to the environment by a littering other. This expectation was predicated on considerable prior evidence (see Fiske and Taylor, 1984, for a review) indicating that substantial psychological impact can result from salience procedures involving simple shifts in the visual prominence of stimulus information, including



59

normative information (Feldman, Higgins, Karlovac, and Ruble, 1976; Ferguson and Wells, 1980; Manis, Dovalina, Avis, and Cardoze, 1980; Ruble and Feldman, 1976; Trope and Ginnosar, 1986). Specifically, then, we predicted an interaction such that subjects who saw the confederate litter into a fully littered environment would litter more than those who saw no such littering; whereas subjects who saw the confederate litter into a clean environment would litter less than those who saw no such littering. Should we obtain this interaction, we would have good support for our focus model of normative conduct. It should be noted that the second component of this predicted interaction adds important conceptual weight to our test in that it is contrary to what would be anticipated by rival accounts. It is opposite to what would be expected if subjects were motivated simply by a greater reluctance to litter into a clean versus littered environment because of the greater relative damage to the respective environments that such littering would cause; by that account, subjects should be more likely to litter after observing littering in a clean environment because the environment will have already been damaged. Similarly, the second component of our predicted interaction pits the norm focus/salience interpretation against a straightforward imitation formulation, in which an unpunished litterer would be expected to increase the littering tendencies of observers in either type of environment. By postulating that a littering other will concentrate attention on evidence of what the majority of people have done, thereby highlighting normative considerations, only the (descriptive) norm focus/salience account predicts that observed littering will reduce subsequent littering in a clean environment.

METHOD Subjects and Procedure Norm salience. Subjects were 139 visitors to a university-affiliated hospital who were returning to their cars in an adjacent, multilevel parking garage during the daylight hours of 5 days within a period of 8 consecutive days. Approximately 5 s after emerging from an elevator, subjects encountered an experimental confederate of college age walking toward them. In half of the instances, the confederate appeared to be reading a large, 21.6 35.6 cm (81⁄2 14 in.) handbill, which he or she dropped into the environment approximately 4.5 cm (5 yd) before passing the subjects (high norm salience). A second confederate judged whether a subject had noticed the littering incident and, consequently, had deflected his or her attention at least momentarily to the parking garage floor. The great majority (93%) were judged to have done so, and only they were examined as to their subsequent littering behavior. In the other half of the instances, the confederate merely walked past the subject without carrying a handbill, so as to provide an equivalent degree of social contact (low norm salience).


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Existing descriptive norm. For some of the subjects, the floor of the parking structure had been heavily littered by the experimenters with an assortment of handbills, candy wrappers, cigarette butts, and paper cups (existing prolittering norm). For the remaining subjects, the area had been cleaned of all litter (existing antilittering norm). The state of the environment (littered or clean) was alternated in 2-hr blocks, with the initial state determined randomly at the start of each day. On arriving at their cars, subjects encountered a large handbill that was tucked under the driver’s side windshield wiper so as to partially obscure vision from the driver’s seat. The handbill, identical to that dropped by the confederate, carried a stenciled message that read, “THIS IS AUTOMOTIVE SAFETY WEEK. PLEASE DRIVE CAREFULLY.” A similar handbill had been placed on all other cars in the area as well. Measure of littering. From a hidden vantage point, an experimenter noted the driver’s sex, estimated age, and whether the driver littered the handbill. Littering was defined as depositing the handbill in the environment outside of the vehicle. Because there were no trash receptacles in the area, all subjects who failed to litter did so by taking and retaining the handbill inside their vehicles before driving away.

Analyses Analyses in this and subsequent studies were conducted using the SPSS-X loglinear program, wherein tests for effects within dichotomous data are examined through the nesting of hierarchical models. This technique allows the testing of individual parameters by comparing the differences in the likelihood ratio chi-square of a pair of nested models. The differenced likelihood ratio is reported as a chisquare.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Gender and age differences in littering have sometimes been found in past research (see Geller et al., 1982, for a review). Therefore, before proceeding to tests of our theoretical hypotheses, we explored the data for gender or age differences. None were found; consequently, neither variable was included in subsequent analyses. Figure 6.1 depicts the amount of littering that occurred in each of the four experimental conditions. Loglinear analysis of those data produced a set of results that conforms to that predicted by our norm focus model. First, as expected, there was a main effect for the existing descriptive norm, in that subjects littered more in a littered environment than in a clean environment (41% vs. 11%), 2(1, N = 139) = 17.06, p < .001. Second, this effect occurred to a much greater extent under conditions of high norm salience, when subjects’ attention was drawn to the existing de-



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scriptive norm for the environment. That is, the size of the existing descriptivenorm effect when the confederate littered (6% vs. 54%), 2(1, N = 55) = 16.52, p < .001, was significantly greater than when the confederate did not litter (14% vs. 32%), 2(1, N = 84) 3.99, p < .05; the resultant interaction was tested as a planned comparison that proved highly reliable, 2(1, N = 139) = 20.87, p < .001. The significant interaction provides confirmation of our hypothesis that procedures designed to shift attention within a setting to just one type of operative norm—in this case, the descriptive norm—will generate behavior change that is consistent only with that type of norm. Apparently, this is so even when the behavior in question is governed by an injunctive norm—in this case, the antilittering norm—that is strongly and widely held in the society (Bickman, 1972; Heberlein, 1971; Keep America Beautiful, Inc., 1968). The pattern of results also supported the directional predictions made from our model. That is, under conditions of high (descriptive) norm salience, subjects littered more in a littered environment (54% vs. 32%) but less in a clean one (6% vs. 14%), although neither simple effect was statistically significant, 2s = 2.76 and 1.18, respectively. It is this latter finding, showing the least littering among subjects in the high norm salience/clean environment condition, that seems the most provocative of our study and, therefore, worthy of pursuit. After all, from an applied standpoint, we should be principally interested in strategies for litter abatement. Moreover, the fact that the least littering occurred among subjects who observed prior littering into a clean environment is of considerable conceptual interest, as it supports norm focus predictions over those that spring from a straightforward imitation or environmental damage account. Good reason exists, however, for caution in drawing strong conceptual conclusions from this finding. Although part of a theoretically

High norm salience (confederate littered) Low norm salience (confederate walked by) 60

54%

Littering

50 40 32%

30 20

14%

10

6%

N=

(31) (50) Antilittering norm (clean environment)

(24) (34) Pro-littering norm (littered environment)

FIGURE 6.1 Percentages of subjects littering as a function of norm salience, and the direction of the descriptive norm regarding littering: Study 1.


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predicted, significant interaction, the drop in littering due to high norm salience in the clean environment was far from significant by itself. Of course, this lack of significance might well have occurred because of a floor effect, owing to the low level of littering (14%) in the low norm salience/clean environment condition; nonetheless, in the interest of enhanced statistical confidence, a replication seemed warranted.

STUDY 2 In planning to replicate and extend our initial study, we recognized a pair of testable implications that flowed from our earlier analysis. First, consistent with the outcomes of Study 1, a subject who witnessed evidence of littering in an otherwise clean environment should litter less as a result; however, the evidence would not have to take the form, as it did in Study 1, of observed littering action. That is, the consequence of such action—a single piece of litter lying in an otherwise clean environment—should have the same effect, because of its conspicuousness, by drawing attention to an environment whose descriptive norm (except for one aberrant litterer) was clearly antilitter. Second, as the amount of litter increases progressively in a setting, so should the likelihood that a subject will litter into it because, by definition, that litter will change the descriptive norm for the setting. The upshot of this pair of implications of our normative analysis is a nonintuitive prediction: The likelihood that an individual will litter into an environment bearing various pieces of perceptible, extant litter will be described by a checkmarkshaped function. Little littering should occur in a clean environment; still less should occur with a sole piece of litter in an otherwise clean environment, but progressively greater littering should occur as litter accumulates and the descriptive norm for the situation changes from antilitter to prolitter.

METHOD Subjects and Procedure Subjects were 358 visitors to an amusement park in a large southwestern city during the evening hours of a pair of weekends in early summer. Immediately before turning a particular corner on a park walkway, subjects encountered a collegeage experimental confederate passing out handbills that read “DON’T MISS TONIGHT’S SHOW,” which referred to an entertainment program sponsored by the park on weekend nights. The confederate was instructed to give a handbill, at 1-min intervals, to the first passing adult walking alone or to one adult (the physically closest) in the first passing group. On turning the walkway corner, subjects, who were no longer visible to the confederate, faced a path of approximately 55 m (60 yd) from which no exit was possible except at its ends.



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State of the environment. All litter had been removed from the path except for varying numbers of handbills of the sort that subjects had just been given by a confederate. Depending on the experimental condition, the path contained 0, 1, 2, 4, 8, or 16 handbills that were visible from the path entrance. Measurement of littering. Because no litter receptacles were available on the path, a subject who deposited a handbill into the environment at any point along the path’s length was considered a litterer. Subjects’ littering behavior was covertly observed by a hidden, second experimental confederate, who also timed subjects’ latency to litter (failure to litter was given a score of 100 s) and who removed any newly littered handbills from the path. On exiting the path, subjects turned a corner to find a pair of previously unseen litter receptacles; virtually all subjects who had not littered to that point dropped their handbills into one of the receptacles.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION As in Study 1, we first examined the littering data for age and gender differences. No significant effects were obtained because of subject age. However, we did find a significant tendency for men to litter more frequently than women (31% vs. 19%), 2(1, N = 358) = 7.41, p < .01. Figure 6.2 depicts the percentage of litterers in each of the experimental conditions of Study 2. The data pattern closely reflects the predicted checkmark shape of our normative analysis. The checkmark function hypothesis was tested in a twostep process. First, we constructed a planned comparison using trend weights that

41%

Littering

40

40%

30 23% 20% 20

18% 10%

10

0

N = (60)

1

2

4

8

16

(59)

(59)

(60)

(60)

(60)

Number of pieces of litter in environment FIGURE 6.2 Percentages of subjects littering as a function of the number of pieces of litter in the environment: Study 2.


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Conformity and Obedience 100 Mean time to litter (measured in seconds)

92 90 84

86

81

80 70 68

70 60

0

N = (60)

1

2

4

8

16

(59)

(59)

(60)

(60)

(60)

Number of pieces of litter in environment FIGURE 6.3 Mean latency to litter as a function of the number of pieces of litter in the environment: Study 2.

modeled the checkmark shape (2, 4, 1, 1, 2, 4). It proved significant, 2(1, N = 358) = 21.80, p < .01. A second planned comparison was then performed to test whether a difference in littering occurred between the zero littering condition and the one-piece-of-environmental-litter condition. No significant difference was found, 2(1, N = 229) = 1.64, p < .20. Comparable analyses were conducted on the latency to litter data shown in Figure 6.3. As with frequency to litter, the first contrast proved significant, F(1, 352) = 20.65, p < .01, whereas the second did not (F < 1). There was no significant interaction between any of these contrasts and gender.

STUDY 3 Even though the general form of the findings of Study 2 confirmed our predictions, one crucial feature of the results offered only ambiguous support. The hypothesized decline in littering from the clean environment condition to the one-piece-oflitter condition of the study, although present (18% vs. 10%), was not conventionally significant, allowing the possibility that it may have been the overall linearity of the checkmark pattern, rather than its elbow-like bend, that accounted for the significance of our general planned comparison. This ambiguity is especially frustrating because, as in Study 1, it appears that a floor effect in the data may have prevented a clear demonstration of reduced littering under the circumstances predicted by our formulation. It is difficult to generate significantly less littering than that of a clean environment when the clean environment generates so little littering itself.



65

Consequently, we decided to conduct a conceptual replication of the theoretically relevant conditions of Study 2 that was designed to overcome the floor-effect problem. One way to deal with a floor effect of the sort that faced us is to increase the statistical power associated with our significance tests by increasing the number of subjects run in each condition. Thus, we used an experimental setting that would allow us to record the littering decisions of large numbers of subjects in a relatively short period of time. Additionally, in an attempt to sharpen the impact of our single-piece-of-litter manipulation, we chose a more conspicuous single piece of litter than we had used in Study 2. Specifically, subjects were college dormitory residents who found a public service flier in their mailboxes. The environment in front of the mailboxes had been arranged so that it contained (a) no litter, (b) one piece of highly conspicuous litter (a hollowed-out, end piece of watermelon rind), or (c) a large array of various types of litter, including the watermelon rind. The dependent variable was subjects’ tendencies to litter with the fliers. On the basis of our normative analysis and the pattern of results of Studies 1 and 2, we made a pair of predictions. First, we anticipated that subjects would litter more into a fully littered environment than into a clean one. Second, we expected that they would litter least into an otherwise clean environment that contained a single, attention-focusing piece of litter.

METHOD Subjects Subjects were 484 residents of a densely populated, high-rise women’s dormitory on the campus of a large state university.

Procedure The residents’ mailboxes were located in rows at one corner of the dormitory’s main lobby. The mailbox area was cut off visually from most of the lobby by a translucent partition. Once past the partition, subjects encountered an open area that fronted the mailboxes. During a 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. schoolday period, residents who opened their mailboxes to find a public service flier placed there as part of the experiment were counted as subjects, provided that no one else was simultaneously in the area getting her mail. Depending on the experimental condition, subjects passing through the open area in front of their mailboxes encountered an environment that contained no litter or a single piece of litter (a hollowed-out, heel section of watermelon rind), or a large number of pieces of litter of various kinds (e.g., discarded fliers, cigarette butts, paper cups, candy wrappers, and soft drink cans), including the watermelon rind. A subject was considered to have littered if she deposited the flier anywhere


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in the environment (all waste containers had been removed) before exiting the lobby onto an elevator or through a set of doors leading to the campus. Of those subjects who littered, the great majority were observed by an unobtrusively placed experimenter to do so in the area in front of the mailboxes.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION The percentages of littering in the three experimental conditions are presented in Figure 6.4. Their pattern accords well with predictions based on our normative perspective; indeed, the expected quadratic trend was highly significant, 2(1, N = 484) = 23.12, p < .001. Moreover, planned contrast tests of our two experimental predictions were supportive at conventional levels of significance. First, subjects were more likely to litter into a fully littered environment than into an unlittered one (26.7% vs. 10.7%), 2(1, N = 291) = 12.62, p < .001. Second, subjects were less likely to litter into an environment when it contained a single, salient piece of litter than when it was unlittered (3.6% vs. 10.7%), 2(1, N = 335) = 6.79, p < .01.

Theoretical Implications To this point, we have reported data from three experiments in three different natural settings that seem to converge sufficiently to allow the generation of statements about the conceptual and pragmatic value of those data. On the conceptual side, it appears that norms can be influential in directing human action; however,

30 26.7%

Littering

25 20 15

10.7%

10 3.6% 5

Clean

N=

(149)

Single piece of litter (193)

Fully littered (142)

State of the environment FIGURE 6.4 Percentages of subjects littering as a function of the amount of litter in the environment: Study 3.



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in keeping with the spirit of prior criticism of normative explanations, it is necessary for norm theorists to be specific about both the type of norm (injunctive or descriptive) thought to be acting in a situation and about the conditions under which it is likely to act. Distinguishing between injunctive and descriptive norms is crucial, because both types can exist simultaneously in a setting and can have either congruent or contradictory implications for behavior. For example, in Study 1 we showed that through procedures designed to highlight differing descriptive norms, we could enhance or undermine compliance with the societywide injunctive norm against littering. Such a finding should not be interpreted to mean that descriptive norms are, in this instance or in general, more powerful than injunctive norms. Rather, it is the differential focusing of attention on one or the other sort of norm that is the key. Indeed, even within the same type of norm, it seems to be the case from our findings that focus of attention is an important component. In all three experiments, exposing subjects to a single piece of litter in an otherwise clean environment—a procedure designed to draw subjects’ attention to what most people had done in the setting (i.e., the descriptive norm)—reduced littering there.

Practical Applications Because littering is a social problem, it is appropriate to consider the potential practical applications of our data as well. The finding of greatest applied value appears to be that subjects in three different settings littered least after encountering a single piece of litter in an otherwise unlittered place. At first glance, such a result might seem to suggest that individuals seeking to retard the accumulation of litter in a particular environment might affix a single, prominent piece of litter there. On closer consideration, however, it becomes clear that such an approach would be inferior to beginning with a totally clean environment. Examination of Figures 6.2 and 6.3, showing the average likelihood and latency of littering among subjects in our amusement park study, illustrates the point. Subjects who encountered a perfectly clean environment tended not to litter there, resulting in long delays before anyone despoiled it with a handbill. Once a single handbill appeared in the setting, subjects were even less likely to litter, generating even longer latencies before the second piece of litter appeared. At that point, with two pieces of litter visible in the environment, the descriptive norm began to change, and subjects’ reluctance to litter into the setting began to deteriorate steadily, leading to shorter and shorter littering latencies with increasing accumulations of litter. Anyone wishing to preserve the state of a specific environment, then, should begin with a clean setting so as to delay for the greatest time the appearance of two pieces of litter there, because those two pieces of litter are likely to begin a slippery-slope effect that leads to a fully littered environment and to a fully realized perception that “everybody litters here.” This logic further suggests that environments will best be able to retard littering if they are subjected to frequent and thorough litter pickups that return them to the optimal litter-free condition.


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In considering the practical implications of our data, we recognized a weakness in our decision to focus subjects’ attention on the descriptive rather than injunctive norm for littering: Procedures that focus subjects on the descriptive norm will only reduce littering when the environment is wholly or virtually unspoiled. Indeed, as was suggested in the data of Study 1, a descriptive norm focus when the environment is substantially littered will tend to increase littering there—hardly a desirable outcome for any but theory-testing purposes. A descriptive norm-focusing procedure, then, should only have socially beneficial effects in environments that do not need much help. The circumstances are different, however, when the injunctive norm is made salient and when, consequently, individuals are focused on what people typically approve and disapprove rather than on what they typically do in a situation. By making the injunctive norm against littering more prominent, we should expect reduced littering even in a heavily littered environment. A test of this hypothesis seemed instrumental to a pair of potentially valuable goals. First, on the practical level, it might establish norm focus procedures that could be used for litter abatement in a variety of environments. Second, on the conceptual level, it would generate evidence for or against our contention that focusing attention on either is or ought information will lead to behavior change that is consistent only with the now more salient type of norm; to this point in the research program, we had examined only half of that contention by concentrating just on descriptive norms.

STUDY 4 Recall that in Study 1, we argued that a confederate’s act of dropping a flier into the environment would draw subjects’ attention to that environment and to clear evidence (that we had manipulated) concerning whether people typically littered there. In this way, we sought to manipulate focus of attention to the existing descriptive norm regarding littering in the setting. Presumably, if instead the environment were to give clear evidence of what is societally approved or disapproved there, the same attention-focusing device would function as an injunctive norm activator, because societally based approval or disapproval is the distinguishing characteristic of injunctive norms (Birnbaum and Sagarin, 1976; Marini, 1984; Sherif and Sherif, 1969). The question of what clear approval/disapproval cue could be placed effectively in a natural environment to test our formulation was answered serendipitously while conducting Study 1. That study was run in a parking garage whose walls rose only halfway from the floor to the roof at each level. On one especially windy day, the litter we had distributed all around the garage floor in the fully littered environment condition was blown against an inside wall, as if someone had swept it there in a neat line. When a confederate dropped a handbill into that environment, virtually no subjects littered, whereas, on previous days the majority of subjects in that experimental condition had littered. In the course of puzzling over the discrepancy,



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we realized that the littering tendency of windy-day subjects may have declined when attention was called to the considerable litter in the environment because that litter gave the (mistaken) impression of having been swept—a clear disapproval cue. Armed with this potential insight, we decided to conduct a partial replication and extension of Study 1, in which subjects saw a confederate who either did or did not drop a handbill into an environment that contained a large amount of either swept or unswept litter. In the case of unswept litter, we expected to replicate the data pattern of Study 1 for the comparable experimental cells; that is, we anticipated that by dropping a handbill, the confederate would focus subjects’ attention on the environment and its evidence that people typically litter there, which should cause littering to increase. By dropping a handbill into a setting where prior litter had been swept (into piles), we anticipated that the confederate would once again focus subjects’ attention on the environment. But in this instance, subjects would encounter a mixed message, composed of a descriptive norm cue (abundant litter) that would incline them toward littering and an injunctive norm cue (swept litter) that would incline them against it. Accordingly, we predicted that the difference in littering found in the unswept conditions would be reversed or at least reduced. Statistically, then, we expected an interaction between our two independent variables of whether a confederate dropped a handbill into the environment (high or low norm salience) and whether the environment contained swept or unswept litter (presence or absence of an injunctive norm cue). Furthermore, we expected a specific form for that interaction, such that any difference in littering found between the swept and unswept litter conditions under low-norm salience procedures would be significantly enhanced under high-norm salience procedures. That is, it was our belief that, under the low salience conditions, the normative forces present would be registered only minimally by subjects, resulting in only a minimal swept/ unswept difference. However, under high salience conditions with normative issues now focal, the effect would be magnified.

METHOD Subjects and Procedure Norm salience. Subjects were 127 visitors to a university-affiliated hospital during the late afternoon and early evening hours of 6 days within a 13-day period. They underwent the same norm salience procedures as subjects in Study 1. That is, after emerging from a parking garage elevator, they encountered a college-age confederate who either dropped a distinctively colored handbill onto the floor in subjects’ view or simply walked past without carrying a handbill. Presence of an injunctive norm cue. For some subjects, the floor of the parking structure had been heavily littered by the experimenters, with the litter


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distributed across the environment in a fashion identical to that of Study 1. For the remaining subjects, all of this ambient litter had been swept into three large piles situated approximately 9 m (10 yd) apart in a line. In the high-norm salience/swept litter condition, the confederate dropped a handbill onto the floor approximately 1.5 m (5 ft) after passing the piles of litter. It was decided to have the confederate drop the handbill immediately in front, but in full view, of the litter piles to avoid an imitation explanation for our predicted effect. That is, if subjects had seen the confederate drop a handbill into one of the piles, then the predicted reduction in subjects’ subsequent littering could be interpreted as simple modeling of a decision not to litter. The swept or unswept litter conditions were run in alternating 2-hr blocks, with the first run of the day determined randomly.

Measure of littering. Littering was assessed as it was in Study 1.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION The influence of age and gender on littering rates was examined in an initial analysis; no significant effects occurred. Thus, these variables were not included in further analyses. The percentage of subjects who littered in each of the experimental conditions of our design is displayed in Figure 6.5. Those percentages occurred in a pattern consistent with the form of the interaction that we were led to anticipate from our norm focus formulation. Using loglinear analyses, we tested that interaction with a planned comparison that contrasted the difference between the two low-norm salience cells (29% vs. 33%), 2(1, N = 68) = 0.18, ns, against the difference beHigh norm salience (confederate littered) Low norm salience (confederate walked by) 60

Littering

50

45%

40 33%

29%

30 18%

20 10

N=

(31) (33) Pro-littering norm (unswept litter)

(28) (35) Conflicting norm (swept litter)

FIGURE 6.5 Percentages of subjects littering as a function of norm salience, and the configuration of litter in the environment: Study 4.



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tween the two high-norm salience cells (18% vs. 45%), 2(1, N = 59) = 5.19, p 6).


456

Prejudice

these scores are extremely disappointing to the students from this population. (See Footnote 5.)

Manipulation of target’s apparent sexual orientation. After administering a series of brief cognitive tasks designed to enhance the integrity of the cover story, the experimenter introduced the “social judgment tasks” by informing the participants that they would read some information about an individual and make some judgments about him or her. All participants read about a target named Greg, a 31-year old struggling actor living in the East Village in New York City. The information summarized Greg’s ambitions and career struggles and listed some of the many odd jobs that Greg had taken to pay the rent while he pursued his dream. The information continued by detailing a recent event in Greg’s life concerning landing “a fairly large part in a serious and rather controversial play directed by a young director.” Participants read that Greg was excited about the play and, in particular, about working with this young director. The director’s name was not mentioned, but gender pronouns indicated that the director was a man. The participants read that after the first week of rehearsals, Greg approached the director and asked him whether he wanted to get “a drink or something” with him after that night’s rehearsal so that they could talk about his role in some more depth. The story continued for a few paragraphs, summarizing the play’s opening and reviews, and it concluded with the information that while continuing to act in the play, Greg was writing his own play and had already gotten a commitment from the director to help him with it. The information about Greg was identical across conditions with the following exceptions. In the first sentence, the participants in the straight-implied condition read that Greg “has been living with his girlfriend, Anne, in a small apartment” for several years. Anne’s name was mentioned three more times in subsequent parts of the story about Greg, and there was one additional reference to his “girlfriend.” For the gayimplied condition, in the first sentence we replaced the word “girlfriend” with “partner” and dropped reference to Anne. Neither the partner’s name nor the partner’s gender was specified, and there were no subsequent references to this partner. Many of the details of the story about Greg (e.g., his living in the East Village, his caring “for a very close and very ill friend for the last 2 months of his friend’s life,” and his relationship with the director) were included to support the implication in the gay-implied condition that Greg was gay. Because each piece of information by itself very plausibly could describe a straight actor’s life, however, we believed that the participants who were introduced immediately to references to Greg’s girlfriend would not entertain the idea that Greg was gay.6 6 An obvious question is why we did not simply state that Greg was gay. Pilot testing of students from this campus revealed quite strongly that many of the participants became suspicious of the purpose of the study if they read that the target was gay. More than half of the participants told the experimenter that they suspected that the study concerned their stereotypes about gay men. When we eliminated any explicit reference to Greg’s sexuality, our pilot test participants did not raise these suspicions, although most of them did spontaneously entertain the thought that Greg was gay.


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Dependent measures. Participants used an 11-point scale ranging from 0 (not at all) to 10 (extremely) to rate Greg’s personality on each of 10 dimensions. Three of these (intelligent, funny, and boring) were included as stereotypeirrelevant fillers. The stereotype relevant traits included sensitive, assertive/ aggressive, considerate, feminine, strong, creative, and passive (see Fein, Cross, and Spencer, 1995; Kite and Deaux, 1987). Assertive/aggressive and strong were reverse-coded so that for each item, higher ratings indicated greater stereotyping. An index of this set of seven traits showed moderate internal reliability (Cronbach’s ␣ = .77). It may be worth noting that these traits, when taken out of a stereotyped context, are not necessarily negative and may indeed be rather positive. But to the extent that participants perceived these traits as more descriptive of a target if they thought that the target was gay than if they thought he was straight, this would indicate stereotyping, and the valence of these traits would be debatable. In addition, participants used the same 11-point scale to indicate the degree to which they would like Greg as a friend and the degree to which their own personality was similar to Greg’s. These measures, of course, were less ambiguous in terms of valence: Lower ratings on these two measures clearly indicated more negative feelings toward the target.

Results Recall that we predicted that if participants read information about a target that implied that he was gay, they would be more likely to evaluate this target consistently with the gay stereotype if they had received threatening, negative feedback about their performance on the intelligence test than if they had not received any threatening feedback. If the information about the target indicated that he was straight, however, the manipulation of feedback should not have had a strong effect on participants’ evaluation of the target. The results supported these predictions.

Stereotyping. A two-way ANOVA on the ratings of the target on the set of seven stereotype-relevant trait dimensions revealed a significant main effect for the manipulation of feedback, F(1, 57) = 11.3, p < .001, indicating that participants who had received negative feedback on the intelligence test rated the target more stereotypically (i.e., gave higher ratings on the stereotype-consistent items) than did participants who had not received any feedback. In addition, the ANOVA revealed a significant effect for the manipulation of the target’s apparent sexual orientation, F(1, 57) = 5.3, p < .03, indicating that participants who read information that implied that the target was gay rated him more stereotypically than if they read information suggesting that he was straight. Most important, the ANOVA revealed a significant interaction, F(1, 57) = 4.4, p < .05. As can be seen in Figure 32.2, and consistent with our predictions, participants who had received negative feedback and read information implying that the target was gay rated the target much more stereotypically than did participants in all other conditions,


458

Prejudice

Stereotypic trait ratings

7

Gay implied Straight implied

6

5

Neutral

Negative Feedback

FIGURE 32.2 Rating of target on stereotype-relevant traits as a function of feedback and implied sexual orientation of the target. Higher numbers indicate greater stereotyping.

t(57) = 4.1, p < .001. None of the other conditions differed significantly from each other (see Footnote 4). Although the stereotype-irrelevant traits were used as filler to make the participants less likely to be suspicious of the intent of our questions, we did conduct an ANOVA on the ratings concerning those traits. The independent variable did not have any significant effects on participants’ ratings of the target on any or all of these traits (all Fs < 1).

Liking and Similarity. The measure of stereotyping yielded results consistent with our predictions. But would self-esteem threat also make participants less willing to indicate that they would like the target as a friend or that their own personality was similar to the target’s? To address this question, we conducted an ANOVA on each of these measures. The ANOVA on participants’ ratings of the degree to which they would like the target as a friend revealed a significant main effect for the manipulation of feedback, F(1, 57) = 5.7, p < .03, indicating that participants who had received negative feedback on the intelligence test rated themselves as less inclined to like the target (M = 5.81) than did participants in the neutral condition (M = 6.87). The main effect for the manipulation of the information about the target’s apparent sexual orientation did not approach significance (F < 1), but the interaction between the two variables was significant, F(1, 57) = 4.1, p < .05. Participants who had received


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negative feedback on the intelligence test were significantly less inclined to like the target than were those who had not received the feedback, whether or not the target information suggested he was gay, but the interaction reflects the tendency for this difference to be greater in the gay-implied condition (Ms = 5.48 vs. 6.98) than in the straight-implied condition (Ms = 6.11 vs. 6.75). The ANOVA on participants’ ratings of how similar their own personality was to the target’s revealed a significant main effect for the manipulation of feedback, F(1, 57) = 5.3, p < .03, reflecting the tendency for participants to rate their personality as less similar to the target’s if they had received negative feedback on the intelligence test (M = 4.16) than if they had received no feedback (M = 5.33). The manipulation of information about the target’s sexual orientation did not have a significant effect (F < 1). More important, the independent variable produced a significant interaction, F(1, 57) = 4.1, p

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