In 1963 Stanley Milgram reported that 26 of the 40 men in his first obedience study kept pressing switches up to 450 volts because a man in a gray lab coat told them to continue. The shocks were fake, but the participants didn't know that. Most people have heard that headline. Fewer know what happened when Milgram changed the setup, or how the bystander effect looks when researchers watch real street footage.
Conformity: two different reasons to go along
Conformity means shifting what you do or say to match a group. Researchers separate two motives.
- Informational influence: you think the group knows better. In the 1930s Muzafer Sherif showed people a still point of light in a dark room, which seems to move. Their estimates of the movement drifted toward a shared group answer. With no right answer to check, others became the evidence.
- Normative influence: you want to fit in. In Solomon Asch's line studies from the 1950s the right answer was obvious, yet roughly a third of answers on the test trials went along with a wrong majority.
Herbert Kelman (1958) added a useful split: compliance is agreeing in public while disagreeing in private, and internalization is actually changing your mind.
What made Asch's effect bigger or smaller
Asch ran many versions. Conformity rose as the unanimous majority grew to about three people, then barely increased. One other person breaking with the group cut conformity sharply, even when that person gave a different wrong answer. Writing answers privately also lowered it. The pressure came from unanimity and being watched, not from numbers alone.
The influence can run the other way, too. Serge Moscovici and colleagues (1969) found that a small minority who kept calling blue slides "green" shifted some majority answers, but only when the minority stayed consistent.
Obedience: why people followed orders
Obedience differs from conformity: the pressure is a direct order from someone with status. Milgram's later variations showed that it depended heavily on the situation:
- When the experimenter gave orders by phone, obedience fell sharply.
- When the learner was in the same room, or the teacher had to force the learner's hand onto a shock plate, fewer obeyed.
- When two other "teachers" (actors) refused, most participants refused too.
- In a run-down office instead of Yale, obedience was somewhat lower but still substantial.
Milgram's explanation was the agentic state: people stop seeing themselves as responsible and act as someone else's agent.
Bystanders: why groups sometimes don't help
Bibb Latané and John Darley proposed that helping takes five steps: notice the event, interpret it as an emergency, take responsibility, know what to do, and decide to act. A group can block any step. In their 1968 intercom study, students who believed they were the only one hearing a fellow student's seizure helped more often and faster than those who thought others could hear. That's diffusion of responsibility.
Common mix-ups
- Conformity is not obedience. Conformity is pressure from peers, usually unspoken. Obedience is an order from someone above you.
- Compliance is not agreement. Going along in public says nothing about what someone privately believes.
- The bystander effect is about each person. It says each individual is less likely to help in a group, not that groups never help.
Where the research is shaky
- Milgram. Gina Perry's 2012 work in Milgram's archives reported that experimenters sometimes went beyond the script and that some participants doubted the shocks were real. Jerry Burger's 2009 partial replication, stopped at 150 volts for ethics, found rates of continuing not significantly different from Milgram's. The core effect seems real; what it means is still debated.
- Asch. Bond and Smith's 1996 meta-analysis found that conformity in Asch-type studies varied by culture and had declined in US samples over time.
- Bystanders. A 2011 meta-analysis by Fischer and colleagues found the effect is weaker in clearly dangerous emergencies. Philpot and colleagues (2020) studied CCTV of real public conflicts in three countries and found that at least one bystander stepped in about 9 times in 10.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between conformity and obedience?
Conformity is changing your behavior to match peers, usually without being asked. Obedience is following a direct order from someone seen as an authority.
Has the Milgram experiment been replicated?
Partly. Burger's 2009 version stopped at 150 volts and found similar rates of continuing, but critics have questioned how the original was run and what it shows.
Is the bystander effect real?
Lab studies have found it many times, though it's weaker in dangerous emergencies. In real-world footage, someone in a group usually does help.
Why do people conform?
Mainly to be right when they're unsure (informational influence) or to be accepted by the group (normative influence).
Try it
Next time you're in a meeting or class and a question gets silence, count how long it takes before anyone speaks. Then ask yourself whether you held back because you agreed or because nobody else had spoken yet.