Part IIIn my first post, I pointed out that in ambiguous situations, people will use feedback from each other to come to common agreement. This occurs even when agreement is not justified.Now, let us consider how people make decisions in the face of disagreement. Solomon Asch asked persons to make simple, easy judgements regarding the length of lines. In this experiment, four of the persons were told to make wrong judgements on some of the trials. Now, what would the fifth person do when four others disagreed with his own obvious perceptions. In about 2/3rd's of the cases, the person went along with the group rather than disagreeing.Implications: Four elders agree and one sees obvious problems with their decision. What is the fifth elder likely to do? Conform to the group. Now let us look at the role someone is given and how it affects their behavior. Phillip Zimbardo conducted a study where he asked one group of college students to play the role of prisoner in an actual jail and the other group to play the role of jailors. This study was to be conducted for a full week. After just three days, Zimbardo had to stop the experiment because the jailors were taking their role too seriously. They became oppressive and harsh and the rules of the game made this possible.
The prisoners became outraged and Zimbardo nearly had a riot on his hands.One very important fact should be kept in mind. The students were assigned their roled randomly, so the oppressive behaviour of the prison guards and the lashing out by the prisoners can not be accounted for by personality differences between the two groups. The behavioral differences are soley the result of the roles each group played.Implications: The role you are in greatly affects you. I have heard of factory workers who were promoted to the level of supervisor. Despite the fact that they were workers themselves at one time, some of them become very oppressive in their new role. The role of elder is not immune from this. Some nice publishers become oppressive elders. If the system, whether it is a factory or a religion does not anticipate this, have and build something into the system to deal with it they will have major problems on their hands.Next time: some shocking results on the subject of obedience to authority.
The prisoners became outraged and Zimbardo nearly had a riot on his hands.One very important fact should be kept in mind. The students were assigned their roled randomly, so the oppressive behaviour of the prison guards and the lashing out by the prisoners can not be accounted for by personality differences between the two groups. The behavioral differences are soley the result of the roles each group played.Implications: The role you are in greatly affects you. I have heard of factory workers who were promoted to the level of supervisor. Despite the fact that they were workers themselves at one time, some of them become very oppressive in their new role. The role of elder is not immune from this. Some nice publishers become oppressive elders. If the system, whether it is a factory or a religion does not anticipate this, have and build something into the system to deal with it they will have major problems on their hands.Next time: some shocking results on the subject of obedience to authority.