12.4 Conformity, Compliance, and Obedience — Why 65% Follow Dangerous Orders | Psychology 2e

• Learn about Asch's classic experiment on how individuals conform to group pressure.
• Understand how the desire to fit in drives conformity to group norms.
• Discover how believing the group has better information leads to conformity.
• Explore how group size, dissenters, and privacy impact conformity levels.
• Understand compliance as publicly agreeing with a request despite private disagreement.
• Learn about Milgram's controversial study on obedience to authority figures.
• Discover how authority's power and victim's humanity influence obedience.
• See how Milgram's findings are still relevant through a 2008 midwife study.
• Learn about groupthink, where harmony is prioritized over rational decision-making.
• Identify groupthink symptoms and strategies to prevent it in decision-making.
• Understand how group discussions can lead to more extreme initial attitudes.
• Learn about social traps where individual short-term gains cause long-term collective harm.
• Understand social loafing, where individuals exert less effort in group tasks.
• Explore methods to prevent social loafing and how groups can enhance performance on difficult tasks.
• Learn about deindividuation, the loss of self-awareness and accountability in a crowd.
• Ponder how social influence will evolve with remote work and online anonymity.
• Up next in “Psychology 2e — Full Course (OpenStax) | Intro Psychology Lectures”12.5 Prejudice and Discrimination — How Your Brain Engineers Bias | Psychology 2e

How much control do you really have over your own behavior? This lesson from Section 12.4 of Psychology 2e digs into the powerful social forces behind conformity, compliance, and obedience — from Solomon Asch's line-matching experiments to Stanley Milgram's shocking obedience studies. Along the way, you'll also explore what happens to decision-making and individual effort when people act as a group. In this video: • Asch's conformity experiments: why 76% of participants gave a wrong answer they could plainly see was wrong • Normative vs. informational social influence — fitting in vs. trusting the group's knowledge • Factors that raise or lower conformity: majority size, a single dissenter, and public vs. private responses • Milgram's obedience experiment and how changing authority or victim proximity drove compliance from 65% down to 23% • Groupthink symptoms (illusion of invincibility, self-censorship, quashing dissent) and how to prevent them • Group polarization as a real-life echo chamber, and social traps illustrated by the Cold War nuclear arms race • Social loafing on easy tasks vs. improved performance on difficult ones, plus deindividuation and the loss of individual accountability in crowds #OpenStax #Psychology #SocialPsychology #Conformity #Obedience OpenStax Content adapted from "OpenStax Psychology 2e", by OpenStax licensed under CC BY 4.0. Content based on Web Version: Apr 23, 2026. Read the textbook online https://openstax.org/details/books/psychology-2e Music first girl talking to me. by ikkun (ex. Barradeen) | https://soundcloud.com/ikkunwastaken Royalty Free Music by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons / Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en_US