Conformity, Obedience, and Rebellion
Sometime during March of earlier this year, I had found myself conducting a psychological research experiment which prompted the question: “Why do people obey — even when there are no clear set of rules or regulations in place in which they feel obligated to obey — and what can be said about the very few who do not?” My experiment had actually started out as a giveaway to show my appreciation for the people that follow my Tumblr blog and enjoy my content. One day, I had made a post on said blog that happened to blow up overnight — tens of thousands of people were “liking”, “replying”, and “reblogging” my post within mere hours. I saw this as an opportunity to do something nice for a random stranger, and thus announced that I would be doing a giveaway. The terms of this giveaway were as follows: whoever managed to get my post to 69,420 “notes” (“notes” being the total amount of likes, reblogs, and replies that a post on Tumblr has) and managed to take and send me an authentic screenshot of the posts notes at that number, would therefore be eligible to win the giveaway — the prize being anything that the winner wanted from their Amazon wishlist with a limit of up to $25. The announcement of the giveaway gained traction, and so did the amount of notes on my post.
That is, up until my post had almost reached 69,420 notes. A mere thousand or so away from the winning number, the post and it’s popularity had suddenly come to a screeching halt. The post that was once getting thousands of notes per day was now only getting a few hundred, if that, despite the post being so close to the lucky number. At first, I figured that people had simply lost interest or that my post happened to lose the right audience and thus it had died down. However, I realized that it was not because the post had simply died down for no reason or loss of interest, but instead it had done so because people had been eagerly awaiting the right moment to win, or that they were too scared to mess up their chances at winning, and thus held off on liking or reblogging my post until they felt was the right moment for them to do so. It was a form of a prisoner’s dilemma — everyone’s decision in that moment would determine who the winner would be. It stayed this way for a few days until someone — a 17 year old boy — had taken over my post and won the giveaway by “cheating”. He had deliberately liked, reblogged, and commented on my post a few hundred times until he reached the winning number, took a screenshot, and sent it to me as proof. I declared him the winner of my giveaway nonetheless, because he didn’t necessarily cheat; he followed my given rules and he was the only one out of tens of thousands of people to have noticed that I had never put any specifics or restrictions as to how one would be qualified to win my giveaway in my “rules”. I simply told people that should they reach the winning number, take a screenshot, and send it to me, that they would win my giveaway and their prize. I never told them that they couldn’t comment on or reblog the post more than once, or that there were any disqualifications towards winning.
So what does this say about the vast majority of people who obey arbitrary rules that sometimes don’t even exist, and what does this say about the very, very few who do not obey these rules — or go about finding a loophole around them to do as they please without technically breaking any rules? Well during the 1960’s, an American social psychologist by the name of Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to try and understand why people conform and why they obey — regardless of how cruel and inhumane the orders or rules may be given by those in positions of authority. The experiment consisted of Milgram conducting multiple variables in his research, which overall consisted of a group of male volunteers who were told they were to take the role of either a ‘learner’ or a ‘teacher’ who would then be paired with a ‘participant’ (unbeknownst to the volunteers, each of them were to take the role of the ‘teacher’ and the ‘participant’ they were paired with was actually a stooge pretending to be the participant). In each of the cases, the learner was taken to a separate room from the volunteer and strapped to a chair. The volunteers, or ‘teachers’, would then be required to test the learner by asking him a series of questions. Milgram, on the other hand, was issuing commands to the volunteers to issue an electric shock to the learner should they have gotten the answers to the questions wrong. In the room, there was a generator with switches that ranged from giving the learner a mild shock at 15v up to a deadly 450v (Milgram, S.).
Under the impression that these shocks had the potential to be very, very deadly, Milgram was surprised to find that when giving the command to issue the electrical shock to the learner, the volunteers obeyed nearly every time — even when the supposed learner was in great distress. When the volunteers questioned Milgram about his experiment, Milgram would insist that it was of importance to continue. A surprising 65% of these volunteers would go on to administer these shocks up to the deadliest volt of 450. Milgram found that there were a number of reasons as to why these volunteers would obey these commands, even if it caused harm or potentially death to fellow human being. Milgram had also identified three main factors as to why people don’t obey, which becomes interesting to note in the context of the experiment I had inadvertently conducted myself.
The first of the three factors was whether or not the experiment was conducted within a group. This indicated that people were more likely to resist obedience when they are in a group of people rather than on their own. In the case of my experiment, it involved tens of thousands of randomized people who had all obeyed my very vague commands seeking a reward for their supposedly good behavior. The 17-year-old boy, however, was the only one out of such a large number of people to stand up against obedience and, in turn, received his reward under fair circumstances.
The second factor as to whether or not people obeyed commands was if there was any resistance against the rules of my experiment and the rules of Milgram’s experiment to begin with. In the case of my own experiment, there had been little to no need for resistance in the first place — it was a harmless giveaway that I had done for the sake of being nice to a random stranger. There was no need for resistance, nor was there truly any need for much obedience, and nobody was being harmed — only rewarded for their active participation in my giveaway. A further research study conducted by Herbert Kelman in 1958 emphasized the notion that:
“Compliance can be said to occur when an individual accepts influence because he hopes to achieve a favorable reaction from another person or group. He adopts the induced behavior not because he believes in its content but because he expects to gain specific rewards or approval and avoid specific punishments or disapproval by conforming. Thus the satisfaction derived from compliance is due to the social effect of accepting influence (Kelman, H. C.).”
Compliance, as Kelman defines it, helps to explain why so many people had been conditioned to merely take the terms of my giveaway at face value and obey a set of arbitrary rules that were never established to begin with.
Finally, the third factor of Milgram’s experiment regarding as to who fails to obey rules is called ‘systematic processing’ — where individuals are more likely to go against a command, or in my case, find a loophole within my giveaway, if they are actually given the time to think about what it is that they are being asked to do. As my experiment had been conducted on a social media platform where individuals are constantly being flooded with other content in a split second, it is likely that all of those people had not truly taken the time to stop and think about the fact that I had never said that they couldn’t do what the 17-year-old boy had done in the end. The winner of my giveaway had been one of of ~69,200 people or so at the time to stop, think, and realize that there were many methods to receiving his reward and that I had never clarified that there were no rules against doing what he had ultimately done in the end.
