obedience to authority.

• how rules "work"
• Harold Garfinkel's "breeching" experiments
• why manners matter
• motive talk
• Joseph Hopper's "The Rhetoric of Motives in Divorce"
• lessons learned from excuse making
• Shlomo Hareli's "Excuses, emotions and in between"
• compliance
• reference groups
• persuasion, including the use of ideology and propaganda
• mass media and advertising

CLASSIC EXPERIMENTS IN OBEDIENCE AND THE POWER OF SITUATIONS

• Reflecting on the lessons from Stanley Milgram's obedience studies
• Resources on the experiment
• Summary table of the experiments
• And while you are reading, why not be listening to Professor Dan Wegner's "The Milgram Obedience Song"?
• Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment (which is still powerful after all these years)

Related resources:

Mental Health Net's "How dependent are we? What makes us so dependent?"--an overview of compliance and obedience with focus on individual-level predispositions

John Cialdini and Kelton Rhoads's "Social Influence at Work"

Many individuals are a tad uneasy in this era of video and movie cameras. Perhaps your father is continually pointing the camera at you and telling you to do something for the family anthology. You do something stupid, and for years afterward you cringe in embarrassment every time the tape is shown. In fact, the spectators of that captured moment may eventually include people you did not know at the time, such as new friends, one's future spouse, and perhaps even your children.

Why does one often feel awkwardness when one knows that one is being videotaped? Aren't other people always watching us and remembering what they see and hear? This is so, but the "video clips" that others have of you might be recorded over by subsequent events. In any case, the tapes are edited by perception and memory and are easily distorted.

Unlike the traditional photograph, the recorded self is accountable not only visually but auditorily, and over considerable periods as opposed to a fraction of a second. (This has had an interesting effect on the political process. Candidates, realizing that every utterance may be captured and available for replay if their actions veer from what they promise, have become more self-conscious, more guarded, and perhaps less willing to take chances.) We take on faith that what we see on television is fact, not some memory and interpretation by an eyewitness. So when we see and hear ourselves as others do--without the thoughts and feelings that, for us, were also part of the recorded situation--an uncomfortable detachment occurs. We see, for instance, how little of ourselves really "gets through," how little of the self-image that we thought we were transmitting was really being conveyed. By watching ourselves on television, we see the normally invisible qualities of ourselves: We did not appreciate how many "uhs" and "ums" had infected our speech; we did not know that we made so many goofy gestures and facial expressions when we talked; we did not know that this was the self that we were presenting to others.

People continually attempt to manage their self-image.  (It's worth noting how the word person derives from the Latin persona, meaning mask.) Teenage girls and boys, for instance, spend considerable time fixing their image so as to be appealing to others-- perhaps assuming others will give them the attention that they give themselves. Through designer jeans, serious expressions, gestures, joking behavior, and other devices, we present images of ourselves that we wish others to accept and to respect. With cosmetics, veils, sunglasses, and beards, we mask all or part of ourselves either to disguise ourselves or to compensate for feelings of powerlessness.

More significantly, impression management is a function of social setting. Erving Goffman portrays everyday interactions as strategic encounters in which one is attempting to "sell" a particular self-image--and, accordingly, a particular definition of the situation. He refers to these activities as "face-work." Beginning by taking the perspective of one of the interactants, and he interprets the impact of that person's performances on the others and on the situation itself. He considers being in wrong face, out of face, and losing face through lack of tact, as well as savoir-faire (diplomacy or social skill), the ways a person can attempt to save face in order to maintain self-respect, and various ways in which the person may harm the "face" of others through faux pas such as gaffes or insults. These conditions occur because of the existence of self presentational rules. These rules, in turn, are determined by how situations are defined. For instance, there is greater latitude in social situations than in task-oriented situations. Situations also dictate available roles and how much self-importance people can sustain.

In our post-industrial context, increasingly the work we do involves not only the manipulation of information but strategic interactions with others. With the expansion of the service sector has emerged a self-marketing industry. By the mid-1980s, the 1970's Winning by Intimidation had been replaced by winning through common courtesy, evidenced by the rise of etiquette consultants for corporate executives. Not surprisingly, increased self-consciousness has resulted, leading to greater caution and lesser spontaneity in everyday interactions. Also emerging on the social landscape are increasing numbers of a new social creature: social chameleons who strive to make the best impression they can in every situation (see Mark Snyder's Public Appearances, Private Reality and The Many Me's of the Self-Monitor).

Hugh Miller's "The Presentation of Self in Electronic Life: Goffman on the Internet"

YOU ARE WHAT YOU WEAR

As developed in our discussions of the body self, clothes make the person.  Here, in the context of presentations of self, we consider how clothing communicates individuals' positions within status hierarchies and their claims to social power and the deference of others.  Clothing also can carry political messages, such as when Gandhi pushed the production of unrefined cloth, or khadi, to symbolize the idea of Indian swadeshi, or self-reliance

Joanne Finkelstein's "Chic Theory"

The History of Costume by Braun and Schneider (1861-1880

Solemates: The Century in Shoes  In the 1400's, a popular form of shoes called "crakows" sported extremely long toes. The length of the toes, which could exceed 20 inches, indicated the social status of its wearer.

REPUTATIONS

The notion of reputation sheds further light on both how situations are framed and the social bases of identity. A reputation involves others' shared image of an individual and its associated esteem. Reputations, whether good or bad or deserved or not, filter how others interpret one's self presentations. Acts of kindness of a reputed SOB are, for instance, interpreted differently than are the same acts performed by a religious missionary. Enter matters of sincerity and deception, whether others "buy" one's performance. And from the perspective of one who knows his or her reputation, we can see how reputations can determine the range of selves that our actor can present to others, such as the presentations one must give to preserve one's "good name" or to restore a positive reputation that previously had been "lost."

Repcheck.com--Because Reputation Is Everything--"allows users to review, rate and search our database of people's reputations for both business and social purposes"

CREATING COLLECTIVE BONDS:
THE CASE OF SCHOOL SOLIDARITIES

It is certainly in the interest of universities to increase the bonds between their students. Consider the ways in which your college or university attempts to amplify the interpersonal attractions of its undergraduate population. Here at Trinity University we find:

• the admissions process--a ritual, in part, designed to make one value eventual acceptance;
• the homogeneity of the population in terms of social class, age, and academic ability;
• the three-year residency requirement, putting students together and thereby employing the power of proximity to create interpersonal attractions;
• plugging students into numerous relationships and groups that link them from small primary bonds (i.e., determination of first roommate, initially matched through questionnaires for establishing compatibility of backgrounds, interests, and lifestyles) to increasingly broader relationships: suitemates, dorm mates (and all first year students live in own dormitories, and then there are the wet and dry dorms of the oldest students), first-year mentor groups, academic cohort classmates (i.e., "Class of 2001;" in "Playfair" first year students become connected with their entire class; in past there were the freshman degradation rituals of upperclassmen, which put novices in "the same boat"), to the entire student body (i.e., the crowd dynamics of students cheering their university vs. others in intercollegiate contests--and having arch rivals certainly helps the collective ingroup-outgroup processes);
• existence of a spectrum of groups such that different ones exist for individuals' different selves and need-systems: e.g., volunteer groups for one's civic self; religious groups for one's spiritual self; sororal and fraternal organizations (whose hazing rituals enhance the importance people place on their memberships in said organizations: enter cognitive dissonance--"If I am putting up with this it must really be important to me!") and secret societies for one's social self; athletic and debate teams for one's competitive self; groups addressing individuals' needs for esteem, such as the various academic and civic honor societies; etc.
• involving students in attracting prospective candidates, university money drives, and in recruiting new faculty: Enter persuasion dynamics, whereby one persuades self by persuading others;
• linking current students with alumni and friends of the university (such as bringing together scholarship recipients with their benefactors), creating intergenerational relationships with others who likewise identify with and value their connection with the institution--and thereby learning that one's group membership is lifelong and not something temporary (physically dramatized by the existence of the class capsules in the library);
• numerous symbols by which one's institutional identification can be advertised to others: sweatshirts, auto decals, glassware, rings, etc.

Avoiding Columbines

Official Site of the Jigsaw Classroom--"a cooperative learning technique that reduces racial conflict among school children, promotes better learning, improves student motivation, and increases enjoyment of the learning experience," based on technique developed in 1970s by Elliot Aronson and his University of Texas students

GROUP DYNAMICS

Thus far in these pages we have considered how social behavior develops through the processes of cognition and motivation; how perhaps the deepest human motivations are the needs for attention and respect; how symbolic systems shape cognition, anticipation, and history; and how individuals manage their presentations of self to make their claims on the distribution of attention and power between individuals.

However, these personal processes are interwoven with processes that are more collective in nature. Think, for instance, about the proportion of your activities that are determined by groups. Your presence in this very course was made possible because of a group we call an organization. It is this group determines your role and that of your instructor, as well as the vast proportion of our activities during the academic year. In addition, the time you spend writing a letter home is a product of your membership in another group we call a family. Observe that even when you are not physically within a group how you can still carry your membership within your head--often our behavior is oriented toward our reference groups. In sum, it can be argued that most of our activities are group-based. We are linked to groups through the roles that we play and the essence of these roles is not so much determined by personality attributes of the role occupant but rather by the nature of the group. Further, definitions of situations are typically made by groups, as are personal motivations (whereas much of the adult population is pecuniarily motivated, students work for a letter of the alphabet!).