When Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo
carried out their seminal experiments on conformity in the 20th
Century, they precipitated a sociological perspective on conformity that holds
more weight today than ever before. The classic Milgram experiment tested a
participant’s willingness to inflict increasingly deadly shocks of electricity
to an unseen victim under an authority’s insistence. With over half of the
participant’s carrying out the final shock, Milgram’s experiment emphasized the
power of authorial persuasion over individual conviction. Zimbardo’s prison
experiment allowed student participants at Stanford University to assume that
position of unilateral power. Splitting volunteers into prisoners and guards,
the experiment tested the limits of the students’ willingness to realistically
adopt their separate roles. Intending to run for one or two weeks, the
experiment abruptly halted after 6 days. The extent to which the guard
participants adopted abusive authorial rule and the prisoners’ treatment
remains a point of ethical discussion today.
The debilitating effect of conformity as
demonstrated in these experiments is widely represented in the world today.
Most notably violence in the name of a greater good or organization has been demonstrated
by prominent terrorist groups like ISIS and the Taliban in the recent past.
While their proselytization through “purification” is founded on their
interpretations of religious text, the faculty through which they implement
violence hinges on the widely studied effects of conformity’s control. As
evidenced in the works of Milgram and Zimbardo, an authority’s command can
overpower an individual’s moral intuition. Rather than questioning the validity
of some Islamic fundamentalist interpretations, followers of ISIS and other
terror organizations see their degradation of woman and historical monuments as
natural ideals of their own twisted philosophy.
Apart from the aggressive tactics and
destruction of innocent lives, many religions of today demonstrate the same use
of conformity that organizations like the Taliban use to propagate and cement
their belief systems. Catholicism’s complex hierarchical structure relies on
the power of authority to orchestrate its influence on their droves of practitioners.
In the same way, Christianity- the world’s most popular religion, relies on the
stewardess of millions of pastors and religious leaders to facilitate its
global practice of behavioral conformity.
Zimbardo and Milgram’s experiments exhibits
the irresistible influence of conformity on people of assumed status. Most
clearly seen in Zimbardo’s prison experiment, the status of prisoner and guard began
to subjugate the ethical standards of the students. These same moral standards
were subjugated in Milgram’s shock experiment where participants assumed the
status of a scientist’s assistant. Conformity’s debilitating societal effect
can be seen in the concentrated social atmosphere of a high school or grade
school. Surrounded by the vessels of conformity’s effect, the peer group
asserts unparalleled social influence in a cordoned environment, lending itself
to harmful activities like group bullying and harassment. Now with the Internet
as a predominant means of social contact, cyber bullying has become a rampant
issue in schools across the nation and worldwide. With the anonymity the
Internet provides, the collaborative harassment of fellow peers online has
become more prevalent than ever, validating the results of Zimbardo and
Milgram’s experiments on conformity’s harmful effects a half century prior.
