[Professor Robert Prentice] Parents seldom accept as an excuse their child's plea of
"Hey, everyone else is doing it!"
However, psychological studies demonstrate that those same parents, and everyone else,
tend to take their cues for proper behavior in most social contexts from the actions of others.
This pressure is called the conformity bias.
[Diana] Everyone wants to just fit in with the "in crowd" and so everyone sometimes makes
the wrong decision in order to fit in or makes a decision you don't feel comfortable making
just to please other people.
Psychologist Solomon Asch found that when he asked subjects to tell which of three lines
is the same length as a fourth, no one had difficulty doing it unless they were placed
in a group with Asch's confederates who gave obviously wrong answers.
Under those conditions, almost all of the subjects found it very painful to give the
obviously correct answer in contradiction to the strangers' wrong answers.
In fact, most participants gave an obviously incorrect answer at least once during the study.
This bias to conform is much greater, of course, when the others in the group aren't strangers,
but are co-employees or friends, or when the correct answer is not right there in
black and white as it was in the Asch Study but is instead a subjective question like an ethical issue.
[Todd] I never really came in here and expected to party at all and then it was kind of like,
well, I guess if all my friends are and I kind of want to hang out with all of my friends
then I mean...
I guess that's something I have to buy into.
[Ellen] They're all drinking and you don't really want to drink.
But you feel... you would feel awkward not drinking.
[Nicole] You don't wanna, you don't wanna stand out for the wrong reason.
So sometimes it's almost just easier to go with the crowd.
The impairment of individual decision-making known as "groupthink" - where people deciding
in groups often make more extreme decisions than any individual member initially supports
- can exacerbate the conformity bias.
It can be reasonably argued that loyalty and groupthink helped Morton Thiokol employees
to remain silent about known O-ring dangers that caused the Challenger space shuttle disaster.
[Robert] If you're loyal to someone, and trust them, and respect them, if they come
up with a decision and in the back of your mind you think, “maybe that’s not right,”
because of your loyalty that can kind of blind you sometimes.
An employee at the accounting firm KPMG challenged the ethics of tax shelters that the firm was selling.
He received a simple e-mail that said: "You're either on the team or you're off the team."
Well everyone wants to be on the team.
We all realize loyalty is generally an important virtue.
But it causes a pressure to conform and this pressure to conform, has been argued, helped
cause Ford employees to sell the Ford Pinto despite awareness of its gas tank dangers
and helped A.H. Robins employees to continue to sell the Dalkon Shield contraceptive IUD
despite knowing its ghastly medical consequences.
[Michael] You don’t believe that groupthink is what's going on, you just believe that
you're as a group working together and coming to a great decision and that it’s just really nice
and that obviously because you all have similar opinions, it must be right.
Psychological and organizational pressures can cause even people with good intentions
to lie or otherwise act unethically.
Good character, unfortunately, isn't always sufficient.
As Albus Dumbledore told Harry Potter, "It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up
to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends."
In this world, I feel like everyone's a puppet somehow.
Like someone's influencing you to do a certain thing even though you don't want to.
So, as much as we want to overcome it...
I feel like it's a very difficult thing to overcome.
I find that the hardest part is getting the courage to actually say no
when everyone else is saying yes or say yes when everyone else is saying no.
In the end, I think it is beneficial to the whole group when I am the one that takes a stand,
even just so that I can get my opinion across.
Even if they decide to go against me, at least I know that I tried and I did something.
[Pranitha] When you step out and do something that's different or something that's
maybe not accepted, that's when you feel like you really made a choice for yourself
and not for the people around you.
While I'm in the middle of doing that, it’s hard and it’s rough and it feels bad.
In the long run, it’s usually memories I look back and say, "I’m really glad that
that’s the stand I took, and I’m really glad that I didn’t compromise on that."