Page 569 - Understanding Psychology

s Main Idea
You may engage in behavior because of direct or indirect group pressure or in response to orders given by authorities.
s Vocabulary
• conformity
• obedience
s Objectives
• Identify ways that groups can influ-
ence an individual’s behavior.
• Explain why most people tend to
obey authority figures.
Conformity and Obedience
Reader’s Guide
Exploring Psychology
Why Are They Running?
Suddenly someone began to run. It may be that he had simply remembered, all of a moment, an engagement to meet his wife, for which he was now frightfully late. Whatever it was, he ran east on Broad Street (probably toward the Maramor Restaurant, a favorite place for a man to meet his wife). Somebody else began to run, perhaps a newsboy in high spirits. Another man, a portly gentleman of affairs, broke into a trot. Inside of ten minutes, everybody on High Street, from the Union Depot to the Courthouse was running. A loud mumble gradually crystal- lized into the dread word “dam.” “The dam has broke!” The fear was put into words by a little old lady in an electric car, or by a traffic cop, or by a small boy: nobody knows who, nor does it now really matter.
—from “The Day the Dam Broke” in My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber, 1933
The above passage is a good example of people conforming to group pressures. Why did they run? They ran because everyone else was running. Most of these individuals did not make a deci- sion based on their own reasoning; rather, they conformed to a group decision—to run.
Chapter 19 / Group Interaction 555