Conformity to peers, not personality, drives obedient cruelty.

Evidence

In two conditions of his experiment, the real subject was sandwiched between two confederates at the shocking machine as part of a “‘Teaching Team.” When the Learner screamed he wanted to be set free from the experiment, one of the confederates quit. So did the second, soon thereafter. The Experimenter then pressured the naive subject to continue administering shocks, but only four of forty (10%) went to 450 volts. However, if the two confederates kept right on going when the Learner started screaming, as though nothing had happened, thirty-seven out of forty (92%) of the subjects who served in that condition went (with their silent partners) all the way to 450 volts. So who is a hero, and who is jelly? It mattered almost not at all who the individuals were. Behavior in these two conditions almost completely depended on what the confederates on the Teaching Team did. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 115

Categorization

• XREF: Direct empirical demonstration of the situation-vs-person view that grounds much social psychology; connects to the reader’s broader task of weighing situational versus dispositional explanations of authoritarian behavior, echoing critiques of Atemeyer’s own personality emphasis. — connects to: Conformity can intensify violence beyond what any individual would initiate alone. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 372