Compliance (psychology)
[1] Compliance psychology is the study of the process where individuals comply to social influence, typically in response to requests and pressures brought on by others.
Some of various fields include healthcare, where patients adherence to medical advice is necessary, furthermore, marketing where consumer behavior is prioritized strategies can be developed.
It is important that psychologists and ordinary people alike recognize that social influence extends beyond our behavior—to our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs—and that it takes on many forms.
Persuasion and the compliance techniques are particularly significant types of social influence since they utilize the respective effect's power to attain the submission of others.
Edward E. Jones discusses three forms of ingratiation:[7][8][9] This technique explains that due to the injunctive social norm that people will return a favor when one is granted to them; compliance is more likely to occur when the requestor has previously complied with one of the subject's requests.
Those involved in this modern social-cognitive movement are attempting to discover the ways in which subjects' implicit and explicit beliefs, opinions and goals affect information processing and decision making in settings where influential forces are present.
Regardless of utilization of fallacy forms (e.g., apple-polishing, ad hominem) to get their point across, individuals engaged in philosophical arguments are overtly and logically expressing their opinion(s).
This is an explicit action in which the person on the other side of the argument recognizes that the arguer seeks to gain compliance (acceptance of their conclusion).
Individuals are frequently rewarded for acting in accordance with the beliefs, suggestions and commands of authority figures, or social norms.
Bibb Latané originally proposed the social impact theory that consists of three principles and provides wide-ranging rules that govern these individual processes.
The theory's driving principles can make directional predictions regarding the effects of strength, immediacy, and number on compliance.
[17] Although this variable is not included in Latané's theory, Burger et al. (2004) conducted studies that examined the effect of similarity and compliance to a request.
The rate of conformity was reduced when one or more confederates provided the correct answer and when participants were allowed to write down their responses rather than verbally stating them.
Additionally, it supports the social impact theory in that the experiment's ability to produce compliance was strengthened by its status (confederates seen as informational authorities), proximity and group size (7:1).
[20] Stanley Milgram's experiment set out to provide an explanation for the horrors being committed against Jews trapped in German concentration camps.
To test this, Stanley Milgram designed an experiment to see if participants would harm (shock) another individual due to the need to comply with authority.
When these alterations to the original experiment were made, the rate of compliance was not reduced: The rate of compliance was reduced when: The ordinary people who shocked the victim did so out of a sense of obligation—an impression of his duties as a subject—and not from any peculiarly aggressive tendenciesThe results of Stanley Milgram's experiments indicate the power of informational and normative aspects of social influence.
After answering a local newspaper ad (calling for volunteers for a study centered on the effects of prison life), 70 applications were checked for psychological problems, medical disabilities and crime/drug abuse history and reduced to 24 American and Canadian college students from the Stanford area.
Cars arrived at the station and suspects were brought inside where they were booked, read their Miranda rights a second time, fingerprinted and taken to a holding cells where they were left blindfolded.
Due to the reality of psychological abuse, prisoners were released 6 days later, after exhibiting pathological behavior and nervous breakdowns.
Additionally, none of the guards came late for a shift, called in sick, demanded extra pay for overtime or requested to be discharged from the study before its conclusion.
Despite obvious discomfort and reluctance of many individuals to write the world "pickle" in one of the pages, more than 64% complied with this vandalism request—more than double the requesters' prediction of a 28% rate of compliance.
An example of this was Adolf Eichmann who had fled and made refuge for himself in Argentina, He was later caught by Israel's Intelligence Service[27] in which he was later tried, found guilty, and executed in 1962.
The information divulged during the event of the Nuremberg Trials suggest strong evidence in the power enforced over others from that of a higher authority.
Compliance strategies exploit psychological processes in order to prompt a desired outcome; however, they do not necessarily lead to private acceptance by the targeted individual.
For example, car salesmen frequently use the lowball technique to manipulate customers' psychological functioning by convincing them to comply with a request.
[34] In addition, in a survey conducted in 16 countries demonstrated that contextual variables (e.g. feeling caged) leads to a lower compliance behaviours (e.g. social distancing).
[35] While there is some debate over the idea and power of compliance as a whole, the main controversy—stemming from the subject of compliance—is that people are capable of abusing persuasion techniques in order to gain advantages over other individuals.
Based on the psychological processes of social influence, compliance strategies may enable someone to be more easily persuaded towards a particular belief or action (even if they do not privately accept it).
In such cases, compliance strategies may be unfairly affecting the outcome of trials, which ought to be based on hard facts and justice, not simply persuasiveness.
