Sometimes we are influenced by cues from an authority figure instead of our peers.
Social influence from powers of authority is referred to as obedience. Stanley Milgram’s research on obedience in the 1960s tested the influence of obedience on participants’ willingness to shock others, who were actually confederates in the study. Participants acted as teachers and gave feedback on wrong answers. In addition, the participants were asked to administer shocks that increased from 15 volts to 450 volts. Even when the confederate protested, more than half of the time the participants continued to administer voltage to the extreme level in the study.
David Meyers states that the take-home from this study is not that we will commit terrible acts but that we are influenced by the step-by-step process that takes us closer and closer to committing those acts through smaller, incremental behaviors.