33 Conformity THE MISCONCEPTION: You are a strong individual who doesn’t conform
unless forced to. THE TRUTH: It takes little more than an authority figure or social pressure to get you to obey, because conformity is a survival instinct. On April 4, 2004, a man calling himself Officer Scott called a McDonald’s in Mount Washington, Kentucky. He told the assistant manager, Donna Jean Summers, who answered the phone, there had been a report of theft and that Louise Ogborn was the suspect. Ogborn, eighteen, worked at the McDonald’s in question, and the man on the other line told Donna Jean Summers to take her into the restaurant’s office, lock the door, and strip her naked while another assistant manager watched. He then asked her to describe the naked teenager to him. This went on for more than an hour, until Summers told Officer Scott she had to return to the counter and continue her duties. He asked her if her fiancé could take over, and so she called him to the store. He arrived shortly after, took the phone, and then started following instructions. Officer Scott told him to tell Ogborn to dance, do jumping jacks, and stand on furniture in the room. He did. She did. Then, Officer Scott’s requests became more sexual. He told Summer’s fiancé to make Ogborn sit in his lap and kiss him so he could smell her breath. When she resisted, Officer Scott told him to spank her naked bottom, which he did. More than three hours into the ordeal, Officer Scott eventually convinced Summers’s fiancé to force Ogborn to perform oral sex while he listened. He then asked for another man to take over, and when a maintenance worker was called in to take the phone, he asked what was going on. He was shocked and skeptical. Officer Scott hung up. The call was one of more than seventy made over the course of four years by one man pretending to be a police officer. He called fast-food restaurants in thirty-two states and convinced people to shame themselves and others, sometimes in private, sometimes in front of customers. With each call he claimed to be working with the parent corporation, and sometimes he said he worked for the bosses of the individual franchises. He always claimed a crime had been committed. Often, he said investigators and other police officers were on their way. The employees dutifully did as he asked, disrobing, posing, and embarrassing themselves for his amusement. Police eventually captured David Stewart, a Florida prison security guard who had in his possession a calling card that was traced back to several fast-food restaurants, including one that had been hoaxed. Stewart went to court in 2006 but was acquitted. The jury said there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him. There were no more hoax phone calls after the trial. What could have made so many people follow the commands of a person they had never met and from who they had no proof of his being a police officer? If I were to hand you a card with a single line on it, and then hand you another card with an identical line drawn near two others, one longer and one shorter, do you think you could match up the original to the copy? Could you tell which line in a group of three was the same length as the one on the first card? You could. Just about anyone would be able to match up lines of equal length in just a few seconds. Now, what if you were part of a group trying to come to a consensus, and the majority of the people said a line that was clearly shorter than the original was the one that matched? How would you react? In 1951, psychologist Solomon Asch used to perform an experiment where he would get a group of people together and show them cards like the ones described above. He would then ask the group the same sort of questions. Without coercion, about 2 percent of people answered incorrectly. In the next run of the experiment, Asch added actors to the group who all agreed to incorrectly answer his questions. If he asked which line was the same, or longer, or shorter, or whatever, they would force one hapless subject to be alone in disagreement. You probably think you would go against the grain and shake your head in disbelief. You think you might say to yourself, “How could these people be so stupid?” Well, I hate to break it to you, but the research says you would eventually break. In Asch’s experiments, 75 percent of the subjects caved in on at least one question. They looked at the lines, knew the answer everyone else was agreeing to was wrong, and went with it anyway. Not only did they conform without being pressured, but when questioned later they seemed oblivious to their own conformity. When the experimenter told them they had made an error, they came up with excuses as to why they made mistakes instead of blaming the others. Intelligent people just like you caved in, went with the group, and then seemed confused as to why. Asch messed around with the conditions of the experiment, trying it with varying numbers of actors and unwitting subjects. He found one or two people had little effect, but three or more was all he needed to get a small percentage of people to start conforming. The percentage of people who conformed grew proportionally with the number of people who joined in consensus against them. Once the entire group other