Re: How well do people follow instructions?

Wow! This question has been waiting for a while. Maybe you should have 
posted it elsewhere than to the neurochemists. :-)

Even though it is too late and this isn't my field at all (I'm a plant 
biochemist), I happen to have read about the following experiments which 
are related to what you now have done in your assignment. I'm sorry I 
can't remember in what book, but the experiments are supposedly "classics".

1. The trick class room. A test of group pressure.
Person A is sitting in a class room together with some other students. 
There is a teacher B by the black board. B draws two lines on the board, 
one obviously longer than the other, and asks which is the longest. 
Everybody agrees on one line. A thinks that the students around him are 
there as test subjects just as he is. In reality they are actors: their 
role is to answer erroneously later on. Now B erases a bit of the longest 
line and repeats the question. It is still obvious which one is the 
longest and everybody agrees. Now the fun starts. B erases a bit more, so 
that both lines are equally long. All the actors still rapidly reply that 
the same line is the longest. So does A, slightly confused. B. removes a 
bit more, so the line now definitely is shorter. Still all actors agree 
that the obviously shorter line is the longest.
A could agree with the others even when the line everyone said was the 
longest was plainly much shorter.

2. The electric shock experiment; a test of obeying a mandated person (in 
the person of the experiment leader B, dressed in a white coat).
Here our poor Mr. A is asked to punish a person when he doesn't manage to 
memorise a series of words or numbers correctly. To do this he controls 
some electrodes, with power ranging from, say, 1 to 10. 1 giving a slight 
tingle and 10 making the "memoriser" faint from the pain. What he doesn't 
know is that the electrodes are phoney and the memoriser an actor. Some 
protests from A are expected and B has a set of answers ready, ranging 
from something like "please continue", through "no, go on" to "for the 
sake of science, press the button!" An amazing number of people sent the 
poor memoriser into a coma before walking away. It was of the order of 30%.

Even though your assignment is over and done with, I though you might want 
to know. I'm sorry MadScientist didn't answer in time.

Cheers,

Erik von Stedingk


[Admin Note:  These experiments mainly deal with authority but they should 
serve as a great starting point for your own experiments. -- RJS]