As part of the communication courses I teach at the university, I include a healthy helping of social influence, with a run down and demonstrational examples of the various laws of social influence as codified by Robert Cialdini in his work.
Some of the examples I provide are straightforward from case studies and business while others seem a bit far fetched or well beyond strange but are still very much rooted in true experiences.
One of the laws of social influence is that of Power or Authority which tells us that folks are more likely to follow the instructions of someone they perceive to be in power or authority . . . certainly, the Milgram experiment which I've posted about here is one excellent example of social influence at work.
Some times social influence is granted to a person based upon genuine authority (most of us will pull over when a police officer signals us to do so) and sometimes it is gained through less than legitimate means. The doctor at a hospital in Tokyo who persuaded nearly one hundred women to crawl around on his clinic floor naked while he took photographs is an example of someone who has legitimate authority in some contexts inappropriately abusing that authority. The sixty year old many who donned a doctor's jacket and went from door to door asking women to let him feel their breasts as part of international breast cancer awareness week is an example of someone who did not honestly deserve a sense of authority from others but took it upon himself through fraud.
An excellent – albeit very sad – example of the misuse of authority as a tool of social influence is the case of Louise Ogborn who at the age of nineteen was an employee at a McDonalds and was falsely strip searched and worse. A prankster called the restaurant and convinced the manager that he was a police officer. He told the manager that an employee was a thief and gave her a generic description which the manager took to be of Ogborn. The voice on the phone then gave a series of commands for the manager to follow and she complied. Ogborn – who was completely innocent – was forced to strip, was forced to have her vagina searched, was forced to do jumping jacks, was forced to get on all fours while a man (the manager's fiance) spanked her and forced to perform oral sex on her "captor" – as captor is certainly an appropriate term. NOTE: The Ogborn tale has been adapted into the film Compliance, a disturbing reenactment of her story.
Keep in mind that at no time did the manager or her fiance question the legitimacy of the prankster's identity (a police officer) nor the legitimacy of the things they forced the young woman to do . . . this is pure use of social influence and blind compliance.
We like to think that these particular people are simply unusual idjits but the same caller evidently was successful in at least seventy other similar prank calls, although Ogborn's was the longest call (over four hours). No, it wasn't simply individual stupidity or at least guillibility here, although this certainly helped, no, this was social influence.
Here's a video worth seeing regarding the case:
A worthwhile piece on this string of cases can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strip_search_prank_call_scam . . . an episode of the television series Law and Order: Special Victims Unit was based upon the case and starred Robin Williams . . . the title, Authority.
I tell my students that social influence is natural . . . we've evolved these strategies over thousands of years of being human and for the most part they care beneficial . . . however, they can be abused. So, it's worthwhile knowing them in order to better defend ourselves against their inappropriate use . . . and to use them appropriately. For the last twenty-five years, I have started the first day of any of my communication courses that I've taught at university with a quotation adapted from one of my favorite Roman thinkers . . . Quintillian, considered the father of rhetoric studies . . . "The essence of communication is a good man speaking well." We learn to communicate effectively but in so doing we are also obligated to use our skillsets for the betterment of society. Obviously, the person on the phone in the Ogdon case was not a good man speaking well.
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