Conformity vs obedience: Milgram's four differences, and where compliance fits

Conformity is a change in the behaviour or the opinions of a person so that they match those of other people. Nobody has to ask for the change. Obedience is a change in behaviour because a person with authority gives a direct order. A recruit who starts to use the slang of the other recruits conforms. A recruit who carries out the order of an officer obeys. Compliance usually names a third case: a person agrees to a direct request from someone who has no authority.

The definitions are short. The difficulty is that all three words describe a person who changes behaviour because of other people. The word compliance also has two meanings in psychology, and textbooks do not always say which meaning they use. This article gives the definitions, the four differences that Stanley Milgram listed, the two meanings of compliance, and a method to sort exam questions.

• Conformity comes from equals and needs no request. Obedience comes from an authority and needs an order.
• Stanley Milgram listed four differences in 1974: hierarchy, imitation, explicitness and voluntarism.
• People explain the two in opposite ways. They deny that a group influenced them, but they say that an authority gave them no choice.
• Compliance has two meanings: public agreement without private belief, and agreement to a direct request.
• The two forces can act in the same situation. In one experiment by Milgram, two peers refused to continue. Then 36 of 40 participants defied the experimenter, compared with 14 of 40 without peers.

The difference in one table

The last row quotes three entries of the APA Dictionary of Psychology: conformity, compliance and obedience. The obedience entry adds that the command is "often one issued by a person in a position of authority". Its examples are a child who cleans a room when a parent says so, and a soldier who follows the orders of a superior officer.

Two things sort the three terms. The first is the source: equals, any person, or an authority. The second is the demand: nobody says a word, a person makes a request, or a person gives an order.

Milgram's four differences

Stanley Milgram is known for his research on obedience. He also wrote a direct comparison of the two terms. It is in chapter 9 of his 1974 book Obedience to Authority.

Milgram limits conformity to "the action of a subject when he goes along with his peers, people of his own status, who have no special right to direct his behavior". Obedience is "the action of the subject who complies with authority". The recruit in the first paragraph of this article is his example. The recruit carries out the orders of his superiors. He also "adopts the habits, routines, and language of his peers". In Milgram's words: "The former represents obedience and the latter, conformity."

He starts with the part that the two terms share: "Obedience and conformity both refer to the abdication of initiative to an external source." In plain words, another party decides what the person does. Then he lists four differences.

The second difference has the shortest test: "Conformity is imitation but obedience is not." Milgram adds an example: "A soldier does not simply repeat an order given to him but carries it out."

The third difference explains why conformity is hard to see. In the conformity experiments of Solomon Asch, Milgram writes, "there is no overt requirement made by group members that the subject go along with them". He adds that many subjects would resist an explicit demand from the group, because equals "have no right to order each other about".

The fourth difference shows after the event: "Subjects deny conformity and embrace obedience as the explanation of their actions." Asch's subjects "typically understate the degree to which their actions were influenced by members of the group". The obedient subject does the opposite. He "asserts that he had no autonomy in the matter".

Milgram explains the contrast with the third difference. The pressure to conform is implicit, so the person sees the behaviour as voluntary. An order is explicit and public, so the person can point to it.

The four differences are an analysis by Milgram. They are not the result of one experiment.

Conformity: going along with equals

Solomon Asch described his conformity experiments in a 1955 article in Scientific American. A group of seven to nine students compared the lengths of lines. All of the students except one had instructions to give the same wrong answer on some trials. The one student without instructions heard most of their answers and then gave his own answer aloud.

Alone, people made mistakes "less than 1 per cent of the time". Under group pressure, the subjects accepted the wrong judgments of the majority "in 36.8 per cent of the selections". The figure comes from 123 subjects.

Read the figure with care. It is a share of the answers, not a share of the people. Asch reports that "about one quarter of the subjects were completely independent and never agreed with the erroneous judgments of the majority".

Two more results help in exams:

• The effect of the majority increased up to three people. With one opponent, the subjects made errors 3.6% of the time. With two opponents, the figure was 13.6%. With three, it was 31.8%. Larger majorities added little.
• One partner who gave the correct answers decreased the errors to one fourth.

Nobody in the group asked the subject to agree. This is the explicitness difference from Milgram's list.

Two reasons to conform

Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard named two reasons in a 1955 paper. They wrote: "We shall define a normative social influence as an influence to conform with the positive expectations of another." The second reason is informational social influence: "an influence to accept information obtained from another as evidence about reality".

OpenStax Psychology 2e gives the same pair in simpler words. With normative influence, people conform "to fit in, to feel good, and to be accepted by the group". With informational influence, people conform "because they believe the group is competent and has the correct information".

The reports of Asch's subjects fit both reasons. Some of the subjects who went along concluded: "I am wrong, they are right." Others suspected that the majority were "sheep" who followed the first speaker, but they went along at the moment of decision.

Deutsch and Gerard add: "Commonly these two types of influence are found together." The two influences are explanations of conformity. They are not two more terms on the same level as obedience.

Obedience: carrying out an order

Milgram published the first obedience study in a 1963 paper. The subjects were 40 men. An experimenter ordered each subject to give stronger and stronger electric shocks to a second man each time that the man made an error. The second man was a confederate of the experimenter and received no shocks. The switches on the shock generator went from 15 to 450 volts.

The result is in the abstract of the paper: "26 Ss obeyed the experimental commands fully, and administered the highest shock on the generator." The other 14 subjects stopped at an earlier point. That is 65% for this one condition. In other conditions the figure was very different.

The hierarchy and the explicit demand are easy to see here. The experimenter had the position of authority in the laboratory. When a subject hesitated, the experimenter used four spoken prods in a fixed order. The first was "Please continue". The last was "You have no other choice, you must go on".

In 2009, Jerry Burger published a partial replication with 70 adults. For ethical reasons, the procedure stopped after the 150-volt switch. In the base condition, 70% of the participants were ready to continue. In the comparable condition of Milgram, 82.5% continued past that point. The difference was not statistically significant.

One caution applies to the word obedience itself. The psychologists Alexander Haslam and Stephen Reicher argue in a 2012 essay that Milgram's participants did not follow orders blindly. They note that the last prod is a direct order. When the experimenter gives it, "participants typically refuse". In their account, the participants "should be seen—and judged—as engaged followers not as blind conformists". This is the interpretation of the two authors.

Our article on Milgram's obedience experiment gives the procedure, the variations and this debate in detail.

Compliance: one word, two meanings

The word compliance causes most of the confusion, because psychology uses it for two different things.

Meaning 1: public agreement without private belief

The APA Dictionary entry on conformity says: "Conformity includes temporary outward acquiescence (compliance) as well as more enduring private acceptance (conversion)." In this meaning, compliance is a type of conformity. The person agrees in public and does not agree in private.

A 2018 study by Sophie Sowden and colleagues uses the same meaning: "Compliance occurs when the individual publicly agrees with the group but does not change their own attitude or belief". The authors call the opposite case acceptance. For the distinction, they cite a 1958 paper by Herbert Kelman. The title of that paper names three processes: compliance, identification and internalization.

A summary of Kelman's model on the TheoryHub site of Newcastle University describes two of the three processes. Compliance is the acceptance of influence "to receive rewards and avoid punishments". Its effect is short-term. Internalisation is the adoption of a behaviour because it agrees with the values of the person.

The subjects of Asch who followed the "sheep" show this meaning. They gave the answer of the majority aloud, although they doubted it.

Meaning 2: agreement to a direct request

The APA Dictionary entry on compliance gives a second sense: "a change in a person's behavior in response to a direct request". The entry then lists techniques that increase compliance, such as the foot-in-the-door technique and the door-in-the-face technique.

OpenStax uses this meaning: "Compliance is going along with a request or demand, even if you do not agree with the request." Here compliance is a third type of social influence. It is explicit, as obedience is. But the person who asks has no authority, so the person who is asked can refuse without defying a superior.

Which meaning does your course use?

Read the question. If it lists conformity, compliance and obedience as three options, it uses the request meaning. If it asks for types of conformity, it uses the public agreement meaning. This is a practical rule, not a quotation from an exam board.

The AQA specification for A-level Psychology is an example of the second case. It lists "Types of conformity: internalisation, and compliance". OpenStax, as shown above, is an example of the first case.

There is one more source of confusion. The everyday word appears in definitions of obedience. The APA Dictionary defines obedience as "behavior in compliance with a direct command". Milgram writes that in obedience "there is compliance without imitation". In these sentences, compliance only means that the person does the thing that is demanded.

Where the line blurs

Exam questions isolate one force. Real situations usually contain more than one. Milgram's recruit obeys and conforms on the same day.

Milgram tested the combination himself. In his Experiment 17, the subject worked with two other teachers, who were confederates. One of them refused to continue at 150 volts, and the other refused at 210 volts. The experimenter then ordered the subject to continue alone.

The result was clear: "36 of the 40 subjects defy the experimenter (while the corresponding number in the absence of group pressure is 14)". Milgram writes that of all his variations, "none was so effective in undercutting the experimenter's authority". The order was the same in the two conditions. The difference was the two peers who refused.

The fourth difference appeared again. Milgram reports that most of the defiant subjects denied that the two peers were the critical factor in their own defiance.

A peer can also help the authority. In Experiment 18, a confederate pressed the switches, and the subject did other tasks. Milgram reports: "Only 3 of the 40 refuse to participate in the experiment to the end."

The effect of a peer does not always appear. In one condition of Burger's 2009 study, the participants first saw one other teacher refuse to continue. Then 63.3% of them continued past 150 volts. This was not significantly different from the 70% in the base condition.

Classifying exam scenarios

Three questions sort each scenario:

1. 1.Did a person ask or order the actor to do it? If nobody did, the term is conformity.
2. 2.If a person did, does that person have authority over the actor? If yes, the term is obedience. If no, the term is compliance in the request meaning.
3. 3.For conformity only: does the actor also believe it in private? If no, the term is compliance in the public agreement meaning. If yes, the term is acceptance or internalisation.

Change one detail in the seventh row and the answer changes. If the friends say nothing and you have one more drink because they do, the term is conformity.

How to keep the terms apart

Four memory aids help:

• Use Milgram's test. In conformity, you copy the other people. In obedience, you carry out an order that the authority does not carry out.
• Count the words. If nobody says a word, the term is conformity. A request points to compliance. An order points to obedience.
• Check the status. Conformity occurs between equals. Obedience occurs between a higher status and a lower status.
• Listen to the explanation. "It was my own decision" is typical after conformity. "I had no choice" is typical after obedience.

A memory aid helps you only if you practise with it. Our guide to memorising psychology terminology explains the two study methods with the strongest evidence. The article on spaced repetition explains why short sessions on different days are better than one long session.

Psychology World is built for this kind of practice. You look up a term and save it to one of your own lists. Then you drill the list as flashcards, by typing the answer, or as multiple-choice questions once the list has four or more terms. Conformity, compliance, obedience, normative influence and informational influence make a ready list of five. The four steps of the learning loop and what each study mode does are on the home page.