Grand Canyon University PSY-362 Social Psychology and Cultural Applications: Topic 3 Discussion Question 1 on Conformity, Obedience, and the Ethics of Social Influence

Post a 250-to 300-word initial response to Topic 3 Discussion Question 1 in the Halo course shell by Thursday at 11:59 p.m. Arizona time, then submit two 150-to 200-word replies to classmates by Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Students answer the prompt with a peer-reviewed source, apply at least one theory of social influence, and evaluate the ethical cost of producing that evidence.

Assessment Context

Grand Canyon University runs PSY-362 Social Psychology and Cultural Applications as a discussion-driven course, and Topic 3 Discussion Question 1 sits inside the social influence week. The assessment type is a graded discussion post, not an essay, so the marking turns on how quickly a student states a position, defends it with one credible source, and then engages two classmates rather than restating the textbook. Course materials live behind the Halo login, so this brief reconstructs the current version from publicly available PSY-362 document sets, GCU discussion rubrics, and the standard Topic 3 question pattern used in the course since 2022. The reconstruction assumes a Thursday initial-post deadline and a Sunday reply deadline, which matches every published PSY-362 schedule consulted.

Learners in this course arrive with strong opinions about the Milgram experiments and thin knowledge of what the archives actually show. The prompt exploits that gap. Answers that repeat the phrase blind obedience and stop there score in the middle band. Answers that separate conformity from obedience, name the mechanism, and then test the mechanism against replication evidence and current ethical standards score at the top.

Unit Learning Outcomes Assessed

• Distinguish conformity, compliance, and obedience as separate forms of social influence, using the correct terms in context.
• Apply a named theory of social influence to a contemporary setting such as a hospital ward, a military unit, a workplace, or an online group.
• Evaluate experimental evidence for credibility, replication history, and ethical standing.
• Use APA 7th edition conventions for in-text citation of scholarly sources.
• Advance a classmate’s reasoning through evidence and question rather than agreement.

Task Instructions

1. Answer the Discussion Question 1 prompt in the first line of the post. State your position in one sentence so the reader knows what you will defend.
2. Open the body with a claim about whether ordinary adults still follow harmful instructions from a legitimate authority. Support the claim with evidence from one peer-reviewed article published within the last seven years.
3. Apply the claim to one concrete setting. Describe the authority, the instruction, the pressure that makes refusal costly, and the point at which a reasonable person would stop. Keep the example specific enough that a reader could picture it.
4. Address the ethical question the prompt raises. Explain what researchers may and may not do to study obedience today, and name the safeguard that replaces the practices Milgram used.
5. Close with one sentence that answers the prompt directly rather than summarising the paragraph.
6. Reply to two classmates. Each reply adds evidence, a counterexample, or a sharper question. Restating a classmate’s point earns nothing.

Initial Post Requirements

• 250 to 300 words, excluding the reference entry.
• At least one in-text citation from a peer-reviewed journal article, with the matching reference listed beneath the post in APA 7th edition format.
• Direct quotation limited to fewer than 40 words, with a page or paragraph number.
• Posted by Thursday at 11:59 p.m. Arizona time to receive full credit for timeliness.

Peer Reply Requirements

• Two replies, 150 to 200 words each, posted by Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Arizona time.
• Each reply must cite a source, a study, or a documented case that the original post did not use.
• Address the classmate by name and respond to the specific sentence you are testing, not to the post as a whole.
• Disagreement carries no penalty. Unsupported agreement does.

Formatting, Integrity, and Submission

• Type the post directly into the discussion thread. Attachments are not read for grading.
• Use APA 7th edition for the reference entry, the in-text citation, and the format of any study named in the reply.
• Draw sources from the GCU Library. Wikipedia, course hero uploads, and open essay sites are not scholarly sources and will not count toward the citation requirement.
• Run the draft through LopesWrite when the instructor enables the link. A similarity score above 20 percent, excluding references, triggers review.
• Late initial posts lose 10 percent per day. Replies submitted after the Sunday deadline are not graded.

Marking Criteria and Rubric

Criterion and Weight	Does Not Meet Expectations (0 to 59%)	Approaches Expectations (60 to 74%)	Meets Expectations (75 to 89%)	Exceeds Expectations (90 to 100%)
Content accuracy and use of terms, 35%	Conflates conformity, compliance, and obedience; no position stated; description replaces analysis.	Terms are mostly correct with one confusion; position appears late; analysis stays close to the textbook wording.	Terms are used correctly throughout; a clear position opens the post; analysis links evidence to the stated claim.	Terms are used with precision, including the distinction between informational and normative influence; the position governs every sentence.
Applied reasoning and ethical analysis, 25%	No contemporary example, or an example so general that it could fit any prompt; ethics ignored.	Example is present but thin; the ethical section repeats the phrase informed consent without explaining what it protects.	Example specifies authority, instruction, and cost of refusal; the ethical section explains a current safeguard and why it matters.	Example exposes the pressure structure precisely; the ethical argument weighs scientific value against participant welfare and reaches a defensible judgment.
Scholarly evidence and APA 7th edition, 20%	No peer-reviewed source; citation absent or invented; reference entry missing.	One source, dated or only loosely relevant; APA errors in author, year, or journal title.	One current peer-reviewed source used to support a specific claim; reference entry and in-text citation are correct.	Source selection is apt and current; the citation does real argumentative work; APA formatting is clean down to the DOI.
Peer reply quality, 15%	One reply or none; agreement only; no evidence added.	Two replies posted, both largely summary; a source appears once and is not tied to the classmate’s claim.	Two replies that add evidence, extend the classmate’s example, or raise a testable question.	Two replies that shift the thread’s reasoning, name the assumption being challenged, and supply a source the class has not used.
Mechanics and professional tone, 5%	Repeated sentence-level errors; tone dismissive toward a classmate.	Errors interrupt reading; tone uneven.	Clear sentences with minor slips; respectful tone throughout.	Controlled prose, varied sentence length, no errors, and a tone that invites further argument.

Example Student Response

The prompt asks whether ordinary adults still follow harmful instructions when a legitimate authority accepts responsibility for the outcome, and the evidence says they do. A partial replication run in Poland kept obedience close to Milgram’s rates, and the study titled Would You Deliver an Electric Shock in 2015? found that most participants pressed the final permitted switch despite visible distress in the learner (Doliński et al., 2017). Calling that result blind conformity misses what participants were actually doing. They trusted the experimenter, believed the research mattered, and worked hard to be a good participant in a project they valued, which is the pattern Haslam et al. (2019) describe when they recast destructive conduct as engaged followership rather than automatic obedience. The same structure appears on a hospital ward when a senior clinician tells a new graduate to skip a second verification of a high-alert medication during a shift handover. The graduate hesitates, calculates the cost of speaking up, and reads the senior clinician’s confidence as evidence that the shortcut is safe. Proximity, legitimacy, and gradual escalation do the rest of the work. Preventing harm therefore depends less on selecting courageous individuals than on building units where dissent is routine and where the person in authority rewards the challenge. Consent, deception, and debriefing remain open questions, and any modern design must answer them before data collection begins.

Why Orders Do Not Explain Obedience

Answers that treat Milgram’s participants as passive instruments run into trouble the moment the archives enter the discussion. Kaposi (2022) maps a second wave of scholarship that treats the experiments as interactional events, where experimenters coached, reassured, and reframed the task until reluctant participants kept going. Resistance in that reading is not a personality trait but a negotiated outcome, which explains why small script changes moved obedience rates so sharply. Perry et al. (2020) push the point further with an unpublished study by Milgram’s assistant, showing that participants who fully believed the learner was in pain stopped sooner than participants who suspected a trick. Skepticism, not courage, accounted for much of the defiance. Discussion posts that cite this finding gain an argument the class has not seen: obedience and disbelief are entangled, so the headline percentage measures belief in the deception as much as submission to authority. Readers who follow the thread to its end reach a harder conclusion about applied settings. Compliance in organisations depends on whether people believe the instruction is real, legitimate, and consequential.

Misreadings That Cost Marks

Students searching for help on this discussion post usually want to know why a competent answer still lands in the middle band. Three misreadings account for most of the lost points.

• Treating Milgram as proof that people are cruel by nature. The experiments show situational submission under legitimate authority, and modern analyses place the mechanism in group identification and trust rather than in character (Haslam et al., 2019).
• Merging Asch and Milgram into one finding. Asch measured conformity to a unanimous majority with no authority present, while Milgram measured obedience to a person with institutional standing. Informational influence explains the first; perceived legitimacy and responsibility transfer explain the second.
• Asserting that ethics approval settles the ethical question. Approval signals that a board reviewed a protocol, and boards can be wrong, which is why the archival record of unscripted experimenter behaviour still matters (Kaposi, 2022).

Each misreading is fixable in one sentence. Name the mechanism, state which study supports it, then show where the mechanism breaks down in a real setting.

Ethics Review Board Reasoning

Arguments about ethics score well when they move past the word deception and describe what a review board actually weighs. Investigators must justify any concealment by showing that the knowledge could not be obtained another way, that risk stays minimal, and that debriefing restores participants to good standing, which is the logic set out in the American Psychological Association’s Ethics Code under informed consent and deception standards. Burger’s partial procedure became the template for a reason: stopping before the point of maximum distress preserved the comparison with the 1960s data while cutting the exposure that made the original studies indefensible. Applicants also carry a duty to monitor distress in real time rather than at the end, and to train confederates so that pressure is scripted and reversible. Retrieved from the APA Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, these standards give a student a defensible framework for judging whether any contemporary obedience study should run at all. Boards reject designs that treat scientific yield as sufficient grounds for distress, and they approve designs that build exit ramps into the procedure. A discussion post that names these trade-offs reads as professional judgment rather than moral complaint.

Final Position on the Prompt

My answer to Discussion Question 1 rests on a simple claim: adults still comply with harmful instructions, and the reason is trust rather than weakness. The Polish replication showed that the effect survives a change of decade and country, which weakens any explanation built on the obedience of a particular generation. Reading participants as engaged followers makes better sense of the transcripts, where people argue, sweat, and continue because they believe the work matters. Applied to a clinical or workplace setting, the lesson is that safeguards have to be structural. A procedure that lets a junior staff member halt the line without paying for it does more than a training module on courage. The ethics question closes the loop, because a field that cannot justify distress in the lab has to be careful about the claims it makes from the lab. Answering the prompt well means holding those three threads together, and that is what my reply to two classmates will test.

References

American Psychological Association. (2017). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct. https://www.apa.org/ethics/code

Doliński, D., Grzyb, T., Folwarczny, M., Grzybała, P., Krzyszycha, K., Martynowska, K., & Trojanowski, J. (2017). Would you deliver an electric shock in 2015? Obedience in the experimental paradigm developed by Stanley Milgram in the 50 years following the original studies. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 8(8), 927–933. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617693060

Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S. D., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2019). Rethinking the nature of cruelty: The role of identity leadership in the Stanford Prison Experiment. American Psychologist, 74(7), 809–822. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000443

Kaposi, D. (2022). The second wave of critical engagement with Stanley Milgram’s “obedience to authority” experiments: What did we learn? Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 16(6), e12667. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12667

Perry, G., Brannigan, A., Wanner, R. A., & Stam, H. (2020). Credibility and incredulity in Milgram’s obedience experiments: A reanalysis of an unpublished test. Social Psychology Quarterly, 83(1), 88–106. https://doi.org/10.1177/0190272519861952

Conformity, Obedience, and the Ethics of Social Influence

Ordinary adults still follow harmful instructions from legitimate authorities because obedience rests on perceived legitimacy, trust, and responsibility transfer rather than cruelty or weakness. A person may resist an order at first, but an authority who appears credible, calm, and institutionally authorized can make harmful action feel necessary, normal, or professionally required. The evidence from a recent partial replication of Milgram’s procedure supports that conclusion. Doliński et al. (2017) found that 90% of Polish participants were willing to administer the highest permitted shock level, even though the learner showed distress and the researchers used a procedure designed to reduce ethical risk. The finding suggests that obedience is not a historical curiosity confined to the 1960s.

Distinguishing the Forms of Influence

Conformity, compliance, and obedience differ in the source and structure of social pressure. Conformity involves changing one’s behavior to match a group norm, often because a person wants acceptance or accurate information. Compliance involves agreeing to a direct request, while obedience involves following an instruction from someone perceived to hold legitimate authority (Kaposi, 2022). Milgram’s studies therefore measure obedience rather than conformity: the experimenter holds institutional status, gives direct instructions, and accepts responsibility for the outcome.

Informational and normative influence help explain why these processes differ. In conformity, a person may look to others for evidence about reality or fear social rejection if they disagree. In obedience, the central mechanism is different: the subordinate assumes that the authority understands the situation, has the right to direct action, and will bear responsibility for its consequences. Haslam, Reicher, and Van Bavel (2019) describe this pattern as engaged followership. Participants do not simply become passive; they continue because they identify with the scientific project and view their role as valuable to a worthy cause.

Evidence From Recent Research

Doliński et al. (2017) provide the strongest recent support for the claim that ordinary adults still obey harmful instructions. Their Polish replication used a modified Milgram procedure with 80 participants and found obedience rates close to those reported in the original research. The researchers stopped the procedure before the highest shock level, which reduced participant distress while preserving the central comparison with Milgram’s earlier findings. The result matters because it weakens explanations based only on the culture, generation, or historical conditions of the original Yale studies.

The study also shows why “blind obedience” is an incomplete description. Participants questioned the procedure, showed hesitation, and experienced conflict, but many continued when the experimenter reassured them. Kaposi (2022) argues that Milgram’s results should be read as interactional events rather than simple demonstrations of personality weakness. The experimenter’s calm insistence, the gradual increase in demands, and the framing of the task as scientifically important all shaped participants’ decisions. Obedience therefore emerges through a relationship between authority, belief, and responsibility.

A Hospital Ward Example

A hospital ward illustrates the same structure. A senior clinician tells a new graduate nurse to skip the second independent verification of a high-alert medication because the ward is busy and the clinician says the dose has already been checked. The instruction is harmful in principle because independent verification exists to catch errors that could injure a patient. The graduate nurse may hesitate, but the senior clinician’s status, confidence, and apparent ownership of the decision create pressure to comply.

The cost of refusal is immediate and social. The nurse may fear appearing incompetent, slowing the team, or damaging a working relationship with a supervisor. Gradual escalation also matters: the first request may seem minor, but each accepted exception makes the next one easier to justify. A reasonable person should stop when the instruction conflicts with a mandatory safety procedure, when verification cannot be documented, or when the authority cannot explain why the safeguard no longer applies. In that moment, the nurse needs an institutional right to pause the task without fear of punishment.

Ethical Limits of Obedience Research

Researchers may study obedience today, but they cannot recreate the full ethical cost of Milgram’s original design. Modern research must obtain informed consent, minimize foreseeable harm, use deception only when scientifically necessary, and debrief participants promptly after the study. The American Psychological Association’s Ethics Code requires researchers to protect welfare, avoid unnecessary harm, and correct harmful effects arising from deception (American Psychological Association, 2017). An institutional review board must therefore ask whether the knowledge gained justifies the distress produced.

The safeguard that most directly replaces Milgram’s practices is a bounded procedure with a clear stopping point. Researchers can use a simulated task, limit the apparent intensity of harm, allow withdrawal at any time, monitor distress during the session, and provide a full debriefing afterward. These protections do not remove every ethical concern. They do, however, shift the burden onto researchers to show that a study cannot answer its question through a less harmful design. Ethical approval is necessary, but it is not sufficient; researchers must still justify each element of pressure, deception, and distress.

Final Position

Ordinary adults still follow harmful instructions when authority appears legitimate, responsibility is transferred, and refusal carries social or professional costs. The Polish replication shows that the pattern persists across time and national context, while engaged followership explains why participants continue despite visible moral conflict (Doliński et al., 2017; Haslam et al., 2019). The practical lesson is structural: organizations need procedures that make dissent safe, verifiable, and routine. Researchers, in turn, must design obedience studies that produce knowledge without treating participant welfare as expendable.

References

American Psychological Association. (2017). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct (2002, amended effective June 1, 2010, and January 1, 2017). https://www.apa.org/ethics/code

Doliński, D., Grzyb, T., Folwarczny, M., Grzybała, P., Krzyszycha, K., Martynowska, K., & Trojanowski, J. (2017). Would you deliver an electric shock in 2015? Obedience in the experimental paradigm developed by Stanley Milgram in the 50 years following the original studies. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 8(8), 927–933. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617693060

Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S. D., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2019). Rethinking the nature of cruelty: The role of identity leadership in the Stanford Prison Experiment. American Psychologist, 74(7), 809–822. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000443

Kaposi, D. (2022). The second wave of critical engagement with Stanley Milgram’s “obedience to authority” experiments: What did we learn? Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 16(6), Article e12667. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12667

Reicher, S. D., & Haslam, S. A. (2020). Engaged followership and engaged fellowship: Toward a unified analysis of harm-doing and helping. In L. S. Newman (Ed.), Confronting humanity at its worst: Social psychological perspectives on genocide (pp. 195–219). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190685942.003.0008

Two Classmate Replies

Reply 1

Hi [Classmate’s Name], your point that people obey because they trust authority is persuasive, but it may understate the role of institutional design. Doliński et al. (2017) found that 90% of participants in a modified Milgram procedure were willing to administer the highest permitted shock, which suggests that obedience can persist even when participants know the setting is an experiment. The more useful question may be why people continue after they begin to doubt the instruction. Kaposi (2022) argues that Milgram’s findings reflect interactional pressure: experimenters reassured participants, reframed their role, and made continuation appear necessary. In your hospital example, a senior clinician could reduce obedience pressure by inviting the junior nurse to verify the medication aloud and documenting the check. That small procedural change turns dissent from a personal risk into a shared safety practice. Does your example assume that the junior nurse has a formal mechanism to pause the task without being labeled difficult?

Reply 2

Hi [Classmate’s Name], you rightly distinguish conformity from obedience, but your claim that obedience depends mainly on fear of punishment needs qualification. Haslam, Reicher, and Van Bavel (2019) describe engaged followership, in which people harm others because they believe they are serving a valued cause, not because they are simply afraid. In Milgram-style research, participants often continued because they saw themselves as helping science, even while expressing discomfort. Doliński et al. (2017) similarly found high obedience in a modern Polish replication, indicating that the effect is not limited to a particular historical moment. Your workplace example could be strengthened by identifying the authority’s legitimacy: a manager may have formal power, but employees obey more readily when they believe the manager represents organizational goals. What evidence would show whether an employee complied because of fear, identification with the organization, or belief that the instruction was technically correct?