Adds meaning to the phrase "everything but the kitchen sink"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_sink
But when you said the incident was justification for behaving oneself,
the position seems like and appeal to fear. Besides simple "compliance
because of authority to punish" would just promote cheating when the
boss ain't looking. Pushing others with fear is doomed to fail because
people will naturally rebel and do what is supposed to be feared,
thank you;
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-fear.html
A better argument would be about reasons for internalizing ethical
standards for behaving properly;
Responses to Social Influence: Thus far, I have been describing two
kinds of conformity in more or less commonsensical terms. This
distinction was based upon (a) whether the individual was being
motivated by rewards and punishments or by a need to know and (b) the
relative permanence of the conforming behavior. Let us move beyond
this simple distinction to a more complex and useful classification
that applies not only to conformity but to the entire spectrum of
social influence. Instead of using the simple term conformity, I would
like to distinguish among three kinds of responses to social
influence:
[1] - Compliance
[2] - Identification
[3] - Internalization.
-------------------------------------------
[1] - Compliance.
The term compliance best describes the behavior of a person who is
motivated by a desire to gain reward or avoid punishment. Typically,
the person's behavior is only as long-lived as the promise of reward
or the threat of punishment. Thus, one can induce a rat to run a maze
efficiently by making it hungry and placing food at the end of the
maze. Chances are that a ruthless dictator could get a percentage of
his citizens to indicate their allegiance by threatening them with
torture if they don't comply or by promising to feed and enrich them
if they do. On the level of compliance, most researchers see little
difference between the behavior of humans and other animals because
all organisms are responsive to concrete rewards and punishments.
Thus, remove the food from the goal box and the rat will eventually
stop running; remove the food or the threat of punishment and the
citizens will cease showing allegiance to the dictator.
[2] - Identification.
Identification is a response to social influence brought about by an
individual's desire to be like the influencer. In identification, as
in compliance, we do not behave in a particular way because such
behavior is intrinsically satisfying; rather, we adopt a particular
behavior because it puts us in a satisfying relationship to the person
or persons with whom we are identifying. Identification differs from
compliance in that we do come to believe in the opinions and values we
adopt, although we do not believe in them very strongly. Thus, if we
find a person or a group attractive or appealing in some way, we will
be inclined to accept influence from that person or group and adopt
similar values and attitudes—not in order to obtain a reward or avoid
a punishment (as in compliance), but simply to be like that person or
group. I refer to this as the good-old-Uncle-Charlie phenomenon.
Suppose you have an uncle named Charlie who happens to be a warm,
dynamic, exciting person; ever since you were a young child, you loved
him and wanted to grow up to be like him. Uncle Charlie is a corporate
executive who has a number of strong opinions, including a deep
antipathy to social welfare legislation. That is, he is convinced that
anyone who really tries can earn a decent wage and that, by handing
money to people, the government only succeeds in eliminating their
desire to work. As a young child, you heard Uncle Charlie announce
this position on several occasions, and it has become part of your
system of beliefs—not because you thought it through and it seemed
right to you or because Uncle Charlie rewarded you for adopting (or
threatened to punish you for not adopting) this position. Rather, it
has become part of your belief system because of your liking for Uncle
Charlie, which has produced in you a tendency to incorporate into your
life that which is his.
[3] - Internalization.
The internalization of a value or belief is the most permanent, most
deeply rooted response to social influence. The motivation to
internalize a particular belief is the desire to be right. Thus, the
reward for the belief is intrinsic. If the person who provides the
influence is perceived to be trustworthy and to have good judgment, we
accept the belief he or she advocates and we integrate it into our
system of values. Once it is part of our own system, it becomes
independent of its source and will become extremely resistant to
change.
Let us discuss some of the important distinguishing characteristics of
these three responses to social influence. Compliance is the least
enduring and has the least effect on the individual because people
comply merely to gain reward or to avoid punishment. The complier
understands the force of the circumstance and can easily change his or
her behavior when the circumstance no longer prevails. At gunpoint, I
could be made to say almost anything; but with the threat of death
removed, I could quickly shrug off those statements and their
implications. If a child is kind and generous to his younger brother
in order to obtain a cookie from his mother, he will not necessarily
become a generous person. He has not learned that generosity is a good
thing in itself; what he has learned is that generosity is a good way
to get cookies. When the cookie supply is exhausted, his generous
behavior will eventually cease unless that behavior is bolstered by
some other reward (or punishment). Rewards and punishments are
important means of inducing people to learn and perform specific
activities but they are very limited techniques of social influence
because they must be ever present to be effective—unless the
individual discovers some additional reason for continuing the
behavior. This last point will be discussed shortly.
Continuous reward or punishment is not necessary for the response to
social influence I call identification. The person with whom the
individual identifies need not be present at all; all that is needed
is the individual's desire to be like that person. For example, if
Uncle Charlie moves to a different city and months (or even years) go
by without your seeing him, you will continue to hold beliefs similar
to his as long as (1) he remains important to you, (2) he still holds
the same beliefs, and (3) these beliefs are not challenged by
counteropinions that are more convincing. But, by the same token,
these beliefs can be changed if Uncle Charlie has a change of heart or
if your love for Uncle Charlie begins to fade. They can also change if
a person or group of people who are more important to you than Uncle
Charlie profess a different set of beliefs. For example, suppose you
are away at college and you find a group of new, exciting friends who,
unlike Uncle Charlie, are strongly in favor of social welfare. If you
admire them as much as (or more than) your uncle, you may change your
beliefs in order to be more like them. Thus, a more important
identification may supersede a previous identification.
The effect of social influence through identification can also be
dissipated by a person's desire to be right. If you have taken on a
belief through identification and you are subsequently presented with
a convincing counterargument by an expert and trustworthy person, you
will probably change your belief. Internalization is the most
permanent response to social influence precisely because your
motivation to be right is a powerful and self-sustaining force that
does not depend upon constant surveillance in the form of agents of
reward or punishment, as does compliance, or on your continued esteem
for another person or group, as does identification.
It is important to realize that any specific action may be due to
either compliance, identification, or internalization. For example,
let us look at a simple piece of behavior: obedience of the laws
pertaining to fast driving. Society employs highway patrol officers to
enforce these laws, and as we all know, people tend to drive within
the speed limit if they are forewarned that a certain stretch of
highway is being carefully scrutinized by these officers. This is
compliance. It is a clear case of obeying the law in order to avoid
paying a penalty. Suppose you were to remove the highway patrol. As
soon as people found out about it, many would increase their driving
speed. But some people might continue to obey the speed limit; a
person might continue to obey because Dad (or Uncle Charlie) always
obeyed the speed limit or always stressed the importance of obeying
traffic laws. This, of course, is identification. Finally, people
might conform to the speed limit because they are convinced that speed
laws are good, that obeying such laws helps to prevent accidents, and
that driving at a moderate speed is a sane and reasonable form of
behavior. This is internalization. And with inter-nalization you would
observe more flexibility in the behavior. For example, under certain
conditions—at 6 o'clock on a Sunday morning, with perfect visibility
and no traffic for miles around— the individual might exceed the speed
limit. The compliant individual, however, might fear a radar trap, and
the identifying individual might be identifying with a very rigid
model; thus, both would be less responsive to important changes in the
environment.
Let us look at the major component in each response to social
influence. In compliance, the important component is power—the power
of the influencer to dole out the reward for compliance and punishment
for noncompliance. Parents have the power to praise, give love,
provide cookies, scream, give spankings, withhold allowances, and so
on; teachers have the power to paste gold stars on our foreheads or
flunk us out of college; and employers have the power to praise,
promote, humiliate, or discharge us. The U.S. government has the power
to increase economic aid to or withhold it from a dependent nation.
Thus, the government can use this technique to persuade a small
country in Latin America to hold a more or less democratic election.
Rewards and punishments are effective means for producing this kind of
compliance, but we might ask whether or not mere compliance is
desirable: To induce a nation to hold a democratic election is easier
than to induce the rulers of that nation to think and rule
democratically.
In identification, the crucial component is attractiveness—the
attractiveness of the person with whom we identify. Because we
identify with the model, we want to hold the same opinions that the
model holds. Suppose a person you admire takes a particular stand on
an issue. Unless you have strong feelings or solid information to the
contrary, there will be a tendency for you to adopt this position.
Incidentally, it is interesting to note that the reverse is also true:
If a person or group that you dislike announces a position, there will
be a tendency for you to reject that position or adopt the opposite
position. Suppose, for example, that you dislike a particular group
(say, the Nazi party in the United States), and that group speaks out
against raising the minimum wage. If you know nothing about the issue,
your tendency will be to favor raising the minimum wage—all other
things being equal.
In internalization, the important component is credibility—the
credibility of the person who supplies the information. For example,
if you read a statement by a person who is highly credible— that is,
someone who is both expert and trustworthy—you would tend to be
influenced by it because of your desire to be correct. Recall our
earlier example of the diplomats at the Freedonian dinner party. Your
acceptance of their expertise made their behavior (belching after the
meal) seem the right thing to do. Accordingly, my guess is that this
behavior (your tendency to belch after a meal at the home of a
Freedonian dignitary) would become internalized; you would do it,
thereafter, because you believed it to be right.
Recall the experiment on conformity performed by Solomon Asch, in
which social pressure induced many subjects to conform to the
erroneous statements of a group. Recall further that, when the
subjects were allowed to respond in private, the incidence of
conformity dropped considerably. Clearly, then, internalization or
identification was not involved. It seems obvious that the subjects
were complying with the unanimous opinion of the group in order to
avoid the punishment of ridicule or rejection. If either
identification or internalization had been involved, the conforming
behavior would have persisted in private.
The trichotomy of compliance, identification, and internalization is a
useful one. At the same time, it should be made clear that, like most
ways of classifying the world, it is not perfect; there are some
places where the categories overlap. Specifically, although it is true
that compliance and identification are generally more temporary than
internalization, there are circumstances that can increase their
permanence. For example, permanence can be increased if an individual
makes a firm commitment to continue to interact with the person or
group of people that induced the original act of compliance. Thus, in
an experiment by Charles Kiesler and his colleagues, when subjects
believed that they were going to continue interacting with an
unattractive discussion group, they not only complied publicly, but
they also seemed to internalize their conformity—that is, they changed
their private opinions as well as their public behavior. This kind of
situation will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5.
Permanence can also result if, while complying, we discover something
about our actions, or about the consequences of our actions that makes
it worthwhile to continue the behavior even after the original reason
for compliance (the reward or punishment) is no longer forthcoming.
This is called a secondary gain. For example, in behavior modification
therapy, an attempt is made to eliminate unwanted or maladaptive
behavior by systematically punishing that behavior, by rewarding
alternative behaviors, or both. For example, various attempts have
been made to use this technique as a way of helping people kick the
cigarette habit. Individuals might be given a series of painful
electric shocks while performing the usual rituals of smoking — that
is, while lighting a cigarette, bringing it up to their lips,
inhaling, and so on. After several trials, the individual will refuse
to smoke. Unfortunately, it is fairly easy for people to notice a
difference between the experimental situation and the world outside:
They realize they will not be shocked when smoking outside of the
experimental situation. Consequently, a person may later experience a
little residual anxiety when lighting a cigarette, but because
electric shocks are clearly not forthcoming, the anxiety eventually
fades. Thus, many people who temporarily cease smoking after this form
of behavior modification will eventually smoke again after electric
shock is no longer a threat. How about those who stay off cigarettes
after behavior modification? Here is the point: Once we have been
induced to comply, and therefore do not smoke for several days, it is
possible for us to make a discovery. Over the years, we may have come
to believe it was inevitable that we awaken every morning with a
hacking cough and a hot, dry mouth, but after refraining from smoking
for a few weeks, we may discover how delightful it feels to have a
clear throat and a fresh, unparched mouth. This discovery may be
enough to keep us from smoking again. Thus, although compliance, in
and of itself, usually does not produce long-lasting behavior, it may
set the stage for events that will lead to more permanent effects.
The Social Animal - Elliot Aronson - 8th Edition 1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/
