The famous Stanley Milgram experiment highlighted how authority figures can prompt people to give excessive punishments to people, even when the subject was clearly in considerable distress.  New research from Brown University explores whether our peers can have a similar impact.

The researchers conducted a number of experiments with several hundred participants, all looking to explore how our peers influence our willingness to punish other people for misdemeanors of varying severity.

The experiments revealed that people tended to dole out sterner punishments the more pro-punishment people were in their group, with some combinations resulting in people becoming 40% more likely to recommend punishing a perpetrator.

Social context did appear to play a part however, with those placed in a jury like context seemingly less likely to be swayed by their peers than those placed in other contexts.  It transpired that people were using their peers’ preferences as a guidepost for the value they should place on punishment, while the group consensus also emboldened them to make decisions that conformed to that consensus.

“When punishment is delegated to groups, there’s the benefit of pooling people’s preferences and perspectives, but it also introduces the danger that people will conform to the group’s preferences,” the authors explain. “In real-world contexts, such as a jury, there’s a possibility that being part of a group will make everyone within the group less cautious about their decisions—that may be sufficient to convince some people to conform to the majority opinion, and that creates increasingly large majorities that eventually convince everyone else.”

Adaptive conformity

The authors believe that while these results may seem a dangerous example of groupthink in action, this conformity to the group norms may actually have played a part in human survival.

“People use each other as a reference points all the time because it is adaptive and helpful for gathering information,” they say. “Looking to other people, and how they approach a justice dilemma, can—although not always—be a useful thing.”

While the findings are undoubtedly interesting, the authors concede that more work is required before too firm a conclusion is reached on the way group norms influence our willingness to punish others, or indeed in other forms of moral decision making.