Influence of an Anonymous Stranger on a Routine Decision to Act or Not to Act: An Experiment in Conformity*

The purpose of the study was to investigate the impact of law-adhering and law-violating contexts on subject-behavior in a potentially law-violating situation in which the probability of negative sanctions was slight. Observations were made on subjects who had to make a decision either to violate or to adhere to a “Don't-Walk’ signal at the intersection with sparse traffic. The three specific conditions included the control-condition in which no model was present and the experimental conditions in which an anonymous male stranger, the experimenter's confederate, acted either as a law-adhering model or as a law-violating model. The presence of a law-adhering model significantly increases the rate of pedestrian-adherence to a minor legal restriction on the part of both males and females. After the ceiling effects arising from the design of the experiment were factored out, the results showed that a law-violating model has greater influence on subject-behavior than the law-adhering model does. In both the law-adhering and the law-violatin contexts, the model influences the behavior of females slightly more than he does the behavior of males.