In the story The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, the townspeople as a whole are reacting to peer pressure. They overcome their own personal revulsion to arbitrarily selecting one of their members by lottery draw to be stoned to death by the rest of the people (Jackson). This type of behavior has been demonstrated in laboratory experiments, beginning in the 1950s with a series of experiments at Rutgers University in which students were asked to match figures and everyone was instructed to give erroneous answers at one point except one student (Asch 308). The experimenter wanted to see if the one person could withstand the pressure of the group to act independently and give the correct answer. Experimental conditions were varied, sometimes having one person side with the independent individual for a while and then switch to the majority, and in some cases leave the room. The presence of another person in agreement made it easier for the independent to remain so, but on his switching to the majority, the independent often felt abandoned and so switched too. However, if the person agreeing with them left the room, the positive effect on independence and faith in one's own decision remained strong. These experiments demonstrated the effect of group pressure on an individual to conform.
In The Lottery, only one person hesitates to go to the stoning of the woman, telling her friend to go ahead, and that she will catch up (Jackson 340). The rest of the town blindly follow tradition and their fellow townspeople and begin stoning the woman selected. Milgrom carried out experiments on obedience in 1963 to see how far people would go in inflicting pain on others for no other reason than experimentation when instructed to do so by Milgrom (Milgrom 314). Under the guise of looking at the effect of punishment on learning, one student acts as a teacher and administers electric shocks to a learner. The teacher is the subject of the experime...