Obedience and Defiance in the Corps

The term obedience refers to a person's change in behavior caused by a direct command from an authority figure (Milgram, 1963). The reason that obedience is tricky in the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M for freshmen is because the people that are training you are at the most three years older than you, and the sophomores who really get in your face were in your exact position only a year ago. Still as a freshman, everyone is your superior except other freshman, so you do what they say including class sets of push-ups (your class year plus 100, so for class of '11 = 111), memorize and recite campusologies (information about the college which range from 3-70 lines), sprint through the hallways of the dorm, sit a certain way at outfit meeting, always have your shirt tucked in with a belt, the list goes on and on.

However, if they just smacked you in the face with all of these new rules from the beginning, no one would ever stay in the Corps. To get you to stay in the Corps, they use the foot-in-the-door technique which starts with easy requests and gradually builds to more demanding requests (Cialdini, 2007). For example, one requirement is that you greet all upperclassmen whenever you see them. To make this easy, at first you don't know theirs names, so you simply call them Mr./Ms. Smith. Then you have to call them by their real names. Then you have to call them by their names, hometown, and major. So a process that starts with "Howdy Mr./Ms. Smith, sir/ma'am" ends with "Howdy Mr./Ms. (last name) sir/ma'am, from (city, state), taking (major) sir/ma'am". A seemingly impossible tasks when you first arrive with 300 band members to meet. But when you chose to be in the Corps, and they start with Mr./Ms. Smith, by the time you get to "greeting three deep", you have a self-image that you're able to fulfill that requirement. Plus there is some serious effort justification going on by then.

Defiance, or refusing to follow orders from an authority, can be contagious (Levine, 1969). This is why in the Corps, even defiance is obedience. There is one way you're allowed to be deviant in the Corps, and everything else is strictly punished. This defiance is called a "pull-out". During a pull-out you defy some rule such as refusing to do push-ups or dumping a bucket of water on the sophomores as they burst into your room at 5:30 to wake you up with the sweet sound of them yelling at the top of their lungs. Under no circumstances are some rules to be broken though. For example, you never pull-out upperclassmen's first names. One of my buddies called an upperclassman by her first name one time (because we know them all, but we're just not allowed to say it), and the punishment was 15 minutes of straight push-ups. The catch was that the buddy who said the name didn't do them with us, but called count as we did them. He was crying by the time we were done, and no one ever did that again.

Cialdini, R. B. (2007). Influence: The psychology of persuasion. New York: HarperCollins.

Levine, J. M. (1989). Reaction to opinion deviance in small groups. In P. B. Paulus (Ed.), Psychology of group influence (2nd ed., pp 187-231). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371-378.