Conformity

Conformity

1. Explainations

   • Normative Social Influence
     • Yielding to group pressure because a person wants to fit in with the group
     • Conforming because the person is scared of being rejected by the group
   • Informative Social Influence
     • Usually occurs when a person lacks knowledge and looks to the group for guidance or when a person is in an ambigious situation and socially comparies their behavious with the group
   • Deutsch and Gerard (1955) developed a two-process theory, arguing that there are two main reasons people conform. They are based on two central human needs: the need to be right (ISI) and the need to be liked (NSI)

2. Key study: Asch (1951)

   • Aim
     • To investigate conformity due to majority influence
   • Procedure
     • Solomon Asch recruited 123 male students from Swarthmore College in the USA to participate in a 'vision test'
       • On each trial, participants identified the length of a standard line
     • Each participant completed 18 trials, 12 of which were 'critical trials' - where confederates gave the wrong answer
   • Findings
     • For the 12 critical trials, 36.8% of ppts agreed with the confederates wrong answers
       • This shows a high level of conformity, called The Asch effect - the extent which people conform in an unambiguous situation
       • Considerable individual differences: 25% of ppts never gave a wrong answer, 75% conformd at least once
   • Conclusions
     • Most ppts said they conformed to avoid rejection (normative social influence) + continued to privately trust their own opinions (compliance - going along with others publicly, but not privately)
     • People tend to confirm due to majority influence
       • Apparently, people conform for two main reasons: because they want to fit in with the group (normative influence) and because they believe the group is better informed than they are (informational influence)
   • Evaluation
     • Strengthens
     • Weaknesses
   • Variations
     • Unanimity
       • Introduced a truthful confederate or a confederate who was dissenting but inaccurate
       • Presence of dissenting confederae reduced conformity, whether the dissenter gave the right or wrong answer
     • Task difficulty
       • Line-judging task made harder by making the stimulus line and the comparison lines more similar in length
       • Conformity increased when the task was more difficult; informational social influence plays a greater role when the task becomes harder and if the situation is more likely to look to others for guidance and assume they are right
     • Group size
       • The number of confederates varied between 1 & 15
       • With 2 confederates, conformity to the wrong answer was 13.6%; with 3 confederates it rose to 31.8% - although adding any more confederates made little difference

3. Herbert Kelman (1958) suggested that there are three ways in which people conform to the opinion of a majority

   • Compilance
   • Internalisation
   • Identification

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