Conformity

Explainations
1. Normative Social Influence
  1. Yielding to group pressure because a person wants to fit in with the group
  2. Conforming because the person is scared of being rejected by the group
2. Informative Social Influence
  1. 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
3. 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)
Key study: Asch (1951)
1. Aim
  1. To investigate conformity due to majority influence
2. Procedure
  1. Solomon Asch recruited 123 male students from Swarthmore College in the USA to participate in a 'vision test'
    1. On each trial, participants identified the length of a standard line
  2. Each participant completed 18 trials, 12 of which were 'critical trials' - where confederates gave the wrong answer
3. Findings
  1. For the 12 critical trials, 36.8% of ppts agreed with the confederates wrong answers
    1. This shows a high level of conformity, called The Asch effect - the extent which people conform in an unambiguous situation
    2. Considerable individual differences: 25% of ppts never gave a wrong answer, 75% conformd at least once
4. Conclusions
  1. 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)
  2. People tend to confirm due to majority influence
    1. 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)
5. Evaluation
  1. Strengthens
  2. Weaknesses
6. Variations
  1. Unanimity
    1. Introduced a truthful confederate or a confederate who was dissenting but inaccurate
    2. Presence of dissenting confederae reduced conformity, whether the dissenter gave the right or wrong answer
  2. Task difficulty
    1. Line-judging task made harder by making the stimulus line and the comparison lines more similar in length
    2. 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
  3. Group size
    1. The number of confederates varied between 1 & 15
    2. 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
Herbert Kelman (1958) suggested that there are three ways in which people conform to the opinion of a majority
1. Compilance
2. Internalisation
3. Identification

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Conformity

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	Erstellt von Amelia G vor etwa 5 Jahre