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Conformity
- 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
- Yielding to group pressure
because a person wants to
fit in with 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
- 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)
- Normative Social Influence
- Key study: Asch (1951)
- Aim
- To investigate conformity due to majority
influence
- 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
- 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
- Solomon Asch recruited 123 male
students from Swarthmore College in
the USA to participate in a 'vision test'
- 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
- This shows a high level of conformity,
called The Asch effect - the extent
which people conform in an
unambiguous situation
- For the 12 critical trials,
36.8% of ppts agreed with
the confederates wrong
answers
- 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)
- 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)
- 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)
- Evaluation
- Strengthens
- Weaknesses
- Strengthens
- 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
- Introduced a truthful confederate or a confederate who
was dissenting but inaccurate
- 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
- Line-judging task made harder by making the stimulus line and the
comparison lines more similar in length
- 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
- The number of confederates varied between 1 & 15
- Unanimity
- Aim
- Herbert Kelman (1958) suggested that there are
three ways in which people conform to the opinion
of a majority
- Compilance
- Internalisation
- Identification
- Compilance
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