Conformity Flashcards
What is conformity
Where the attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of someone in a particular group are adopted in response to group pressure
What are types of conformity
Compliance
Identification
Internalisation
Compliance
When someone publicly conforms to the behaviour or views of others in a group in order to be accepted or to avoid disapproval, but keeps their own views private.
Identification
Adjusting behaviour and opinions to those of a group because they identify with that group and want to be a part of it. Sees them as role models. Public acceptance and private rejection.
Internalisation
Conversion of private views to match those of a group, this behaviour or belief becomes part of their own belief system. Public and private acceptance.
Why do people conform
Normative social influence (NSI)
Information social influence (ISI)
Normative social influence
When people conform because they want to be liked by the other members of the group and want to avoid hate.
Informational social influence
Based on the desire to be right and occurs when we turn to others who we believe to be correct in attempt to gain information on how to think or act.
Research into conformity: Asch’s experiment
To investigate the degree to which individuals would conform to a majority who gave obviously wrong answers.
Asch’s experiment: Procedure
123 male US graduates
7-9 participants
Sat looking at lines matching one to the stimulus line.
Correct answer was obvious (unambiguous)
All except one were confederates
Asch’s experiment: Findings
37% of the critical trials were conformed on
75% conformed to atleast one wrong answer
25% never gave a wrong answer
5% conformed to all wrong answers
Asch’s experiment: conclusions
Participants said they conformed publicly in order to avoid rejection and disapproval.
Motivated by Normative social influence
Demonstrates a strong tendency to conform to group pressures even when the answer is clear.
Variables affecting conformity
Task difficulty
Group size
Unanimity
Task difficulty
Conformity increases when task difficulty increases, as the right answer becomes less obvious, confidence in our own judgement tends to drop.
Asch’s- made the stimulus line and other lines similar to eachother in lengths.
Group size
Conformity rates increase as the rates increase as the size of a majority influence increased.
Asch’s-varying the number of confederates.
Unanimity
The extent to which all members of a group agree. Rates have been found to decline when majority influence is not unanimous.
Asch’s- introduced a confederate who disagrees with the others sometimes correct or sometimes wrong answers.
Evaluation of Asch’s research into conformity
Methodology
Child of its time
Cultural bias
Ethical issues
Methodology
He conducted a controlled laboratory experiment. Means that he could control everything like changing the group size.
Child of its time
The investigation took place in a time where conformity was high, so therefore it made sense for the participants to conform. The 1950s was a particularly conformist time in America - it made sense to conform to established norms.
Cultural bias
One limitation is that it did not take cultural differences into account. The participants were all from the US. Which is an individualistic culture where people are more concerned with themselves than the social group.
Ethical issues
There were also ethical issues as they were deceived as they missed out on important information about the experiment. As a result lack of informed consent was and issue.
Conformity to social roles: Zimbardo SPE
To investigate the extent to which people would conform to the roles in a role-playing simulation of prison life.
Zimbardo-SPE: Procedure
Stanford university
24 male students, volunteers
All were psychologically/physically screened
Randomly allocated prisoner or guard
Zimbardo played prison supervisor
Zimbardo-SPE: Findings
Dehumanisation was apparent as the guards began to humiliate the prisoners and made them clean the toilets with their bare hands, being blindfolded and being given stocking caps to stimulate a bald head.
Deindividuation was also apparent as they were referring to eachother and themselves by their prison numbers.
Zimbardo-SPE: Conclusions
Everyone conformed to their social roles and therefore became a psychological threat to the prisoners health- therefore stopping the experiment.
