Conformity: Flashcards
Conformity and Internalisation:
-conformity: the tendency for an individual to align to their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours with those of the people around them
-internalisation: the deepest type of conformity in which people change their beliefs permanently, so the beliefs become part of their way of seeing the world
Compliance and Internalisation:
-Kerman (1958) argued that we can distinguish between different types of conformity
-compliance: the individual conforms publically but put privately disagrees with the view that they express
-internalisation: some views are adopted at a deeper, permanent level and they become part of the person’s own way of viewing the world
Asch (1951):
-Asch believed conformity was a rational process in which people work out how to behave from other people’s actions
-he wanted to assess what would happen when an individual was confronted with a group who were plainly wrong in their judgement, to see if the individual would change their view to agree with the majority
-Asch recruited 123 male, white students and asked them to take part in a “task of visual perception”
-they were placed in groups of 7 to 9 and seated around a large table
-participants were shown two cards: the target line and then 3 more where 1 matched that one
Asch 1951: techniques
-participants were asked to call out in turn which of the 3 comparison lines, A,B, or C matched the standard line in length
-each group carried out of a total of 18 trials
-to manipulate group pressure, the group was made of confederates who has been instructed to give the same wrong answer in 12 out of the 18 trials
-the real participant sat towards the end of the table, so they were exposed to the incorrect answer repeatedly before giving their own view
-ethics: as the trials progressed, participants became increasingly anxious and self-conscious regarding their answers, and some reported feeling of stress
Asch 1951: findings
-the overall conformity rate was determined by how many times the participants gave the same wrong answer as the confederates
-overall conformity rate = 37%
-Asch also found individual differences in conformity:
-5% of the participants conformed on every critical trial, these could be seen as the most conformist
-25% remained completed independent, they gave the correct answer in all 12 critical trials and chose to stick to their viewpoint despite considerable group pressure
-most participants who conformed claimed they knew that the rest of the group was worng, but conformed because they didn’t want to stand out
-a small number wondered if their perceptions were inaccurate and doubted their eyes
-conclusion: people conform for two main reasons: because they want to fit in with group (normative influence) and because they believe the group is better informed than they are (informational influence)
Asch’s study: evaluate
Positives:
-internal validity
-easily replicated
Negatives:
-reductionist
-biased sample
-population validity
-generalisability
-ethics: deception and protection from harm
-ecological validity
Normative social influence and Informational social influence: + explanations for conformity
-Normative social influence: conformity based on the desire to be liked and accepted
-Informational social influence: conformity based on the desire to do the right thing
-the dual process dependency model (Deutsch and Gerard, 1955) identifies two reasons for conformity:
-the desire to be accepted
-the desire to be right
Normative Social Influence:
-occurs when someone conforms because of their need to be accepted by and belong to the group
-this may be because they think belonging to the group is rewarding
-individuals may personally and privately continue to disagree but conform on the surface (compliance)
-normative social influence was the reason given for conforming by most of Asch’s participants
Informational Social Influence:
-in some social situations, people may be unsure of how to behave or unclear as to how they think or feel about an issue
-as a result, they may conform because they don’t know what to do or say -> the drive for conformity is the desire to do the right thing
-in Asch’s experiment, a small minority of people doubted their own eyes and thus agreed with the confederates, showing informational social influence
Factors Affecting Conformity: Group Size
-Asch altered the number of confederates in his study
