Conformity Flashcards
What is conformity?
- when a person changes their attitudes or behaviour due to real or imagined group pressure
What is compliance?
- the lowest level of conformity
- a person changes their public behaviour but not their personal beliefs
- short term
- usually due to normative social influence
What is identification?
- middle level of conformity
- person changes their public behaviour and personal beliefs whilst in the presence of the group they are identifying with
-short term - usually due to normative social influence
What is internalisation?
- deepest level of conformity
- person changes both their public behaviour and personal beliefs
- long term change
- usually due to informational social influence
What is informational social influence?
- we follow the behaviour of the group because we want to be right
- most likely to happen in new situations or when theres ambiguity
What is normative social influence?
- people prefer to gain social approval rather than be rejected
- fitting into the norms of a social group
Research support for ISI
P: one strength is evidence support
E: when Asch interviewed his participants, they said they conformed because they didn’t want to be ridiculed by the group. When PP’s wrote their answers down, conformity fell to 12.5%
E: giving answers privately meant there was no group pressure
L: some conformity is due to the pressure of fitting in
Individual differences in NSI
P: weakness is NSI doesn’t predict conformity in every case
E: people greatly concerned with being liked by others are called nAffiliators
E: they have a strong need for affiliation, so are more likely to conform
L: NSI underlies conformity for some people more than it does for others. There are individual differences in conformity
Research support for ISI
P: research support
E: Lucas found that participants conformed more to incorrect answers during maths problems
E: when the problems became difficult and pp’s no longer ‘knew their own minds’, conformity increased
L: ISI is a valid explanation of conformity
Counterpoint to evidence for ISI
- unclear whether ISI or NSI is at work
- Asch found that conformity is reduced when there is one dissenting participant because they provide social support
- dissenter may reduce the power or NSI and ISI
- therefore is is hard to separate them
What was Asch’s aim?
- to investigate the extent to which group pressure from a majority group could affect a persons likelihood to conform
What was Asch’s procedure?
- 123 male American students
- line judgement task
- one PP and seven confederates
- 18 trials in total, and confederates gave the incorrect answer 12/18 times
What were Asch’s findings?
- 36% of participants conformed to the clearly incorrect majority
- 75% of participants conformed on at least one trial
- 5% of participants conformed to all 12 incorrect answers
What conclusion did Asch make?
- when interviewed, most participants said they did not believe their conforming answers, but went along with the group in fear of being ridiculed
- normative social influence
Group size
- conformity decreases when there is only one confederate
- when there are 4 confederates instead of 7, conformity stays the same
Unanimity
- when there are more people in the group all giving the wrong answer, conformity stays the same
Task Difficulty
- when the task is more difficult conformity increases
- when the task is easier, conformity decreases
Artificial situation and task - weakness of Asch’s research
P: task and situation were artificial
E: participants knew they were in a research study and may simply have gone along with what was expected
E: there was no consequence or reason for conforming so findings can’t be generalised to the real world
L: research doesn’t reflect conformity in real world situations
Limited application - limitation of Asch’s research
P: it is a limited application
E: may be culturally biased. All of Asch’s participants were men.
E: the USA is an individualist culture where people are more concerned with themselves rather than the social group. Collectivist cultures have found higher rates of conformity
L: Asch’s findings tell us little about conformity in other cultures
Research support - strength of Asch’s research
P: support from other studies for the effects of task difficulty
E: Lucas asked participants to solve easy and hard maths problems. PP’s were given answers from three other confederates
E: participants conformed more when problems were harder
L: Asch was correct that task difficulty affects conformity
Counterpoint to Research support for Asch’s study
- conformity is more complex than Asch suggested
- participants with high confidence with their maths abilities conformed less on hard tasks than those with low confidence
- an individual level factor can influence conformity
