Conformity

Question 1

Define Conformity

Answer 1

Yielding to group pressure because behavior is influenced by a larger group of people (majority)

Question 2

What are the 3 types of Conformity?

Answer 2

• Compliance
• Identification
• Internalisation

Question 3

What is Compliance?

Answer 3

• Changing your behavior/opinion to fit in a group to gain acceptance
• Public behavior is changed but Private thoughts stay the same

Example:
Telling your friends that you studied for a test because they all did but in reality you slept

Question 4

What is Identification?

Answer 4

• TEMPORARILY altering your behavior/belief to fit in a certain group
• Original behavior stays the same when the group isn’t there (only changes in the presence of the group)
• Private and Public thoughts are changed TEMPORARILY

Example:
Changing your political views when hanging out with a certain group

Question 5

What is Internalisation?

Answer 5

• PERMANENTLY altering your behavior/belief due to exposure to a group’s belief
• Beliefs are seen to be correct therefore it leads to Public and Private acceptance

Example:
Changing your religion

Question 6

What is Informational Social Influence (ISI)?

Answer 6

• When individuals conform because they look up to the group for information in order to be correct.
  Especially when the individual is uncertain snd doesn’t know what the correct thing to do is
• This may lead to Internalisation because it results in Private acceptance go the group’s opinion

Question 7

Evaluate Informational Social Influence (ISI)

Answer 7

Strength:
Jenness’ study supports the ISI explanation of conformity.
Participants may have conformed to the group’s estimate of how many jelly beans were in the jar because they believed the groups to be experts as they were unsure of their answers.
They were looking up to the group for the correct answer

While Jenness provides convincing evidence for the role of ISI, it must be noted that his experiment has been criticised for lacking ecological validity.
Providing an estimate of the number of beans in a jar is a rather mundane task with no social consequences.
Consequently, it is legitimate to question whether we would display such levels of ISI in tasks that have more significant social consequences, for example, hearing evidence in a court case from an ‘expert’ barrister.
Therefore, until further research examining ISI is conducted in the real world, these results remain confined to the laboratory.

Question 8

What is Normative Social Influence (NSI)?

Answer 8

• When and individual conforms because they want to be accepted by the majority.
  They want to be liked and respected because rejection is painful
• This may lead to Compliance because they are agreeing with the majority but not necessarily believing what they say

Question 9

Evaluate Normative Social Influence (NSI)

Answer 9

Strength:
Interviews with Asch’s participants said that they knew the correct answer but conformed due to fear of being ridiculed.
This supports the NSI because it suggests that we do conform to be accepted and to avoid rejection.
Participants made statements during debriefing like “I didn’t want to be the odd one out” or “I didn’t want to look stupid”

Question 10

Evaluate both Normative Social Influence (NSI) and Informational Social Influence (ISI)

Answer 10

Strength:
Sometimes both the processes are involved. For example, Conformity is reduced when there is one other dissenting participant in the Asch experiment.
This dissenter may reduce the power of NSI (because the dissenter provides social support) or may reduce the power of ISI (because there is an alternative source of information)

This shows that it isn’t always possible to be sure whether NSI or ISI is at work. This is the case in LAB studies, but even truer in real-life conformity situations outside the lab.
This casts serious doubt over the view of ISI and NSI as 2 processes operating independently in conforming behavior

Question 11

What was the aim and method of Asch’s study?

Answer 11

Aim
- To create an unambiguous task to investigate the extent to which individuals will conform to a majority who give obviously wrong answers

Methods
- He took 123 male American undergraduate students and they each took turns to join a group of confederates to take part in a task.
The real participant didn’t know that the rest of the people taking part in the task were all confederates and they thought they were real participants, like themselves.
There were between 7 and 9 people in a group, so the number of confederates were between 6 and 8.
All participants sat around a table with the real participant last or second to last.
All participants were shown 2 cards; one card with a standard line (labelled X) and another card with three comparison lines and participants had to select which line was most similar to line X. Confederates gave the correct answer on 6 of the 18 trials but on 12 of the trials the confederates all agreed on the same incorrect lines.
Asch’s wanted to see if the participant would agree with the majority and go for the obviously wrong line.

Question 12

What were Asch’s findings?

Answer 12

there was a 32% conformity rate

75% of participants confirmed at least once

25% of participants never conformed

5% confirmed on all of the 12 trials

Question 13

What did Asch conclude?

Answer 13

• The majority influence does not affect an individual, they will conform even when the majority id obviously wrong
• There are individual differences in the extent to which individuals are influenced by the majority

Question 14

Evaluate Asch’s study

Answer 14

Weakness:
- Biased sample –> All the participants were male students who all belonged to the same age group –> study lacks population validity –> results cannot be generalized to females or older groups of people.

Another problem –> experiment used an artificial task to measure conformity - judging line lengths –> How often are we faced with making a judgment like the one Asch used, where the answer is plain to see?

• Study has low ecological validity and the results cannot be generalized to other real-life situations of conformity.

Weakness:
- Ethical issues: participants were not protected from psychological stress –> occur if they disagreed with the majority.

Evidence that participants in Asch-type situations are highly emotional was obtained by Back et al. (1963) who found that participants in the Asch situation had greatly increased levels of autonomic arousal.

This finding suggests that they were in a conflict situation, finding it hard to decide whether to report what they saw or to conform to the opinion of others.

Question 15

What are the factors that affect conformity?

Answer 15

• Unanimity
• Task difficulty
• Anonymity
• Size of the majority

Question 16

Task difficulty

Answer 16

Asch made the right answer less obvious by having lines of similar length

Conformity INCREASED as participants were looking to the group for the correct answer

Question 17

Anonymity

Answer 17

When participants gave out anonymous answers

Conformity DECREASED

Question 18

Size of the majority

Answer 18

Asch changed the Size of the Majority

When the majority was SMALLER

Conformity DECREASED (fell to 13%)

Question 19

Define Social roles

Answer 19

The parts people play as members of various social groups

Question 20

What was the aim and method of Zimbardo’s study?

Answer 20

Aim:
To examine whether people would conform to the social roles of a prison guard or prisoner when placed in a mock prison environment.

Method:
Zimbardo’s sample consisted of 21 male university students who volunteered in response to a newspaper advert. The participants were selected on the basis of their physical and mental stability and were each paid $15 a day to take part. The participants were randomly assigned to one of two social roles, prisoners or guards.

Zimbardo wanted to make the experience as realistic as possible, turning the basement of Stanford University into a mock prison. Furthermore, the ‘prisoners’ were arrested by real local police and fingerprinted, stripped and given a numbered smocked to wear, with chains placed around their ankles. The guards were given uniforms, dark reflective sunglasses, handcuffs and a truncheon. The guards were instructed to run the prison without using physical violence. The experiment was set to run for two weeks.

Question 21

What were Zimbardo’s findings?

Answer 21

Found that both the prisoners and guards quickly identified with their social roles. Within days the prisoners rebelled, but this was quickly crushed by the guards, who then grew increasingly abusive towards the prisoners. The guards dehumanised the prisoners, waking them during the night and forcing them to clean toilets with their bare hands; the prisoners became increasingly submissive, identifying further with their subordinate role.

Five of the prisoners were released from the experiment early, because of their adverse reactions to the physical and mental torment, for example, crying and extreme anxiety. Although the experiment was set to run for two weeks, it was terminated after just six days, when fellow postgraduate student Christina Maslach convinced Zimbardo that conditions in his experiment were inhumane. [Maslach later became Zimbardo’s wife].

Question 22

What did Zimbardo conclude?

Answer 22

People quickly conform to social roles, even when the role goes against their moral principles. Furthermore, he concluded that situational factors were largely responsible for the behaviour found, as none of the participants had ever demonstrated these behaviours previously.

Question 23

Evaluate Zimbardo’s study

Answer 23

Weakness:
Zimbardo’s experiment has been heavily criticised for breaking many ethical guidelines, in particular, protection from harm.
Five of the prisoners left the experiment early because of their adverse reactions to the physical and mental torment.
Furthermore, some of the guards reported feelings of anxiety and guilt, as a result of their actions during the Stanford Prison Experiment.
Although Zimbardo followed the ethical guidelines of Stanford University and debriefed his participants afterwards, he acknowledged that the study should have been stopped earlier.

Strength:

• Variables were controlled
• (participants were randomly selected)
• This rules out the effect of individual differences
• It increases internal validity so we can draw conclusions about the influence of social roles on behaviour