Conformity and Resistance Flashcards
What is conformity and resistance relevant to?
relevant to social change campaigns, teams & working groups and trend forecasting
what is the definition of conformity?
aligning one’s behaviour or expressed attitudes and beliefs with social norms or others’ behaviour. Conformity does not require internalisation.
what is the definition of norms?
implicit or explicit rules or principles that guide or constrain behaviour. Norms are understood by members of a group and applied without the force of laws.
What is the early explanation of conformity?
Sherif claims we use norms to explain ambiguity and others provide information for us about the world
What is the autokinetic effect?
- illusion in which a point of light in a dark room appear to be moving
- participants how much the light was moving
- when alone, individuals come up with their own distinct estimates -> all measurements differed distinctly
- when responding in groups, they converged on common estimates -> conformity also infers overtime using each other for information and becoming a group norm
- norms help resolve uncertainty -> we use other people to disambiguate the world
Asch ->
Participants were asked to say out loud which of the three lines on the right are the same lengths as the one on the left
* answer is obviously C and there’s no ambiguity
What dod they find when participants were alone?
correct 99% of the time
What happened when there was a group of confederates who provided wrong answers?
Average conformity rate -> 33%
* people gave the wrong answer 33% of the time
What percentage of participants answered correctly consistently?
25%
* which means 3/4s moved towards the group norm
What percentage of participants conformed on 6 more critical trials (out of 12)
50%
* more going on, than just ambiguity the information
What was the percentage when participants recorded their responses privately?
12.5%
Which situation made the norm more powerful?
Answering in Public
When the confederate was in the minority, what did the participant do?
ridicule the confederate
What is Asch’s experiment a representation of?
Normative Influence
What are three main influences to why we conform?
- Informational Influence
- Normative Influence
- Referent Informational Influence
Informational Influence
one accepts information from another as evidence about reality (to disambiguate the situation).
e.g., “They must know something I don’t know.”
Normative Influence
one conforms to gain social approval or to avoid social disapproval/ostracism.
e.g., “Going along with the crowd.”
Referent Informational Influence
one conforms to the norm of a group when one’s membership in that group is important or salient (identify with group to you answer with the group).
e.g., “That’s what people like me do.”
What is Illusory Norms?
when we think there’s a norm but it actually isn’t out there as a norm
* our perception of norms is not always accurate but our behaviour may nevertheless be shaped by those perceived norms
What is Pluralistic Ignorance?
Conforming to what one mistakenly believes is the majority view, despite not personally endorsing it (Katz et al, 1931 -> shift behaviours from own preferences to the imaginary norm and start reinforcing a norm you don’t even believe in).
False Consensus Effect (Ross et al, 1977): When one overestimates the degree to which attitudes or beliefs are shared by others.
* Task: Participants were asked to wear a sandwich board around campus.
* “What we’d like you to do today is to put on one of these sandwich boards and walk around the campus for about 30 minutes.”
* Measure 1: Will you wear the sandwich board?
* Measure 2: What percentage of your peers do you estimate would agree to wear the sandwich board?
They found that:
- 50/50 split on whether they’d wear the sandwich board
- Willing to wear the sign, overestimated the amount others would be willing to wear the sign
- Not willing to wear sign, overestimate the amount of others who would not be willing to wear the sign
^ believe we share the view of every other person
A recent study examined pluralistic ignorance in the context of intergroup interactions.
* Participants: Black and White students at an Stanford American University. Initial studies demonstrated that both groups wanted more intergroup friendships.
* Scenario: “You enter the dining hall for dinner. You are alone because your close friends are in a review session. As you look around the dining hall for a place to sit, you notice several White [Black] students who live near you sitting together. These students also notice you. However, neither of you explicitly makes a move to sit together.”
Measures:
* Did this happen because you/they were not interested in sitting together?
* Did this happen because you/they were afraid of rejection?
What did they find when other students in the story were white?
- among white participants -> don’t think it was a fear of rejection, they just had a lack of interest with sitting with them and vice versa
- among black participants -> didn’t join because they feared rejection and there was a lack of interest from the white students at the table
What was the opinion when the other students were black?
- white participants -> had a fear of rejection and black students probably weren’t interested in them sitting there
- black participants said it wasn’t rejection, but they weren’t interested in sitting with each other
What does the Pluralistic Ignorance experiment draw as a conclusion?
false norm shapes our behaviour and perpetuate lack of intergroup behaviours
The costs of non-conformity are _ and _
emotional and social