Social Influence

Question 1

What are the 3 types of conformity? Can you explain each one?

Answer 1

1. Compliance: going along with the group usually due to NSI - private views and beliefs remain but public behaviour changes to ‘fit in’
2. Identification: Adopting role related behaviours (teacher, parent, soldier etc). Private views remain the same but public behaviour alters when operating in the role.
3. Internalisation: the deepest level of conformity where both public and private views and beliefs change. Often due to ISI.

Question 2

What is NSI?

Answer 2

Normative social influence. This is one of the reasons for conformity. We want to fit in to the norms of the group in order to feel part of it. We may disagree with the group views but we join and behave in the same way to ‘be part of the group’[

Question 3

What is ISI?

Answer 3

Informational Social Influence: We sometimes conform as we believe the group has more information than ourselves. We have a desire to be right so adopt the behaviour of the group who we think might know more than ourselves.

Question 4

What did Solomon Asch investigate?

Answer 4

Solomon Asch conducted an experiment to investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform

Question 5

What were the basic procedures of his investigation? What did he do?

Answer 5

Using a line judgment task, Asch put a naive participant in a room with seven confederates/stooges. The confederates had agreed in advance what their responses would be when presented with the line task.

The real participant did not know this and was led to believe that the other seven confederates/stooges were also real participants like themselves.
There were 18 trials in total, and the confederates gave the wrong answer on 12 trails (called the critical trials). Asch was interested to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view.

Asch’s experiment also had a control condition where there were no confederates, only a “real participant.”

Question 6

What did Asch find ?

Answer 6

Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the majority view. On average, about one third (32%) of the participants who were placed in this situation went along and conformed with the clearly incorrect majority on the critical trials.
Over the 12 critical trials, about 75% of participants conformed at least once, and 25% of participants never conformed.

In the control group, with no pressure to conform to confederates, less than 1% of participants gave the wrong answer.

Question 7

Which 3 variables did Asch find affected conformity rates?

Answer 7

• Group size - conformity increased upto an optimum group size of 3
• Task difficulty - when the task was more difficult (ambiguous) and the lines were close in length conformity rates increased
• Unanimity - conformity rates were higher when the confederates were unanimous in their judgement. When one confederate answered correctly the social support meant that the participant’s conformity dropped sharply

Question 8

What did Asch conclude in his line study?

Answer 8

When they were interviewed after the experiment, most of them said that they did not really believe their conforming answers, but had gone along with the group for fear of being ridiculed or thought “peculiar.

A few of them said that they really did believe the group’s answers were correct.

Apparently, people conform for two main reasons: because they want to fit in with the group (normative influence) and because they believe the group is better informed than they are (informational influence).