Types of Conformity

Question 1

What is conformity?

Answer 1

A type of social influence that describes how a person changes their behaviour in response to group pressure.

Question 2

What are the 3 types of conformity?

Answer 2

Compliance, Identification, Internalisation

Question 3

What is compliance?

Answer 3

• The shallowest level of conformity.
• A person changes their public behaviour & the way they act but not their private beliefs.
• This is a short-term change and is a result of NSI

Question 4

What is identification?

Answer 4

• The middle level of conformity.
• A person changes their public behaviour & their private beliefs but not only in the presence of the group.
• This is a short-term change and is a result of NSI

Question 5

What is internalisation?

Answer 5

• The deepest level of conformity.
• A person changes their public behaviour & private beliefs.
• This is a long-term change and a result of ISI.

Question 6

What are the explanations for conformity?

Answer 6

Normative social influence:
- When a person conforms to be accepted because it is socially rewarding and to avoid social rejection. It is a short-term change and is associated with compliance & identification

Informational social influence:
- When a person conforms to gain knowledge because they believe that someone else is ‘right’ or the majority are ‘experts’. It is a long term change and is associated with internalisation.

Question 7

Evaluate explanations for conformity

Answer 7

• Asch’s 1951 study provides research support for NSI since many participants went along with the obviously wrong answer. When asked after the experiment why the participants did this, they said they changed their answer to avoid disapproval from the group which shows compliance caused them to conform to fit in.
• Individual differences play a role in explaining social influence: Perrin & Spencer 1980 conducted an Asch-style experiment but they used engineering students in the UK. Only one conforming response was found out of the 400 trials. This could be because students felt more confident and less pressured to judge line lengths based on their experience in engineering. However, the difference could be due to historical bias since the studies were done almost 30 years apart where rapid social changes would have occured.

Question 8

Key study: Asch

Answer 8

Asch 1951
Aim: To examine the extent social pressure has on conforming to an unanimous majority in unclear situations

Method: 123 American male undergraduate students believed they were taking part in a vision test. Asch placed on real (naive) participant in a room which 6-8 confederates who agreed one their answers beforehand. They were presented with a line-judgement task and had to say out loud in turns which line was most like the target line in length. The answer was always obvious however confederates always gave the wrong answer to see if the participant would conform

Results: The real participant conformed on 32% of the trials to the wrong answer. 74% conformed at least once and 26% never conformed.

Conclusion: Asch interviewed the participants after and asked them why they conformed. Majority said that they knew the answer was incorrect but still conformed to it to avoid being ridiculed and to fit in. This shows that participants complied due to NSI to fit in publicly without changing their private belief.

Question 9

Evaluate Asch

Answer 9

• Asch’s study lacks population validity since he used a biased sample of 123 male students in America. We cannot generalise his results to other populations or to females. We are unable to conclude if females would react similarly.
• Asch’s study has low levels ecological validity since the line judgement task is an artificial task and does not reflect conformity in everyday life. This means the task lacks mundane realism since we cannot generalise the results to everyday life

Question 10

Which factors did Asch test in his variations?

Answer 10

Group size:
-His variation to test how group size affected the rate of conformity ranged from 1 to 15 confederates.
-Participants conformed on 3% of the trials when there was 1 confederate. When the group size increased by 2, the rate of conformity increase to 12.8%, when there were 3 confederates the rate of conformity increase to 32% which was the same percentage in Asch’s original study of 6-8 confederates. This shows conformity reaches its highest level with just 3 confederates.

Unanimity:
-Refers to the extent members agree with one another.
- In his variation a confederate gave the correct answer throughout all the trials and the rate of conformity dropped to 5%. This shows if the participant has support for their belief, they are more likely to resist the pressure.
-In another variation one of the confederates gave a different incorrect answer to the rest of the group throughout the trials and the rate of conformity still drooped to 9%. This shows if you break the groups unanimous position, conformity can be reduced significantly even if the answer given is incorrect.

Task difficulty:
- In this variation, Asch made the task more difficult by making the lengths of the lines smaller. The rate of conformity increased. This is a result of ISI since the participant would look to the group for guidance when undertaking an ambiguous task in order to be ‘right’.

Question 11

Asch: issues & debates

Answer 11

• He only used a sample of male students which is beta bias since we cannot apply the results to females or conclude that they would react in a similar way to conformity
• Explanations for conformity (NSI/ISI) have a nomothetic approach as they attempt to provide general principles to human behaviour when under pressure by a group.