Conformity

• Internalization

  Person believes or agrees with a group of people as they have accepted the groups point of view or belief, publically and privately, 'desire to be right', permanent
• Normative Social Influence


  Someone conforms in order to fit in or avoid seeming different - leads to compliance
• Asch's Research (1951, 55) - Procedure


  Showed two large white cards at a time: standard line and comparison lines

  One of the three lines were the same size as the standard lines and the others were wrong and participants were asked which lines matched
• Asch's Research (1951, 55) - Procedure


  123 American male undergraduates, each naive participants were not aware that the rest were confederates (all confederates were to give same answer)
• Asch's Research (1951, 55) - Findings


  Each participant took part in 18 trials, on 12 'critical' trials confederates gave wrong answers

  36.8% of the time, participant gave wrong answer

  25% did not conform on any trial

  75% conformed at least once
• Asch's Variation

  1. Group Size
  2. Unanimity
  3. Task Difficulty
• Group Size

  With three confederates, conformity rose to 31.8%

  Addition of confederates had less of an impact
• Unanimity

  The presece of dissenting confedarates meant that conformity was reduced by a quarter than when the majority was unanimous. Presence of dissenter allowed naive participant to act more independently
• Task difficulty


  Made the task more difficult as standard line and comparison lines were more similar - conformity increased. Informational social influence plays a huge role
• Evaluation -

  'Child of its time' McCarthiyism, 1950's conformist time
• Evaluation -

  Sample Bias - all male participants, Neto (1995) suggests women may conform more than men as they care about social relationships and acception
• Evaluation -


  Artifical situation and task - knew they were in research study and could've gone along with what is expected (demand characteristics), tasks were very trivial.
• Fiske (2014)


  Asch's 'groups were not very groupy'
• Evaluation +


  Lucas et al (2006) people conformed more when tasks became more difficult
• Social roles


  These are 'roles people play as members of various different social groups - includes parents, teachers, children and students. These are accompanied by our preconceived notions of what is expected and appropriate behaviour.
• Stanford Prison Experiment

  Following reports of brutality by guards in America 1960's

  Zimbardo wanted to know if 'prison guards behave brutally because they have sadistic personalities or is the situation that creates these behaviours
• Stanford Prison Experiment - Procedures


  Set up a mock prison in the basement of psychology unit in stanford univerdity