Conformity

• Compliance is where a person may agree in public but privately will still hold their own views
• Identification is when an individual feels a sense of group membership and changes private views as well as public views
• Compliance is the shallowest type of conformity as internalisation is the deepest
• Internalisation is a meaningful form of 'conversion' as the views of the group are taken on permanently
• Jenness procedures into conformity : people had to guess how many sweets were in a jar, a few people were asked to write their answers down under a sheet of fake answers, the rest of the participants didn't have access to this.
• Jenness found that the answers given by the people who read the fake answers were significantly higher than the rest of the group
• Jenness concluded that people conformed to write higher answers as they were influenced and under pressure
• Conformity is a type of social influence involving a change in belief/behaviour in order to fit in with a group. The change is in response to real (physical presence of others) or imagined (pressure of social norms) group pressure
• The 2 explanations for conformity are normative social influence and informational social influence
• Informational social influence is the desire to be right and when we conform because we are unsure of the situation, so we look to others who we believe may have more information than us
• Normative social influence is when we conform to fit in with a group because we want to be liked and not appear foolish
• Asch's aim was to investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform
• Asch's procedure was putting a naïve participant in a room with 7 confederates, each person stated which comparison line was most like the target line, the answer was always obvious. The real participant gave their answer last.
• In Aschs study, the confederates gave the wrong answer in 12 out of 18 trials.
• The results to Asch's study : 1/3 of the participants conformed to the wrong answer and 75% conformed on at least 1 trial
• After Asch's study participants said they didn't believe their conforming answers but had gone along with the group in fear of being ridiculed, a few said they really did believe the group answer was correct
• Variations of Asch's procedure:

  Size of group - conformity increases as group size increases to a certain point (4-5 people)

  Non-conforming role model - if one person gave a different answer to the group, conformity dropped as much as 80%

  Difficulty of task - when comparison lines were made similar in length, conformity increased
• Unanimity means the extent that members of a majority agree with one another
• Confidence, gender, culture and giving answers in private impact the rate of conformity
• Strengths of Asch study: 1. Asch used a standardised procedure (same for everyone who did it) 2. 75% of participants conformed 3. good control over extraneous variables
• Limitations of Asch study: 1. lacks external validity 2. demand characteristics 3. ignores individual variables