Conformity + Asch

• Conformity


  Change in behaviour or belief because of group pressure
• Reasons for conformity


  • Normative social influence: someone changes to fit in to get approval or avoid disapproval
  • Informational social influence: people conform because they don't know what to do so look to others for guidance
• Types of conformity

  • Compliance: person agrees in public but doesn't change personal beliefs
  • Identification: person takes on views of group but doesn't fully change their own private beliefs
  • Internalization: person changes views as they are accepted groups belief
• Asch

  Showed different lengths of a line and made participants match a line that was the exact same size
• Asch's experiments

  1. Tested group size

  2. Tested unanimity

  3. Tested task difficulty
• Group size


  • As group size increased, conformity increased
• Unanimity

  • Introducing a confederate that disagreed with the rest of the group, conformity decreased
• Task difficulty

  • Increasing the difficulty of the task, conformity increased
• Androcentric


  Only men were tested so results can't be generalised to women as they conform in different ways, as shown by Larson's study
• Ethnocentric


  Only tested American men so results can't be generalised to other cultures, conformity norm in 1950s America - individualism didn't become popular until 1960s - likely to have affected results as participants grew up in an environment that placed great value on conformity
• Time validity

  Social climate changes and Larsen found lower conformity rates when replicating Asch's study in different time periods
• Smith and Bond carried out a meta-analysis and found variations in conformity across various cultures and within cultures
• The study took place in an artificial environment with an artificial task, which isn't representative of real-world situations
• Strength of NSI


  • Evidence supports it as an explanation of conformity
  • When participants wrote their answers down, conformity fell to 12.5% because giving answers privately meant there was no normative group pressure
  • At least some conformity is due to a desire not to be rejected by the group for disagreeing with them
• Strength of ISI


  • Research evidence supports it from the study by Todd Lucas et al. (2006)
  • Participants conformed more often to incorrect answers they were given when the maths problems were difficult because when the problems were easy the participants "knew their own minds' but when the problems were hard the situation became ambiguous (unclear) and the participants did not want to be wrong, so they relied on the answers they were given
  • ISI is a valid explanation of conformity because the results are what ISI would predict
• • It is often unclear whether it is NSI or ISI at work in research studies (or in real life)
  • Asch (1955) found that conformity is reduced when there is one other dissenting participant, but it is unclear whether the dissenter reduces the power of NSI (because they provide social support) or they may reduce the power of ISI (because they provide an alternative source of social information)
  • Both interpretations are possible
  • It is hard to separate ISI and NSI and both processes probably operate together in most real-world conformity situations
• Individual differences in NSI

  • NSI does not predict conformity in every case
  • Some people are greatly concerned with being liked by others (nAffiliators) and they are more likely to conform
  • There are individual differences in conformity that cannot be fully explained by one general theory