Conformity

• Types of conformity:

  not all conformity is the same. People conform in different ways and for a variety of reasons, depending on the situation they are in. There are 3 types of conformity;

  • compliance
  • identification
  • internalisation
• Compliance:

  • this is where a person changes their behaviour to fit in with the group
  • they change their public behaviour; however, they do not change their private belief
  • it is not a permanent change in behaviour
  • for example, your friends are saying horrible things about a person. You go along with this and join in even though you like the person
• Identification:

  • this is where a person changes their behaviour as they want to be a member of that group
  • they change their public behaviour and their private belief
  • however, it is not a permanent change, once they leave the group their behaviour changes
  • for example, you join the army and get up early every morning and make your bed. Once you leave the army, this no longer happens
• Internalisation:

  • this is where a person changes their behaviour as they have accepted the groups belief as their own
  • they change their public and private belief as they believe that the group was right
  • it is also likely to be a permanent change
  • for example, you change your answer on a test as you see other people have a different answer and you believe there answer is correct and yours is wrong. You then believe that to be the correct answer going forward
• Study of conformity (Asch 1951) - aim:

  • Asch wanted to see if participants would change their answer to an obviously wrong answer just because of a majority opinion
• Study of conformity (Asch 1951) - method:

  • Asch conducted a lab experiment. He asked student volunteers to take part in a 'vision' test, although unbeknown to the volunteers, all but one of the participants were confederates (actors who know the real aim and play a role)
  • in total there were 123 male American undergraduates tested. Participants were seated one at a time in a room with approximately 7 confederates and asked to look at 3 lines of different lengths and a standard line. They were then asked to state, in turn 'which of the 3 lines is the same length as the standard line?'. The correct answer was obvious. Participants were always questioned in the same order - with the confederates going first and real participant last or second to last - this created a majority opinion
• Study of conformity (Asch 1951) - method:

  • the confederates were prompted to give the same incorrect answer on 12 of the 18 trials, these were called the critical trials
  • Asch was interested in whether people would stick to what they believed to be right, or cave into the pressure of the majority and go along with its decision
• Study of conformity (Asch 1951) - results:

  • participants conformed on 32% of critical trials
  • 75% of participants conformed at least once
  • 25% never conformed on any of the trials
  • less than 1% conformed in the control group
• Study of conformity (Asch 1951) - conclusion:

  • this shows that people do conform to fit in with the group, even though they know the answer is incorrect
• Variables affecting conformity:

  • Asch conducted lots of variations of his original study. This is where he kept all the research the same except for one change
  • he wanted to see what impact this had on conformity levels. From this he could see what variables affect conformity

  these include;

  • group size
  • unanimity
  • task difficulty
• Group size on conformity:

  • Asch changes the number of confederates ranging from 1 to 15
  • the bigger the majority the greater the conformity up to 3 confederates, then it remained constant at around 32%
  • this shows that a variables that affects conformity is group size, the smaller the group the less conformity, the bigger the group, the more conformity (up until a point)
• Unanimity on conformity:

  • Asch changed the study and included a confederate (dissenter) who did not conform and gave the correct answer, breaking the unanimous answer
  • conformity levels decreased to around 5%
  • this shows that a variables that affects conformity is unanimity, people are more likely to conform when there is a unanimous answer. When this is broken participants are less likely to conform
• Task difficulty on conformity:

  • Asch changed the task to make it more difficult. He did this by making the 3 comparison lines more similar to each other, making it harder to judge which was the correct answer
  • conformity levels increased
  • this shows that a variable that affects conformity is task difficulty. When the task is harder people are more likely to conform
• Evaluations for research into conformity:

  W - child of its time

  W - lacks ecological validity

  S - reliability

  W - ethical issues

  W - unrepresentative sample
• It's a child of its time (identify):

  • a weakness of Asch's research is that it is a child of its time
• It's a child of its time (explain):

  • Asch's studies were conducted in the 1950s. In the 1950s, the Us was in the grip of McCarthyism (where people were exposed and unfairly published in an attempt to ruin their reputation for going against the government)
  • this means that there may have been higher conformity than normal
  • Perrin and Spencer repeated Asch's study in the UK in the 1980s with science and engineering students. They found only 1 conformity response out of 396 trials
• It's a child of its time (conclusion):

  • this is a weakness of research into conformity because this questions the temporal validity of research into conformity as it can be argued that people are less conformist now and therefore it can be argued that Asch's study does not apply to modern day society
• Lacks ecological validity (identify):

  • a weakness of Asch's research is that it lacks ecological validity
• Lacks ecological validity (explain):

  • in all of Asch's studies it involved participants judging the lengths of lines whilst in the presence of others and a researcher
  • in everyday life this task is not likely to occur, so the conformity level displayed is not likely to be accurate to real life conformity (the levels may be different to tasks in real life)
• Lacks ecological validity (conclusion):

  • therefore, this questions the ecological validity of research into conformity, as Asch's study only demonstrates why people would conform in a controlled environment, where they may be subject to demand characteristics which would confound the results, meaning we may not be able to generalise the findings to levels of conformity in real life
• High replicability (identify):

  • a strength of Asch's research is that it is replicable
• High replicability (explain):

  • Asch's studies were lab experiments that used standardised procedures, for examples, all participants were shown the exact same lines in the exact same order
  • all of the confederates gave the same answers with each participant and were in the exact same order
  • this means it is very easy to repeat this study a number of times in different years and countries to see if they get the same levels of conformity or not
• High replicability (conclusion):

  • this adds to the internal validity and reliability of research into conformity as the controlled environment of Asch's research means only the IV could cause a change in the DV (levels of conformity), so we can be sure which factors affect conformity, allowing us to establish a cause and effect relationship
  • the research is also easily replicable by other researchers due to the empirical methodology, so can be deemed reliable
• Ethical issues (identify):

  • a weakness of Asch's research is that it breaks ethical issues
• Ethical issues (explain):

  • participants were deceived about the true aim of the experiment as they were told that the experiment was a vision test, when it was really testing conformity. They were also unaware that the other 'participants' were really confederates
  • therefore, as a result participants did not give fully informed consent
  • some may also argue that Asch caused psychological harm to the participants as they were put under pressure when faced with a majority influence that was incorrect
• Ethical issues (conclusion):

  • therefore this questions research into conformity as it breaks ethical issues and therefore lacks credibility
  • to improve it, there must be more control over ethical issues or conduct the research in a more ethical way
  • however, it could be argued that the deception was necessary to maintain the validity of the research and avoid demand characteristics
  • furthermore, there was a very low risk of harm and all participants were debriefed afterwards, meaning the costs are outweighed by the important knowledge the study discovered about conformity
• Unrepresentative sample (identify):

  • a weakness of Asch's study is that it uses an unrepresentative sample
• Unrepresentative sample (explain):

  • the sample consists of 123, male, American undergraduates
  • there is little variety between the participants meaning that the sample does not represent everyone in society and their conformity levels
• Unrepresentative sample (conclusion):

  • this questions the validity of Asch's study to explain conformity as due to it being unrepresentative, the findings cannot be applied to the target population
  • random/stratified sampling would make the findings more representative
• Culture bias:

  • all the participants in the Asch study were from America. America is an individualistic culture (where people are more concerned with themselves than the social group)
  • other cultures such as China are collectivist cultures (where they value the group more than the individual)
  • Bond and Smith (1996) conducted a conformity study on Chinese participants and found that conformity rates were much higher than what Asch found
• Gender bias:

  • Asch' study used only used males who may be unlikely to have similar conformity levels to women
  • Neto (1995) found that women have a higher level of conformity than men, and suggested that this might be due to them caring more about social relationships than men
• Explanations for conformity:

  there are two explanations for conformity;

  • normative social influence
  • informational social influence

  these explain the reasons why people conform and was created by Deutsch and Gerard (1955)
• Normative social influence:

  • this explanation explains why people conform due to compliance
  • this is where a person goes along with the majority due to fear of rejection/need to be liked
  • this is because the majority have the ability to include or exclude them from the group
  • this means that they change their behaviour due to emotional reasons (they do not want to be feeling left out) rather than cognitive ones
  • this then leads to change in their public behaviour but not their private belief and it is not a permanent change
• Informational social influence:

  • this explanation explains why people conform due to internalisation
  • this is where a person goes along with the majority as they want to be right/correct
  • it usually occurs in difficult/unusual/ambiguous situations
  • this is because the majority have the answer/knowledge that you require
  • this means that they change their behaviour due to cognitive reasons (they believe their own thinking to be wrong) rather than emotional reasons
  • this then leads to a public change as well as a private change as they accept the new information, this change is likely to be permanent
• Evaluation for explanations for conformity:

  NSI;

  S - support from Asch

  ISI;

  S - support from Asch variation

  S - support from Lucas

  both;

  W - individual differences - locus of control

  W - difficulty distinguishing between reasons for why conformity occurs
• Empirical evidence to support (identify):

  • a strength of normative social influence is that there is evidence to support this information from Asch
• Empirical evidence to support (explain):

  • Asch's main study found that participants conformed and gave the wrong answer at least once when it was very obvious which was the correct answer
  • this was due because the majority of participants said the incorrect answer and they wanted to be liked and fit in with the group
• Empirical evidence to support (conclusion):

  • this therefore adds validity to the dual process dependency model as an explanation for conformity, as Asch's study provides evidence that people conform due to normative social influence, based on their need to be liked
• Empirical evidence to support (identify):

  • a strength of informational social influence is that there's evidence to support this explanation from Asch
• Empirical evidence to support (explain):

  • Asch's task difficulty variation supports informational social influence
  • Asch conducted a variation where he made the task more difficult by making the lines closer in length
  • he found that conformity levels increased
  • this supports ISI as when the participants were less certain of their response due to an ambiguous answer, they looked to the majority for the correct answer, suggesting they conformed due to a need to be right