Conformity

• Conformity - when a person‘s behaviour / thinking changes as a result of group pressure. This pressure does not have to be explicit.
• Kelman 3 types of conformity - compliance, identification, internalisation.
• Compliance - going with others in public due to group pressure.
• Identification - publicly changing behaviour to fit in with a valued group.
• Internalisation - genuinely accepting a group‘s norms, leading to private and public change of behaviour.
• Deutsch and Gerard - “Two reasons we need to conform: the need to be right, and the need to be liked”.
• Informational Social Influence - you accept other’s behaviour because you believe they are likely to be right.
• Normative social influence - we accept people’s behaviour when we do not want to be judged.
• AO3 - Normative influence has support from US research showing a relationship between people’s normative beliefs and their likelihood of doing something.

  Linkenbach and Perkins - adolescents exposed to the fact most people their age don’t smoke are less likely to.
• AO3 - there are issues distinguishing compliance and identification. Defining public compliance and private acceptance is complicated. This means there is difficulty applying these types of conformity.
• Asch 1951 - examines the extent to which social pressure can affect someone to conform.
• Asch - students asked to participate in a test with several confederates. They had to call out which looked most like a first line from three options. The confederates called out fake answer, even though the answer was obvious.
• Asch - on average, participants conformed to 32% of the trials. When interviewed, they said they did it in order to fit in.
• Asch’s variables affecting conformity - difficulty of the task, size of the majority, unanimity of the majority.
• Asch difficulty of the task - if the correct answer was less obvious, more people conformed.
• Size of the majority - majority 1 or 2 = lower conformity.

  majority 3 or 4 = conformity up 30%.

  adding more than 3 has little effect.
• Unanimity of the majority - when given a confederate supporter, conformity dropped to 5.5% from 32%
• Asch AO3 - America was dominated by McCarthyism in the 50s, making people afraid to be “different”. This caused people to be conformist. This means results aren’t very consistent over time, and might not be applicable today.
• Asch AO3 - judging lines in a room of strangers is not applicable to everyday life. This lowers ecological validity. However Asch replied to this - he would like an investigation where students had no doubt on the correct answer.
• Asch AO3 - the study used a biased sample of 123 American students. This study is androcentric and cannot be applied to other cultures.
• Stanford Prison Experiment - healthy willing men assigned into groups of “prisoners“ and “guards” randomly. Guards were there to keep prisoners under control.
• Prisoners - “arrested” from their homes unexpectedly and taken to the university.
• Prisoners - stripped, deloused and given a number to be referred to instead of their names. No individuality.
• Guards - were given uniforms and mirrored sunglasses to prevent eye contact and emotional connection.
• Prisoners - had to stay in their cells for 23 hours a day
• Guards - got to go home at the end of their shift.
• Zimbardo - the experiment got called off after 6 days instead of two weeks. The guards had become too brutal and the prisoners had become apathetic.
• Zimbardo - all participants had conformed to their social roles.
• AO3 Zimbardo - the study broke too many ethical guidelines. There was no protection from harm. And the participants had no right to withdraw.
• Zimbardo AO3 - the study maintained ecological validity. The situation was tightly controlled, prisoners and guards were randomly allocated. Prisoners were arrested from their homes.
• Zimbardo AO3 - individual differences were not considered. Zimbardo stated that the situational factors caused conformity to social roles. However guard behaviour varied drastically, some were sadistic, while some were helpful. This means that situational factors are not the only cause - but dispositional factors are too.
• Zimbardo AO3 - Abu Ghraib. A real life situation where situational factors (lack of training, boredom, no accountability) with an opportunity to abuse power led to the abuse of prisoners performed by guards. This shows that situational factors can contribute to a person‘s likelihood of conforming to a social role, as stated by Zimbardo.
• Asch AO3 - we only saw conformity in around a third (32%) of the time. This means that in two thirds of the trials, participants still used their own answer despite the confederate majority. Therefore the study indicates that we are more likely not to conform, rather than conform, questioning conclusions drawn by the original study.
• Asch AO3 - the study lacked ecological validity. Participants knew it was a psychology experiment so they would be less likely to conform. Also, the task was artificial and unrealistic. So this makes it difficult to generalise findings to everyday situations.