Social Influence - Conformity (24-Oct-2002)

• Social Influence is the effect that other people have on our behaviour
• Social norms define what is "normal" in society - they are unwritten rules that govern behaviour.
• Social norms are useful and provide order and organisation - they are the glue that holds society together.
• Social norms change depending on:
  • social context - e.g. the way you behave in a pub will be different from the way you behave in church
  • culture - e.g. Victorians found it easy to talk about death but not sex; now it's the other way round


• Conformity is defined by Crutchfield as "yielding to group pressure"; or by Zimbardo & Leippe as "a change in belief or behaviour in response to real or imagined group pressure when there is no direct request to comply with the group nor any reason to justify the behaviour change"
• Two reasons for conforming:
  • Normative Conformity occurs when we "go along" with a group because of the desire to be liked, or accepted. The result of normative conformity is compliance, where although the behaviour changes to conform with the group, the private opinion remains unchanged.
  • Informational Conformity occurs when the group appears more knowledgeable about a situation, and so is assumed to be correct. In this case, the result is internalisation, where both private opinion and public behaviour change to correspond with the group view.


• Some people argue that certain behaviours are contagious (e.g. yawning, laughing) and that this explains conformity

Asch

(See Asch study sheet)

Sherif(1935) conducted an experiment where subjects were asked to make a judgement based on an ambiguous task - that is, one which has no definite "right" or "wrong" answer. This is a bit like being asked to estimate how many pebbles are in a jar. Sherif found that when participants could hear each others answers, they tended to converge on a single answer, or group norm, which represented the average of the individual estimates.

Asch(1951) believed that this conformity was due to the fact that the task was ambiguous, and devised an experiment where subjects were given a task which had a definite correct answer. In this experiment, subjects were shown a card with a "standard" line drawn on it, and asked to say which of a set of three lines on another card was the same length as the standard line. They participants were told that this was an experiment into aspects of visual perception.

During the experiment, all but one of the subjects were confederates of the examiner (or "stooges"), and on certain occasions gave deliberately wrong answers. Asch expected that in this case, the participants would not conform with the rest of the group, because to do so would mean giving an answer which was obviously incorrect.

Asch found that in 32% of cases, the participant did go along with the incorrect answers given by the "stooges". During debriefing the participants justified this behaviour by saying:

• they hadn't wanted to be "different"
• they had doubted their own ability/eyesight
• they were worried about messing up the experiment
• they said what they thought the experimenter wanted to hear
• they thought perhaps they were looking at an optical illusion

Most of the participants said that they knew they were giving the wrong answer (i.e. "normative" conformance), but a small proportion insisted that they had been giving the correct answer.

Asch didn't know whether the results were a one-off, and so did follow-up studies, changing certain aspects of the experiment. Some of the important factors turned out to be:

• Group size : for a group with one stooge, the conformance rate was very low (3%). With two stooges, the rate rises to 14%, and with 3, the 32% figure reported in the original experiment. Larger group sizes don't seem to raise the rate of conformance above this figure.
• Unanimity : conformity is most likely to occur when the stooges are unanimous in their answers.
• Task Difficulty : the harder a task, the more conformity rises. This is because the task becomes more ambiguous (like the one used by Sherif).

Since the 1951 experiment, doubt has been cast on the generalisability of Asch's findings. The type of participant (male college student) and cultural climate (McCarthyism) may have influenced the rate of conformity that Asch saw.

Subsequent attempts to repeat Asch's experiment (see Weblinks (1)) have by and large not shown such a large degree of conformity, and seem to indicate that the rate of conformity does depend on the social context and cultural factors. for example, when this type of experiment is performed in countries that might be described as having a collectivist culture (e.g. Japan, Fiji, certain African countries), relatively high rates of conformity are seen. But in societies that are more individualistic such as France, UK in the time of Thatcher, relatively low rates of conformity are seen.

Comments on Asch's study

• Asch's experiment can be said to lack mundane realism. That is to say, it's unlikely that in real life you'd find yourself looking at lines and trying to decide whether they're equivalent. Also, in the experiment there was no opportunity for the participants to reserve judgement - they were required to give an answer.
• Asch's experiment had high experimental realisim. That is to say that the participants believed what they were told about what was going on - they didn't suspect that other participants were confederates of the examiner. We know this because they showed signs of stress when they gave answers that were out of line with the stooges. This raises ethical issues - is it right to put volunteers in this situation?

References

1. Psychology: A New Introduction for A Level (2nd edition), Gross et al : Chapter 6

1. Paul Webley's page on "The Asch effect" at www.ex.ac.uk/~PWebley/psy1002/asch.html

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Homework

Fill in the Study Sheet for Asch's experiment

Study: Asch 1951

Aims: To establish the extent that group pressure can influence an individual to conform to that group's way of thinking.

Procedure: A set of participants is seated around a table. Each participant in turn is shown a card which has a "reference" line drawn on it, and another card which has three labelled lines. The task of the participant is to state publically which of the three labelled lines matches the reference line. In each case, the task is designed to be easy. In fact, all but one of the participants are confederates of the examiner, and, on a secret signal from the examiner, will deliberately provide an incorrect answer. The test is designed so that the "innocent" participant is the penultimate person to have to answer, and so by the time his turn comes, he will have heard most of the other "participants" answer, and so be subject to pressure to conform with the rest of the group.

Findings: Depending on the size of group, it was found that participants agreed with the incorrect majority answer in 32% of trials. This rate of conformance was lower when the group size (and number of confederates) was smaller, but remained fairly constant when there were three or more confederates in the experiment.

Conclusion: From this experiment alone, we could conclude that a group exerts a strong influence on an individual to conform, especially when the individual is in a minority of one.

Strength: Asch had not expected to see such a high degree of conformity. The fact that the results of the experiment were not what he expected suggests that this was a well-designed and useful experiment: rather than confirming the experimenter's prejudice, it provided information which challenged it.

Criticism 1: It is likely that the high degree of conformance observed by Asch was in part a product of the prevailing social climate (in the time of McCarthyism). Subsequent attempts to repeat the experiment have not shown such high rates of conformance, which casts doubt on the generalisability of the results

Criticism 2: The experiment must have been very time-consuming, since only one "real" participant could be tested on each iteration.