AQA A-Level Psychology

What conformity is

Conformity is a change in a person's behaviour or beliefs as a result of real or imagined pressure from a group. It is not the same as simply doing what one is told, which is obedience, because nobody in the group gives an order; the pressure comes from the fact that everyone else is doing or believing something.

Types of conformity

Kelman (1958) distinguished several ways in which a person can go along with a group, and two of them matter here.

Compliance is going along with the group in public while privately keeping one's own view. The change in behaviour lasts only as long as the group is watching, and it is usually a response to the wish to be accepted or to avoid disapproval. A person who laughs at a joke they find unfunny because the rest of the room is laughing is complying.

Internalisation is the deepest form of conformity. The person accepts the group's view as their own, both in public and in private, so the change lasts even when the group is no longer present. It happens when the group's beliefs seem to be correct, as when a person who joins a new community comes to share its values and keeps them after leaving.

A third type, identification, sits between the two: the person adopts the views of a group they want to belong to, because they value being a member, but without necessarily believing them privately once they leave.

Explanations for conformity

Deutsch and Gerard (1955) proposed two processes, each linked to a different motive.

Informational social influence

Informational social influence (ISI) is conformity that arises because a person wants to be right. When a situation is ambiguous, or a person lacks knowledge, they look to others as a source of information and assume the majority knows better. It is most likely when the task is difficult or the answer is unclear, and when other group members are seen as experts. Because the person comes to believe the group is right, ISI usually produces internalisation: the change is private as well as public.

Normative social influence

Normative social influence (NSI) is conformity that arises because a person wants to be liked and accepted. People fear rejection and ridicule, so they go along with the group's norms to gain approval. The person does not necessarily change their private opinion, so NSI usually leads to compliance. It is strongest in situations where the group can see what the person does, and among people who are particularly concerned about being accepted.

Evaluating the two explanations

• There is good support for both. In Asch's studies, participants who gave their answers privately conformed much less than those who answered aloud in front of the group, which fits NSI, and conformity rose when the task was made harder, which fits ISI.
• The two are hard to separate in practice, because both often operate together. A dissenting group member reduces conformity, which could be because the dissenter provides an alternative source of information (weakening ISI) or because they make it less frightening to disagree (weakening NSI), and the results cannot say which.
• NSI does not affect everyone equally. Individual differences matter: people who strongly want to be accepted, sometimes called nAffiliators, conform more. This means NSI cannot explain all conformity in a group.
• Studies of ISI and NSI have mostly used student samples in laboratory settings, so it is uncertain how far the findings apply to everyday conformity.

Asch's research

Asch (1951) wanted to know whether people would conform to a majority even when the majority was clearly wrong. His procedure became the standard way of studying conformity.

Procedure

A group of male American undergraduates (123 in the main study) were told they were taking part in a study of visual perception. Each sat in a room with a group of others, all of whom were confederates (people acting under the researcher's instructions). The task was to say which of three comparison lines matched a standard line. The differences were obvious; when people did the task alone, they made fewer than 1 per cent errors.

The real participant sat near the end of the row and answered last or second to last. There were 18 trials, and on 12 of these (the critical trials) the confederates all gave the same wrong answer, with the aim of seeing whether the participant would follow.

Findings

• On the critical trials, about one third (32 per cent) of answers conformed to the majority's wrong answer.
• About three quarters of the participants conformed at least once.
• About a quarter never conformed on any trial.

Afterwards, in interviews, many participants said they had gone along with the group because they did not want to be ridiculed, even though they knew the answer was wrong (compliance, from NSI). Others said they had come to doubt their own judgement, which fits ISI.

Variables affecting conformity

Asch changed aspects of the procedure to see what increased or decreased conformity.

Group size

Conformity increased as the number of confederates rose, but only up to a point. With one confederate, conformity was very low; with two it rose; with three it reached close to the level found with larger groups, and adding more beyond about three made little further difference. Later research has not always agreed, and some studies have found that conformity keeps rising with larger groups, so the exact point at which the effect levels off is debated.

Unanimity

Conformity fell sharply when the majority was not unanimous. If one confederate gave the correct answer, so that the participant had an ally, the level of conformity dropped substantially. This was true even when the dissenter gave a different wrong answer from the majority. The dissenter seems to make it easier to resist because the group is no longer united, which reduces both the pressure to be accepted and the doubt about one's own judgement.

Task difficulty

When the lines were made more similar in length, so that the task was harder, conformity increased. A harder task makes the participant less sure of their own answer and so more likely to look to others for information, which supports the ISI explanation.

Evaluating Asch

• The study was a controlled laboratory experiment with a clear procedure that other researchers could repeat, and it produced consistent findings, so it has high internal validity.
• The task was artificial. Judging line lengths matters little to anyone, and the group was made up of strangers whom the participant would never meet again, so there was little reason to worry about their opinion. Conformity in everyday life, where the stakes and relationships are real, could be different. This criticism concerns ecological validity.
• The sample consisted only of American male students, so the results may not apply to women or to other cultures. Perrin and Spencer (1980) repeated the line task in Britain with science and engineering students and found almost no conformity, which suggests the original result reflected the time and place (1950s America, a period of conservative social pressure) rather than something universal. It has also been argued that conformity is more common in collectivist cultures, which place greater value on group harmony than individualist cultures do.
• Deception was used, since participants did not know the others were confederates, and they could have experienced some distress during the task, so there are ethical concerns.
• Asch's finding that most responses were independent is sometimes overlooked: about two thirds of all responses on critical trials did not follow the group.