Conformity & Group Behaviour (DP IB Psychology): Revision Note

Conformity

• Conformity is a type of social influence which involves someone changing, adapting or taking on new behaviours to fit in with the group

• Conformity could also be known as majority influence, as people tend to want to conform to larger groups (bringing safety in numbers)

• Minority influence (conforming due to the influence of one person or a small group) does happen, but it is less common

Explanations of conformity

• Conformity can be explained as stemming from two different motivations:

  • Normative social influence (NSI): the need to be liked/accepted by the group (the fear of rejection)

  • Informational social influence (ISI): the need to know what to do (fear of social disapproval/humiliation)

Normative social influence (NSI)

• NSI occurs when an individual is keen to adopt the social norms of a specific group

  • E.g., Wearing black all the time because that is what the group do

• Someone is more likely to be affected by NSI if they feel that their behaviour and attitudes do not align with those of the group

  • E.g., 'I stopped going to church years ago but the group goes every week'

• This lack of cohesion with the group may cause anxiety, which in turn may lead to an adjustment in behaviour

  • E.g., 'I'm going to start attending church with the group so that they feel that I am one of them'

• NSI may involve an individual going against their inner beliefs, ideals or opinions in order not to be rejected by the group

  • E.g., Agreeing with the group that a new film is rubbish while secretly having enjoyed it

• NSI as an explanation of conformity is linked to compliance

• The essence of NSI is emotional, as it is based on the need to be liked and accepted

Informational social influence (ISI)

• Informational social influence (ISI) tends to take place when the individual is unsure and/or lacks knowledge about what to do or how to behave in a specific situation

  • E.g., On someone's first day at work, they will look to others for cues as to how to behave in the office, where to go at lunchtime, the appropriate dress code, etc.

• ISI occurs when the individual looks to the group for guidance

• ISI can occur when there is a crisis and a decision needs to be made quickly

  • The assumption that follows is that the group knows what to do (even if this assumption is incorrect)

• Someone is more likely to be affected by ISI if they are insecure about what is deemed 'right/wrong' behaviour

  • E.g., Someone collapses in the street but no one stops to help them, so the individual assumes that the situation is not serious; thus, no help is given

• ISI as an explanation of conformity is linked to internalisation

• The essence of ISI is cognitive, as it is based on information processing

The effect of conformity on group behaviour

• The effect of conformity on group behaviour is demonstrated effectively with this classic study from Asch (1951)

Aim:

• To investigate the effect of majority influence on behaviour.

Participants:

• 50 male students from a university in the USA

• The participants believed that they were taking part in a vision test (i.e., they did not know the true nature of the study, so were naive participants)

Procedure:

• One participant (who was always seated at the end of a row with seven confederates) is asked to state which of three lines to the right of a card is the same length as the line on the left of the card, for example:

• The experimenter then asks each participant in turn to state which of the three lines on the right of the card are the same length as the target line on the left of the card

• In the critical trials the confederates always give the same wrong answer, so the dependent variable is measured as the number of conforming answers to the wrong answer

Results:

• The rate of conformity was 32% on the critical trials (where confederates all gave the same wrong answer)

• 74% of the participants conformed at least once

• 26% of the participants did not conform on any of the trials

• In one variation Asch the participant took part in the procedure with no confederates present

  • Conformity in this condition was less than 1%

Conclusion:

• People will conform to giving an incorrect answer due to normative social influence

Evaluation of conformity & group behaviour

Strengths

• Understanding how majority influence affects the individual is useful on a number of levels:

  • Analysing crowd behaviour, particularly anti-social acts that may occur during protests

  • Knowing why some people are not given help in an emergency (also known as diffusion of responsibility)

• Asch's study is well controlled

  • The independent variable was manipulated while other variables were kept constant (e.g., the same line stimuli, the number of confederates, the placing of the participant in the row)

    • This means that it is high in reliability

Limitations

• Neither explanation for conformity explains why some people resist both NSI and ISI, e.g., freedom fighters, rebels, iconoclasts

  • The above observation means that both explanations for conformity cannot be generalised to everyone

    • to this extent they cannot account for individual differences

• It is rare for both NSI and ISI to be tested in real conditions

  • Most research in this field is lab-based

  • Lab-based research is low in mundane realism, which reduces the scope of its external validity

Link to concepts

Causality

• One of the key questions surrounding Asch's study is the extent to which demand characteristics invalidate the findings

  • Participants were asked to perform an unusual and highly artificial task, which may have led to the participants feeling self-conscious

  • Any self-consciousness would translate to them not behaving as they would with a less contrived task

  • The second demand characteristic is that the task is so easy and unambiguous

    • It is possible that participants gave the same wrong answer as the confederates simply because their answer was so obviously wrong that the participants may have wondered, ‘What do they know that I don’t? Is this a trick?’ and may thus have followed the wrong response more out of wariness than conformity

Bias

• Asch's study has both gender bias and culture bias due to its all-male, US sample

  • The findings do not account for how normative social influence might affect women or people from other cultures

• Participant bias is also an issue with this research

  • Participants respond differently to a task or situation because they are participating in a study, often because they wish to fit in with the group

    • In other words, the participants who conformed to the incorrect answer may not show a similar degree of conformity in real life