Conformity Flashcards
What is the aim of social psychology?
to understand and explain how cognition, emotion and behaviours are influenced by the presence of other people.
What is conformity?
following norms
What are norms?
Belief systems about how to behave reflecting the expectations of a group. Guides to action rather than laws.
Why are norms important?
reduce uncertainty about how to behave even in new situations as we can draw on similar situations.
they help to coordinate individual and group behaviour.
Descriptive norms
what people typically do in a similar situation
Injunctive norms
what people ought to do - sense of moral obligation
How do norms emerge?
from interactions with other people, especially those in the same social group.
Can be passed on through explicit instruction or demonstration or implicitly through non-verbal behaviours and standards or inferred from others behaviour.
Must be some level of communication of norms for them to have an effect on behaviour.
Are norms absolute and universal?
different norms exit in different contexts and are not universal across social groups and cultures.
it is possible for multiple norms to apply at once - if they conflict then we tend to turn to other individuals for information about how to act.
Normative influence
people conform out of a desire to be liked and not disliked.
not following norms can leave to ridicule and ostracisation.
illustrated by Asch’s line-length studies.
Informational influence (Deutsch and Gerard, 1955)
people conform out of a desire to be right.
other people can provide a frame of reference in ambiguous circumstances.
Illustrated by Sherif’s Autokinetic effect studies.
Referent informational influence
desire to feel part of a group so look to others to know the group norm.
combines normative and informational.
argued for by Turner
How is coordination a reason to conform?
sharing a common perspective optimises group performance.
practical reason.
illustrated by behaviour of people in lifts for example.
What was the aim of Sherif’s Autokinetic Effect Studies (1935;6)
Sherif was interested in the problem of truth and reality and wanted to investigate how people come to see particular views of the world as correct with an emphasis on the role that other people play in this process.
What is the autokinetic effect
an illusion observed by astronomers where if you look at a dot of light against a dark background, such as a star, it appears to move.
this is due to saccadic eye movements and the absence of a frame of reference.
ideal for studying how people make sense of ambiguous stimuli and situations.
What was the experimental procedure in Sherif’s Autokinetic Effect Studies?
Participants were placed in a dark room and shown a flash of light, 5m away for a few seconds.
they were asked to provide an accurate estimate of how much it moved.
There are two phases, individual and group, and participants are either in the individual-to-group condition or the group-to-individual condition.
Individual phase: 100 successive trials where participants make their judgements alone over 3 days.
group phase: participants make judgements aloud in groups of 3 for 3 days.
What were the results of Sherif’s Autokinetic Effect studies?
those who started in the individual phase developed their own persoal norms: a median estimate which they fluctated around with decreasing range in answers. large variation of 7” between individuals’ norms.
once put in a group personal norms converge to form a new group median/norm around which all their estimates fluctuate slightly.
for those who started in the group phase, group norms emerged straight away and persisted when they moved to the individual phase with only small variation found to persist when in new groups and when tested again a year later.
What did Jacobs and Campbell study in 1961?
They investigated how long the group norms developed in Sherif’s studies persist.
They placed a confederate with very high judgements in the room.
The same convergence was observed, although now higher than before.
The median persisted as every member of the room was replaced up until the 4th/5th generation.
Can extrapolate this to norms in society that exist despite no longer applying.
However MacNeil and Sherif found that more random and inaccurate norms decay faster.
Importantly this shows that for ambiguous stimuli, the norms can be adapted implicitly and develop until they are ultimately internalised.
What can we conclude from Sherif’s Autokinetic effect studies?
New norms arise to provide a social frame of reference for ambiguous situations to calibrate our own perceptions.
They are social products that continue to have meaning and influence long after being established.
This is generalisable outside the lab to everyday uncertain situations that lead to the creation of new norms that fit e.g covid - we wear masks to protect other people, especially the vulnerable/ make sure we don’t pass on corona. People who don’t do this are seen as selfish.
In terms of social psychology, he established that larger social structure must be considered in order to make sense of individual behaviour.
Ultimately layed the groundwork for social identity approach.
How did Alexander and colleagues (1970) criticise Sherif’s AKE studies?
Argues that the experimenter sets up the expectation that the stimuli actually moves and that there exists an objective correct answer.
Therefore it would be rational to expect agreement.
If one were to remove this expectation then no norm will arise.
They recreated Sherif’s experiments but told the participants about the AKE and that they should therefore not expect to agree with others.
They found that participants reported direction and distance with no evidence of convergence to a norm or reduction in variation.
How do Pollis and colleagues (1976) respond to Alexander et al.’s (1970) criticism of Sherif?
Argue that Alexander induced people to diverge, or at least not converge, by saying and therefore instilling the expectation they should not expect the same answers.
To demonstrate this they repeated the experiment but only told participants about the AKE.
They produced very different results to Alexander that reinforced Sherif’s original interpretation that participants converge to form norms.
What inspired Asch’s line-length studies (1951)?
Thorndike’s studies where people were asked to give their opinion on a topic and were then confronted with an authority figure or group of peers saying the opposite.
Asch wanted to understand why people typically shift their views towards peers/authority despite them presenting no arguments to support their views.
Investigates whether people will conform when responding to a numerical majority.
Also a response to Sherif’s studies as he believed that conformity was only observed because the stimulus was ambiguous and therefore wanted to observe what would happen when responding to an unambiguous stimulus that requires no clarification.
What is the experimental procedure in Asch’s line-length studies (1951)?
Participants were shown a reference line on one sheet of paper and three lines of different length on another. They had to identify which of the three was the same length as the reference aloud.
However the room was actually full of 4-7 confederates and only one naive participant.
The confederates all gave consistently wrong answers on key trials.
The naive participant always gave the penultimate answer.
What were the results of Asch’s (1951) line studies?
Participants notice the discrepancy between their judgements and the others in the room and seek to understand why as they begin to doubt their own answer.
This resulted in 1/3 conforming with the incorrect majority to say the wrong answer.
Why did participants conform in Asch’s line studies?
Some individuals actual perception of the lines changed as a result of hearing the group answers.
Some became convinced that they must be wrong so change their judgements.
Others change their answers so as not to contradict the group but still believe their answer was correct.
This is evidence of normative influence.
The experience of being the minority and being confronted with a majority appear to be seeing something different to you is unsettling as evidenced by film footage showing participants distress.
