conformity And Obedience : Nature Of Conformity

Question 1

What is social psychology and what does it involve ?

Answer 1

• Social psychology is the area of psychology that explores the effects of the social world on the behaviour of the individual (or groups of individuals )
• involves studying human behaviour in its social context , examining our thoughts , feelings and behaviours and how they are influenced by our interaction with others

Question 2

What is conformity

Answer 2

Conformity can be defined as a change in behaviour as a result of real or imagined social pressure / pressure from a group (Myer, 1999)

Question 3

The three types of conformity

Answer 3

• Compliance
• identification
• internalisation

Question 4

Compliance

Answer 4

• conform in public but privately keep their own views
• (usually created by normative social influence - people conform because they want to be liked and gain approval. People fear they will be rejected and laughed at if they don’t go along with the crowd)

Question 5

Identification

Answer 5

Conform in public and private but then go back to previous views when you leave that group
- this is based on the desire to be right which is called informational influence. With informational social influence we assume that others know more than us and so we copy what they are doing.

Question 6

Internalisation

Answer 6

Conform in public and in private and keep those view for life.
- a person takes on the views of the group when they join that group - these are internalised. They don’t change even once that individual is away from the influence of the group- they keep these views for life. This is also based on informational social influence

Question 7

The two reasons why we conform - and who were they proposed by

Answer 7

Deutsch and gerrard (1955) proposed two motivating factors behind conformity

• normative social influence
• informational social influence

Question 8

Normative social influence

Answer 8

People conform due to normative social influence when :
- they want to be liked or approved by a group
- they want to avoid rejection / ridicule or being laughed at
- want to be accepted and feel part of a group
: usually this reason is based on compliance

Question 9

Informational social influence

Answer 9

People conform due to informational social influence when
- they conform to be right or do the right thing
This is usually when we are in a new or ambiguous situation and are not sure how to behave. We look to other people because we assume they have more knowledge than us and know how to behave in the situation and therefore copy their behaviour

Question 10

Research evidence showing informational influence : Jenness

Answer 10

Jenness (1932)

• Conducted a study where individuals were asked to guess the number of beans in a bottle.
• participants were put in groups of three and asked to give a group estimate after discussion.
• most participants later wanted to change their individual guess to a number closer to the group estimate. It appeared that when they feel unsure , people will tend to be influenced by a peer group. This showed informational influnce.

Question 11

Key study ( Asch)
Aim
Method
Findings + conclusion

Answer 11

Aim : Asch wanted to see whether people would conform to others incorrect estimates if the task was easy and the correct answer was obvious
Method: participants were 50 American men (all sociology students) they were told this was an experiment into visual perception. Each was placed in a small group but every other group member was a confederate of the researcher and had been told how to respond. The group were shown 18 cards and each time were asked to match one line to a choice of three comparison. The condensates all gave the wrong answer on 12 occasions - the “critical trials”. The true participant was always second or last to answer.
Findings : participants conformed to incorrect answers 32% of the trials. A control group hardly made a errors at all. 74% of the participants conformed at least once. 26% of participants did not conform at all. Some participants stated they actually saw the lines as being correct. Others said they conformed to avoid ridicule or exclusion from the group.
Conclusion: the results showed that even in an unambiguous situation people feel a strong pressure to conform. Asch found people conform for different reasons : some because of normative social influence , and some because of informational social influence

Question 12

Evaluation of asch study : strengths and weaknesses

Answer 12

Strengths
+ highly influential study, stimulated other studies such as the mori and Arai experiment.
+ lab experiment so has a high degree of control and replicability. The model allowed for important social variables to be manipulated to reveal factors affecting conformity.
+ asch debriefed the participants and collected qualitative data on why they gave the wrong answer : this was able to find reason for distortion of judgment due to majority group pressure

Weaknesses

• lacked ecological validity - was not carried out naturally, the setting and task was unrealistic
• some aspects of the findings may be specific to the time and culture tested : only males were tests and all aMercian and sociology students. (Perrin and spender (1981) replicated asch study using British engineering students and found lower levels of conformity.
• participants were not really given the opportunity for full consent as the experimenters lied to the participants about her true aim of the lab task
• only 32% of people actually showed consistent conformity

Question 13

The three groups , which include factors that affect conformity

Answer 13

• Individual : something about the person themselves
• situational : something about the situation the person is in
• cultural : something about the culture the person has been brought up in

Question 14

Individual , situational and cultural factors

Answer 14

Individual :

• self esteem
• gender
• strong beliefs

Situational :

• secrecy of response
• unanimity
• size of group
• task difficulty

Cultural
- cultural factors

Question 15

Individual factor : self esteem - how does it affect conformity ?

Answer 15

• people with low self esteem are more likely to conform than those with high self esteem

Question 16

Individual factor - gender

Answer 16

• females are more likely to conform than males
• a lot of the time males have strong self esteem. Eagly (1987) suggested that sex differences can be explained by women trying to promote harmony in the group - and are likely to care more about relationships within the group , whilst men are comfortable in themselves and maintaining independence
• mori and arai (2010) found that females conformed in a replication of asch but males did not

Question 17

Individual factor : strong beliefs

Answer 17

Hornsey et al (2003) found that If someone strongly held conviction about an issue they are less likely to conform

• they studies 205 Australian university students who supported same sex marriage and showed them fake graphs of other students views which showed majority opposition.
• privately those with weak beliefs conformed , whilst those with stronger beliefs did not? Publicly the difference was even greater - those with strong beliefs showed counter conformity meaning they became even more strongly in favour of sam sex marriage than before

Question 18

Situational factors - secrecy of response

Answer 18

In a variation of Asch’s line study , the true participant wrote their answers down privately, whilst confederate said theirs out loud
In this variation conformity level dropped to 5%. This suggests that compliance is much less likely to occur in real situations where we are able to hide our response

Question 19

Situational factors -unanimity

Answer 19

If a group as unanimous in giving the same response , then conformity will be high. However even if just one person gives a different answer and breaks the unanimity, the conformity falls.
- in variation Of Asch’s study - one confederate acted as an ally to the true participant by disagreeing with there. The ally was seated fourth and therefore answered before the true participant- total conformity dropped to 5.5% showing having a unanimous group has a more powerful influence in our behaviour

Question 20

Situational factors : size of group

Answer 20

• a large majority tends to exert more pressure than one or two people
• asch found that with a group of two there is no conformity but once you have a group size of 3-4 you have conformity
• with two confederate there was 12.8 % conformity
• with three confederates there was 33.3 %
  The addition of further confederate made inky a slight difference to results. It doesn’t really make much difference if a group is larger - the level of conformity for a large group is pretty much the same as a group of 3-4

Question 21

Situational factors : task difficulty

Answer 21

• asch found the more difficult the task the more people comform
• a later replication of Asch experiment found that if lines were more similar in length , level of conformity increased.
• this would be because participants felt less certain

Question 22

Culture affect on conformity

• collectivist cultures
• individualist cultures

Answer 22

Levels of conformity appear to vary from country to country
Collectivist cultures- are those that value family and society over the needs of an individual - they show higher levels of conformity
Individualist cultures - tend to prioritise the likes and wants if an individual over the needs of a group - these cultures show lower levels of conformity
- the USA is a country with a predominantly individualist culture, whilst Pakistan is a country with predominantly collectivist culture

Question 23

Key study 
Mori and Arai 
Aim 
Method 
Findings and conclusion

Answer 23

Mori and Arai (2010)
Aim : replicate of asch study (to see if people would conform to incorrect estimates of others , without the need of actors ) and it also included both males and females
Participants - 104 (40 males and 64 females)
Method: very similar to asch (1951) length of lines study , however the researchers chose not to use actors. Instead each participant wore specially designed filter glasses that allow the, to look at the same image but see different things. 104 participants were used in groups of 4, with one member of each group given a different type of filter glasses from the other three. Participants stated their answers out loud and the minority participants always went third.
Findings : for female partisans conformity to majority was shown at a rate of 36.7%, however male participants did not conform to a significant extent.
Another difference from the Asch finding was that it made very little difference whether the majority was unanimous or not.
Conclusion : there are reduced conformity levels in males compared to the asch study , this may reflect the generational changes since the 1950s.

Question 24

Evaluation mori and Arai

Answer 24

Strengths

• the participants knew each other in the study, mori and arai believed that this made the study more relevant to real world situations
• mori and arias experiment required less acting / deception so the procedure could be deemed more ethical and efficient
• size of sample was bigger than Asch’s study and included females

Weakness

• still based in lab (ecological validity) “?
• a large percentage of participants were not naive to social psychology, reporting they were aware of conformity studies in social psychology already
• still some deception in the study - investigators said the filter glasses were to protect your eyes from glare