Conformity

Normative Social Influence (NSI)

This happens when we go along with the crowd because we want to be accepted or liked or because we want to avoid embarrassment or being ridiculed. Real life examples: smoking because others in your peer group smoke, dressing like your friends in order to fit in or avoid bullying. This often leads to compliance which is where people will agree publicly with the group but privately they do not change their personal opinions. 

Asch’s Line Study

Sample: 123 American male students volunteered.

Procedure: Participants are deceived into taking part in a study on visual perception.  They are seated at a desk with others that they believe to be fellow participants but who in reality are in league with the researchers (stooges or confederates).  Lines are presented on a screen and participants simply have to say which line (out of 3 possibilities, is the same length as the target line).  The confederates would give their answer one at a time, as they go down the line. The naive participant always gave their answer either last, or second from last. The stooges get the right answer on the first few trials but then start to make deliberate mistakes. There were 18 trials of the line task in total, and in 12 of the trials, confederates gave identical wrong answers. 

Conformity was measured by counting the number of times the real participant conforms when stooges give the wrong answer.

There was also a control group of 36 participants who were tested individually on the lines task on 20 trials, to test how accurate individual judgments were. This acted as the IV.

After the lines task, participants were interviewed and were asked why they conformed. This was so Asch could be more confident in the conclusions that he drew from his findings.

Quantitative Findings:

• Overall conformity rate was 1/3.  This means that participants conformed on a 1/3 of all trials (32%).
• 75% conformed on at least 1 trial.
• However, within this there were substantial individual differences: Nobody conformed on 100% of trials, 13 out of the original 50 never conformed at all.
• Highest rate of conformity was a participant who conformed on 11 out of 12 trials.

Interview data – Qualitative Findings:

When participants were interviewed at the end of the study, Asch found the following reasons:

• Distortion of action – they knew the answer was wrong, but did not want to be ridiculed by the group – This is evidence of Normative Social Influence
• Distortion of perception – they genuinely believed they got the right answer
• Distortion of judgement – they were not certain of their answer so went with the majority view

In the video below, you will see some other variations of his study. For example, Asch carried out a variation of his study where the naive participants were asked to note down their answer on a piece of paper instead of saying them out loud. In this variation, conformity drops by 2/3. This shows that when a participant is immune from judgment by the group, they are less likely to conform. This further supports the theory of Normative Social Influence.

Asch’s Variations:

Group Size:

Asch wanted to understand whether the size of the group would be more influential in comparison to agreement (conformity) of the group. Asch replicated his study and used a variety of stooges:

• One stooge 3% conformed
• Two stooges 14% conformed
• Three stooges 32% conformed

Further increases in group size do not increase conformity.  With very large groups conformity actually begins to fall! Why do you think this might be?

Unanimity:

In another variation of the original experiment, Asch broke up the unanimity (total agreement) of the group by introduced a dissenting confederate.

Asch (1956) found that even the presence of just one confederate that goes against the majority choice can reduce conformity as much as 80%.

For example, in the original experiment, 32% of participants conformed on the critical trials, whereas when one confederate gave the correct answer on all the critical trials conformity dropped to 5%.

Task difficulty:

When the (comparison) lines (e.g., A, B, C) were made more similar in length it was harder to judge the correct answer and conformity increased. When we are uncertain, it seems we look to others for confirmation. The more difficult the task, the greater the conformity. Participants were allowed to answer in private (so the rest of the group does not know their response) conformity decreased. This is because there are fewer group pressures and normative influence is not as powerful, as there is no fear of rejection from the group.

Other research supports this. We are less likely to conform when we are confident in our ability, e.g. men are less likely to conform to incorrectly named tools than they are to incorrectly named kitchen utensils.  Clearly research of the 1950s!