Conformity

Compliance

• Shallowest form of conformity
• Public agreement with beliefs of a group; does not extent to private beliefs
• Temporary change; caused only by the group's presence
• Example: laughing at someone's jokes even if you do not find them funny

Identification

• Change in public and private beliefs to fit in with a group
• Temporary change; only while under the group's influence
• Example: becoming vegetarian while in a group of vegetarians, but eating meat when they are not present

Internalisation

• Deepest level of conformity
• Permanent external change in behaviour to fit in with a group while also agreeing privately
• Example: converting to a different religion

Normative Social Influence (NSI)

• A motivational force to be liked and accepted by a group
• Tends to lead to compliance, so is only a temporary change
• Example: smoking because your friends are smoking, not because you want to

Informational Social Influence (ISI)

• A motivational force to look to others for guidance in order to be correct
• Generally occurs in unfamiliar or ambiguous situations
• Tends to lead to internalisation because the person is uncertain of what to believe, so they will adopt the viewpoint of those around them
• Could have evolutionary basis - looking to others in new and potentially dangerous situations could have a survival value
• Example: watching how someone else selects the correct cutlery to use in a fancy restaurant, then doing the same yourself

Aim: To investigate whether individual judgements of the number of beans in a jar would be influenced by group discussion.

Procedure: Participants made private individual guesses as to the number of beans in the jar. They discussed their estimates in groups and came up with a group estimate. They were then given the chance to change their private estimates.

Findings: Individuals' second guesses tended to converge towards the group estimate. The average change was greater among women.

Conclusion: The judgements of individuals are affected by majority opinions, especially in unfamiliar or ambiguous situations.

Evaluation:

• Considered ethically sound, despite the slight deception as to the aims of the study, when compared to other social influence studies
• Lacks mundane realism - it is an artificial lab experiment with little relevance to real life

Aim: To investigate the degree to which individuals would conform to a majority which was obvoiusly incorrect.

Procedure: One participant was placed in a group with 7-9 confederates. They had to decide which of 3 comparison lines was the same length as the 'stimulus' line on 18 trials, 12 of which were critical trials, where all the confederates gave identical wrong answers. The real participant answered last or second-to-last. They also had a control group of 36 participants who were tested individually on 20 trials.

Findings: Control group: 0.04% error rate. Critical trials: 32% conformity rate. 75% conformed to at least one answer, and 5% conformed on all 12 trials. Three reasons for conformity were given in post-experiment interviews- distortion of action, perception and judgement.

Conclusion: Judgements of individuals are affected by majority influence, even if it is clearly wrong. Most participants only agreed publicly, suggesting they were affected by normative social influence.

Evaluation:

• Method became a paradigm for conducting conformity research
• Uneconomical and time-consuming method- only one participant is tested at a time
• Lacks mundane realism - artificial, unrealistic situation
• Unethical - participants were deceived as to the aim of the experiment and some suffered psychological harm as they were under stress
• As the overall conformity rate was 32%, this suggests the majority of people are actually not conformist, but independent

Size of group

• Research shows that a larger majority causes a higher conformity rate, but only to an point
• Asch - highest conformity rate, 32%, was achieved with one participant & three confederates
• Bond and Smith (1996) performed a meta-analysis on Asch-style studies from many different countries and found that conformity tends to peak at 4-5 people
• Gerard et al (1968) found that adding more confederates does increase conformity rate, but the rate of increase declines as more people are added

Unanimity

• Asch - adding a confederate who went against the other confederates meant conformity fell to 5.5%; if they went against the confederates and participant conformity still dropped to 9%

Task difficulty

• Asch made the lines more similar in length and found that conformity increased
• This may be due to ISI, as the participants looked to the others for guidance because they were unsure of the correct answer

• Different social situations have their own social norms which individuals are expected to conform to
• Social roles are the parts people play as members of a social group which meet the expectations of that situation
• Conformity to social roles involves identification as people accept the behaviour required of them publicly and privately, but only temporarily, as they must adopt different social roles depending on the situation they are in

Aims: To investigate the extent to which people would conform to the social roles in a simulation of prison life; to test the situational vs dispositional explanations of prison violence

Method: 21 physically and mentally stable male American students with no past record of anti-social or criminal tendencies were selected from those that applied. 10 were guards and 11 were prisoners as the result of random selection, with Zimbardo playing the role of superintendent. The prisoners were arrested outside their homes and taken to Stanford University, where a wing had been converted into a mock prison. They were dehumanised as they were assigned numbers instead of keeping their names. The guards were given khaki uniforms and sunglasses to prevent eye contract, as well as truncheons. The guards were allowed to do anything except physically punish the prisoners.

Findings: After an initial rebellion by the prisoners was quashed, the guards became increasingly sadistic and the prisoners became more submissive. De-individuation was seen as the prisoners referred to themselves and each other by their numbers, not their names, even in private. Three were released early after fits of crying and rage; one developed a severe rash. The experiment, scheduled to run for two weeks, was terminated after 6 days because of the damage to the prisoners' health.

Conclusions: The situational hypothesis is favoured over the dispositional hypothesis, as none of the participants had ever shown such behaviour. They themselves were shocked at their conduct after the experiment. The experiment shows how readily people conform to their social roles even when they contradict their personal beliefs.

Evaluation:

• The experiment provided lots of information about social roles and blind obedience, which led to reforms in some prisons and other establishments
• The careful choice of participants and the controlled lab setting means the experiment shows a clear cause and effect relationship
• There are severe ethical issues with this experiment. The participants were initially refused when they asked to leave the experiment. They all suffered psychological harm, and for some this extended to physical pain.
• Zimbardo may have over-exaggerated the guards' behaviour - only around a third of them acted brutally, but Zimbardo generalised the behaviour of these guards
• There is poor internal validity due to observer effect - Zimbardo chose the participants himself so he would have been biased towards his own values

• Argued that people would commit atrocities if ordered to do so by an authority figure
• Participant paired with a confederate, draw rigged so participant would always be teacher
• Learner taken into another room, ppt could hear but not see them, ppt had a shock machine in their room that went up to 450v
• Shock machine was not real but ppt thought it was
• Ppt told to read out pairs of words that the learner had to remember
• If they got it wrong the teacher would have to shock them and increase the voltage each time - at 315 volts there was silence from the learner
• Ppt with experimenter who would give them 'prods' if they started to disobey, if they continued after Prod 4 the experiment was terminated
• Predicted that 2% would shock to the highest level but most would quit early
• Actually found that all participants shocked up to 300v and 65% went all the way up to 450v

• Supporting research from Sheridan and King - people gave real shocks to puppies, 54% of men and 100% of women gave shocks
• Hofling et al - 21/22 nurses would overdose a patient when given orders to do so by a doctor they did not know
• Androcentric so not generalisable
• Ethical issues - lack of informed consent (ppts not told the shocks were fake), deception, questionable right to withdraw
• Orne and Holland - argued ppts did not believe the shocks were real so low internal validity
• Lacking in mundane realism, lab setting

Note: These were all variations on Milgram's original study, where max. obedience was 65%.

Proximity

• Teacher and learner in same room, obedience dropped to 40%

Location

• Study moved to run-down office, drop to 48%

Uniform

• Ordinary person stepped in for the experimenter, drop to 20%

• Bickman - people twice as likely to obey confederate in security guard uniform than confederate wearing a suit when asked to perform tasks e.g. picking up litter
• High in reliability as it has been repeated numerous times across cultures, and high levels of obediance have been found across the board
• Orne and Holland said ppts knew the shocks were fake, even more so when an 'ordinary person' stepped in, leading to demand characteristics
• Mandel argues that this gives an excuse for evil behaviour, such as in the Holocaust. Suggests that Nazis were victims themselves of situational factors beyond their control.

• Agentic state - person carries out orders, acting as an agent, with little personal responsibility
• Autonomy given up to the authority figure
• Entered due to agentic shift - give up autonomy when authority figure is seen as trustworthy
• Feel less guilt if someone else is responsible for own actions, so self-image is less affected

• Legitimacy of authority - to move into agentic state, authority figure must be established as legitimate
• Power of authority figure comes from their perceived authority in a given situation
• E.g. the army, a structured hierarchy where power increases by rank
• Hofling and Bickman studies also show this, see previous

• Blass and Schmitt - students who watched footage of Milgram's experiment all blamed the experimenter for the harm done because they were the legitimate authority
• Real-life application, explains why soldiers carry out brutal orders such as the My Lai massacre
• Kilham and Mann replicated Milgram's study in Aus, found that only 16% shocked to max. - all explanations cannot apply to all countries
• Agentic shift cannot explain why some do not obey, so is not a full explanation of obedience

Dispositional explanation

• Characteristics - submissive to authority, conventional attitudes, contempt for those of lower status, belief in society having a strong powerful leader to enforce traditional values

• Adorno et al - wanted to measure unconscious racial bias in 2000 middle-class white Americans
• Gave them the F-scale (fascism scale) to measure authoritarian personality, items included 'Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn'
• Found that those who scored highly on the F-scale had authoritarian leanings
• Strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice
• Concluded that harsh parenting in childhood caused authoritarian personality

• Milgram and Elms - ppts who were fully obedient in Milgram's study given the F-scale, found that they scored highly
• Correlation not causation, may be other factors involved such as lack of education
• Difficult to understand why nearly all the people in Nazi Germany were involved in oppression - too simplistic to assume they all had the same personality
• Methodological issues with Adorno's research. Self-report so ppts may have had demand characteristics. All statements in the F-scale were in one direction so ppts could have just agreed with everything, causing bias in the results

1. Social Support

• Situational explanation
• If someone else is seen to disobey then it gives others the confidence to do the same

2. Locus of Control

• Dispositional explanation by Rotter
• High internal LOC -  believe you have control and responsibility over your actions, so are more likely to follow own conscience than majority
• High external LOC - likely to believe in fate and luck as the reason for outcomes rather than own behaviour, more likely to obey because it may feel like destiny that they are in that position so they must go along with it - tend to be less confident and intelligent so less likely to resist social pressure

Social Support:

• Asch's variations - if a confederate went against the majority the whole way through, conformity dropped to 5%
• Gamson et al - groups asked to run a smear campaign, 29/33 rebelled - peer support
• Milgram's study - if another teacher was seen to disobey then obedience dropped to 10%
  • Could be dispositional factors - ppts reported different reasons for obeying

Locus of Control:

• Oliner and Oliner - people who protected Jews in WW2 found to have high internal LOC
• Correlation not causation, effect of situational factors ignored
• Newer research from Twenge et al found that people are more resistant to social influence but high external LOC also more common

• Consistency increases interest from others and makes majority rethink their views
• Moscovici, blue slide green slide - showed groups slides in shades of blue, asked to say colour out loud
• When confederates always answered green, conformity at 8.42% - when confederates sometimes answered green, conformity dropped to 1.25%
• Concluded that minority can influence majority but only when consistent with their responses

• Committment - engaging in extreme activities draws attention to cause and increases interest from majority - augementation principle

• Flexibility - minority must balance consistency and committment so they don't seem too rigid
• Nemeth - fake jury, 3 ppts 1 confederate, asked to decide amount of compensation for ski lift victim
• When confederate would not budge from unreasonably low amount, majority stuck to higher amount
• When confederate changed a little, so did majority

• Supported by real-life examples, such as the Suffragettes and Fathers 4 Justice, who were minority groups that managed to create change and awareness to their cause
• Minority influence can be gradual, takes a long time to implement changes
• If minority is perceived as deviant then their power can be limited

• When society adopts a new way of thinking which then becomes widely accepted as the norm
• Always begins with a minority who exhibit commitment, consistency and flexibility to achieve their goals

1. Drawing attention to an issue

2. Cognitive conflict (examine minority's argument closely)

3. Consistency to show committment to cause

4. Augmentation principle (taking a risk to increase interest from majority

5. Snowball effect (as more people adopt the new belief, more and more people will follow - also known as social crypto-amnesia