Conformity Experiments

Aim: To investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform

Method:

• 50 male participants were put into groups with 6 confederates. The naive participant was sat next to the confederate that was at the end of the row.
• Each person in the room had to state aloud which comparison line (ABC) was most similar in length to the target line. The answer was always obvious
• The confederates gave the obvious wrong answer which tested whether the participant would follow the confederates and give the wrong answer or be independent and give the right answer 

Findings:

• The naive participant gave the wrong answer 36.8% of the time
• 25% of participants did not conform on any trial meaning 75% conformed at least once

Evaluation:

• Participants and confederates knew that they were in a study so may have acted differently
• Conformity may differ when around friends/family than when around strangers
• The task was not very real so lacks ecological validity
• America in the 1950s was a very conformist society - may not be the same today
• All the participants were male from the same age group, making it a biased sample therefore meaning the experiment lacks validity and cannot be generalised
• Participants were not protected from psychological stress which may occur if they disagreed with the majority. Back et al. did a similar study and found that participants in the Asch situation had increased levels of autonomic arousal
• Asch deceived the participants claiming that they were taking part in a vision test

1. Group Size - he wanted to know whether the size of the group would be more important than the agreement of the group. With 3 confederates conformity rose to 31.8%. With 6 confederates conformity was 36.8%. But addition of further confederates made little difference. This suggests that a small majority is not sufficient for influence to be exerted but at the other extreme there is no need for a majority more than 6.

2. Unanimity - he wanted to know if the presence of another non-conforming person would affect the naive participants conformity. To test this he introduced a confederate who disagreed with the others (dissent). The presence of a dissent meant that conformity was reduced by 25%. It enabled the naive participant to behave independently. This suggests that the influence of the majority depends on some extent to the group being unanimous

3. Task difficulty - Asch made the line judgement task more difficult by making the target and comparison lines more similar in length. Conformity increased under these conditions. This suggests that ISI plays a greater role when the task becomes harder. This is because the situation is more ambiguous so we are more likely to look to other people for guidance

Aim: To investigate how readily people would conform to the roles of guard and prisoner in a role-playing exercise that stimulated prison life

Method:

• Zimbardo set up a mock prison in the basement of the psychology department at Stanford University
• Students were asked to volunteer and were randomly allocated into prisoner or guard roles
• Prisoners were arrested at their homes, taken to prison, stripped, deloused and given uniforms
• The guards were also given a uniform and given the task of enforcing a set of behaviour rules which they could determine themselves

Findings:

• During the beginning of the experiment the guards relished their roles, removing privileges such as reading/writing letters when prisoners misbehaved
• However as time went on guards became more brutal with their punishments. Punishments included the loss of food/sleep/blankets/washing facilities, cleaning toilets with bare hands and solitary confinement
• For most of the time prisoners obeyed, however one began a hunger strike. He was put into solitary confinement and rejected by other prisoners.
• One prisoner was released early due to 'acute emotional disturbance' and another due to a psychosomatic rash
• The experiment was designed to last two weeks however had to be ended after 6 days
• Participants quickly conformed to their roles. Good guards were tough, aggressive and arrogant
• Prisoners quickly conformed in order to avoid nasty punishment
• The experiment shows the power and potency of social influence. The participants became the roles they were playing

Evaluation:

• Zimbardo had some control over the variables like the selection of participants. Emotionally stable individuals were chosen and randomly assigned to roles in order to rule out personality differences as an explanation for the findings. This is a strength because it increases internal validity
• It was argued that participants were play acting rather than genuinely conforming. They conformed to stereotypes and roles they had seen on TV rather than actual guards
• Actually only a minority of the guards behaved in a brutal manner. Some were keen on applying the rules fairly and others actively tried to help and support the prisoners
• Not a realistic experiment - participants given little indication on how to behave whereas in real life guards would be given more guidance and would be trained
• Huge ethical issues
• Low validity as it only used male students

This experiment tells us what male American students would do with this sort of power. If the experiment had been done with female students the outcome may have been different. Stereotypically females are more empathetic and less likely to use force and violence in these situations. The experiment showed that people are quick to conform into social roles however this can be influenced by what they see on TV. Dr Zimbardo explained that after the experiment that participants were in a set of social psychological variables that can make ordinary people do things they wouldn't normally do. 

Aim: To investigate how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it meant harming another person

Method:

• Milgram wanted to find out how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it meant harming another person
• Participants were 40 males aged 20 and 50
• At the beginning of the experiment the participant was introduced to the confederate they would be working with
• The participant was assigned the role of teacher and the confederate was assigned role of learner
• The teacher was told they had to teach the learner a set of word pairs and test them. Every time the learner got an answer wrong the teacher had to give them an electric shock, increasing the severity each time, from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 volts (severe shock)
• The confederate gave mainly wrong answers and pretended to be in pain - they weren't actually shocked
• If the teacher disobeyed an experimenter had to give 4 commands/prods

Findings:

• All participants continued to at least 300 volts
• 12.5% of participants stopped at 300 volts
• 65% of participants continued to 450 volts

Evaluation:

• Holland argued that participants continued to give high voltage shocks because they guessed that the shocks were not real therefore Milgram was not testing what he intended to test so the study lacked internal validity
• The lab experiment accurately reflected wider authority relationships in real life giving the experiment good external validity
• A documentary about reality TV repeated the experiment and got very similar results showing that Milgram's findings were not just a one off chance occurrence
• The experiment involved deception - participants were led to believe the allocation of roles was random but it was fixed. They were also led to believe they were shocking and hurting the other person

Milgram carried out some variations of his study to see if the situational variables would affect the levels of obedience. These variations included; proximity, location and uniform

Proximity:

• In the original study the teacher and the learner were in adjoining rooms so the teacher could hear the learner but not see him, in the proximity variation they were in the same room
• When the learner and teacher were in the same room obedience dropped from 65% to 40%
• In another variation the teacher was instructed to put the learner's hand onto an electroshock plate if they got the answer wrong
• In this touch proximity variation, obedience dropped to 30%
• In a third proximity variation the experimenter left the room and gave commands over a telephone
• In this remote instruction variation, obedience was further reduced to 20.5% with some participants pretending to give shocks/giving weaker ones than instructed

Location:

• The original study was conducted in Yale University
• In the location variation it was conducted in a run down building. In this variation the experimenter had less authority
• When performed in a run down building obedience fell from 65% to 47.5%

Uniform:

• In the original study the experimenter wore a grey lab coat as a symbol of his authority
• Milgram carried out a variation in which the experimenter was called away for a phone call and was replaced by a confederate wearing everyday clothes
• In this variation, obedience dropped to 20%, the lowest of all variations

Evaluation:

• Other studies have demonstrated the influence of these situational variables on obedience. In a field experiment, Bickman [1974] had three confederates dress in 3 different outfits - jacket and tie, milkman's outfit and a security guards uniform. The confederates stood in the street and asked passers by to pick up litter. People were twice as likely to obey the person dressed as a security guard than a person in a jacket and tie, showing that a uniform conveys the authority of its wearer and is likely to produce obedience
• One criticism is that many participants worked out that the procedure was faked. This makes it unclear whether the results are genuinely due to the operation of obedience or because the participants saw through the deception and acted accordingly
• A strength is that Milgram's experiment has been replicated in other cultures and produced the same results. However most replications have been done in western societies (Spain, Australia) which are not that culturally different from the USA so these findings may not apply everywhere

Aim: To demonstrate that people conform to group norms when they are put into ambiguous (unclear) situations

Method:

• The autokinetic effect was used in this experiment. This is where a small spot of light, projected onto a screen in a dark room, appears to move although it actually does not move at all (visual illusion)
• Participants were first tested individually
• The participants were then tested in groups of 3. Sherif designed the groups by putting together two participants whose individual answers were very similar, with one participant whose individual answer was very different

Findings:

• When participants were tested individually their answers ranged from 20cm-80cm
• When tested in groups, the participant whose individual answer was very different conformed and gave a similar answer to the other participants in the group showing that in an ambiguous situation a person will look to others who they think know better