Psychology- social, biological and cognitive dev.behaviour

What is conformity?

• yelding into group pressure

Types of conformity

• normative social influence- (complaince) the desire to be liked, accepted by group. The person conforms publicly not privately. This is a temporary change to behaviour an beliefs.
• Informational social influence- (internalisation) the desire to be right. individual looks at others to ensure that the are not making mistakes rather are correct. this can cause a long lasting or permanent change to the persons beliefs and attitude.

• to see if participants will conform to the majority even when the correct answer is obvious
• 123 male american student participants
• took part in what they believed to be visual perception
• laboratory experiment
• they were sitted around a table of seven to nine people who in real life were confederates
• they were to see if the line A,B,C and D were simular to the stimulus line
• 12 out of 18 trials participants gave the wrong identical answers, the real participants sat last or last but one
• there was a control group of 36 participants, who were tested individually on 20 trails
• they had 3 mistakes out of 720 trails
• on 12 critical trials- 32% conforned to wrong answers
• 75% conformed once, 25% never conformed
• 5% conformed to all wrong answers

• post experiment interview found three reasons why they conformed. 1) doubt over accuracy of judgements
• believed their perception must be actually wrong
• conformed publicly not privately to avoid ridicule.

Conclusion

• wide individual differences in the extent to which individuals are affected by the majority influence.
• the fact the conforms indicates they were motivated by normative social influence.
• they conformed to gain acceptance and to avoid rejection.

One Strength

• laboratory experiment
• good control over IV to see whether the majority gave the same answers or not and could measure the DV which was the participants conformed or not.
• cause and effect was easily established. this was whether the minority could influence the majority to conform or not.
• therefore, it is a good example of the power of the majority especially that of the normative social influence.

One Weakness

• can be criticize because of the sample used- 123 male american participants which doesn't generalise to the rest of the population.