Social influence

There are three types of conformity: 

Internalisation - where the individual changes their beliefs to those of the majority, you genuinely believe them and they become your own views.

Identification - where you conform to whats expected of you to fulfil a certain social role.

Compliance - is where you go along with the majority but you don't agree with what they believe, you comply to appear normal - normative social influence

Method: carried out a lab experiement. In groups of 8 participants judged line lengths by saying out loud which comparison line matched the standard line. Each group only contained 1 real participant the rest were confederates. The real partcicpants always went last or one before last, allowing the confederates to answer before. Each aprticipant did 18 trials, on 12 of these the confederates all gave the incorrect answer.

Results: In the critical trials participants conformed to the majority 37% of the time, 75% conformed at least once. When debriefed participants said they gaev the same answer so they didn't appear different.

Conclusion: participants conformed due to normative social influence.

Group size- with only two confederates the real participant only conformed 14%, with three confederates the participant conformed 32%. There was little change to conformity rates after that no matter how big the group got. So very small majorities are easier to resist than larger ones but influence doesn't keep increasing with the size of the majority.

Social support- Having a fellow dissenter (someone who disagrees with the majority) broke the unanimity of the group which made it easier for the participant to resist the majority, the rate of conformity fell to 5.5%

Task difficulty- When Asch made the task more difficult by making the lines more similar, conformity levels increased. People are more likely to conform if they're less confident that they're correct.