Conformity
Use some psychological studies of conformity to discuss reasons for
conforming.
According to Leon Mann, conformity means ‘yielding to group
pressures’.
Everyone is a member of one group or another and everyone
expects members of
these groups to behave in certain ways. If you are a
member of an identifiable
group you are expected to behave appropriately to
it. If you don’t confirm and
behave appropriately you are likely to be
rejected by the group. Like
stereotypes, conforming and expecting others to
conform maintains cognitive
balance. There are several kinds of conformity.
Many studies of conformity took
place in the 1950’s which led Kelman to
distinguish between compliance,
internalisation and identification.
Compliance is the type of conformity where
the subject goes along with the
group view, but privately disagrees with it.
Internalisation is where the
subject comes to accept, and eventually believes in
the group view.
Identification is where the subject accepts and believes the
group view,
because he or she wants to become associated with the group. Leon
Mann
identifies normative conformity which occurs when direct group
pressure
forces the individual to yield under the threat of rejection or the
promise of
reward. This can occur only if someone wants to be a member of the
group or the
groups attitudes or behaviour are important to the individual in
some way. Apart
from normative conformity there is informational conformity
which occurs where
the situation is vague or ambiguous and because the person
is uncertain he or
she turns to others for evidence of the appropriate
response. Thirdly, Mann
identifies ingratiational conformity which occurs
where a person tries to do
whatever he or she thinks the others will approve
in order to gain acceptance
(if you make yourself appear to be similar to
someone else, they might come to
like you). The first major research into
conformity was conducted in 1935 by
Sherif who used a visual illusion,
known as the auto-kinetic effect. Sherif told
his subjects that a spot of
light which they were about to see in a darkened
room was going to move, and
he wanted them to say the direction and distance of
the movement. In the
first experimental condition the subjects were tested
individually. Some said
the distance of movement wasn’t very far in any
directio, others said it was
several inches. Sherif recorded each subjects
response. In the second
experimental condition, Sherif gathered his subjects
into groups, usually of
three people, and asked them to discribe verbally the
movement of light. He
gave them no instructions as to whether they needed to
reach any kind of
agreement among themselves but simply asked them to give their
own reports
while being aware of the reports that other members gave. During the
group
sessions it became apparent that the subjects reports strarted to
converge
much nearer to an average of what their individual reports had been.
If a
subject who had said that the light didn’t move very far when
tested
individually said ‘I think it is moving 2 inches to the left’ then
another
who had reported movement of 4 inches, when tested individually,
might say ‘I
think it may have been 3 inches’. As the number of reported
movements
continued the more the members of the group conformed to each
others reports.
This spot of light was in fact stationary so whatever
reports were made was the
consequence of the subject imagining they saw
something happen. So they were not
certain about the movement they observed
and so would not feel confident about
insisting that their observations were
wholly correct. When they heard other
reported judgements they may have
decided to go along with them. The problem
with this study, for understanding
of conformity, as one aspect of social
psychology is that it is a total
artifical experimental situation - there
isn’t even a right answer. Requested
reports of imaginary movements of a
stationary spot of light in a darkened
room when alone, or with two others,
hardly reflects situations we come
accross in our every day lives. Generalising
from its conclusions to real
life might be innacurate. However, some of them do
have a common sense
appeal. Ash was a harsh critic of Sherifs experimental
design and claimed
that it showed little about conformity since there was no
right answer to
conform to. Ash designed an experiment where there could be
absolutely no
doubt about whether subjects would be conforming or not and it was
absolutely
clear what they were conforming to. He wanted to be able to put an
individual
under various amounts of group pressure that he could control and
manipulate
and measure their willingness to conform to the groups response to
something
that was clearly wrong. Ash conducted what are now described as
classic
experiments in conformity. This is not to say they aren’t criticised
today or
that its conclusions are wholly acceptable now - they showed the
application
of the scientific method to social psychology and we used as models
of how to
conduct psychological research. In an early experiment Ash gathered a
group
of seven university students in a classroom. They sat around one side of
a
large table facing the blackboard. On the left side of the board there was
a
white card with a single black line drawn vertically on it. On the right of
the
board there was another white card with three vertical lines of
different
lengths. Two of the lines on the card on the right were longer or
shorther than
the target line. Matching the target line to the comparison
line shouldn’t
have been a difficult task however for these seven students,
all but one was a
confederate of Ash and they had been instructed to give
incorrect responses on
seven of the twelve trials. The one naive subject was
seated either at the
extreme left or next to the extreme left of the line of
students so that he
would always be last (or next to last) to answer. He
would have heard most of
the others give their judgements about which
comparison line matches the target
line before he spoke. The naive subject
was a member of a group he didn’t know
and might never see again who suddenly
and for no apparent reason started saying
something which directly
contradicted the evidence of his own eyes. In
subsequent experiments Ash used
between 7 and 9 subjects using the same
experimental procedure. In the first
series of experiments he tested 123 naives
on 12 critical tests where 7 were
going to be incorrect. Each naive therefore
had 7 opportunities to conform to
something they could see to be wrong. One
third of the naives conformed on
all 7 occasions. About three quarters of them
conformed on at least one
occasion. Only about one fifth refused to conform at
all. Just to be certain
that the result was due to the influence of the
confederates responses and
not to the difficulty of the task Ash used a control
group. Each control
subject was asked to make a judgement individually - there
were no pressures
at all. Over 90% gave correct responses. Hollander and Willis
give some
criticisms of the early research into conformity. Firstly the studies
do not
identify the motive or type of conformity. Do the subjects conform in
order
to gain social approval? Are they simply complying? Do they really
believe
that their response is correct? Secondly Hollander and Willis claim
that the
experiments do not identify whether the subjects are complying
because they
judge that it’s not worth appearing to be different, or because
the actually
start to believe that the groups judgement is correct. Hollander
and Willis also
claim that the studies cannot show whether those who do not
conform do so
because they are independant thinkers or because they are
anti-conformists. And
Lastly, they claim that the studies seem to assume
that independance has to be
good and conformity has to be bad. However
conformity is often benificial.
Sherif and Asch have each conducted
fairly artificial laboritory experiments
which showed that about 30% of
responses can be explained by the need or desire
of the subjects to conform.
These experiments may not accurately reflect real
life when conformity might
be benificial and sometimes contribute to
psychological well-being.