Social Influence – Types of Conformity and Explanations
Social Influence – Types of Conformity and Explanations
Conformity
- Yielding to group pressure
- A change in a person’s behaviour or opinions as a result of a real or imagined pressure from a person/group of people
TYPES OF CONFORMITY
| Identification | Compliance | Internalisation |
| – Going along with what others are doing
– simply to fit in with a group but once away from those individuals, behaviours and opinions will revert to normal |
– person conforms to the behaviours of a group because membership of the group is desirable
– publicly part of a group but privately may behave differently |
– when a person genuinely believes and accepts a norm publicly and privately
– behaviours and beliefs become ingrained as part of the way they think – public and private conformity |
REAL LIFE APPLICATION
- Schutz et al (2008) – found they were able to change the behaviour of hotel guests by using printed messages encouraging them to save energy. The messages which suggested other guests were using fewer bath towels were most successful
EXAM QUESTIONS
- In the context of conformity, explain what psychologists mean by the term identification. (2 marks)
- One type of conformity is internalisation. Explain what psychologists mean by the term (2 marks)
- Internalisation, identification, and compliance are all types of conformity. Outline one difference between any two of these. (2 marks)
EXPLANATIONS FOR CONFORMITY
| Normative Social Influence | Informative Social Influence |
| – person conforms to fit in with a group because they don’t want to feel left out
– an individual changes their public behaviour but not their private beliefs, hence this explanation is associated with compliance – any change in behaviour is temporary |
– person has a desire to be ‘right’ and conforms to those who they believe may have more information
– this explanation is associated with internalisation as the individual lacks knowledge and is unsure of the situation
Jenness’ Bean Jar Experiment: – experiment is an example of informative social influence |
VARIABLES AFFECTING CONFORMITY
Solomon Asch’s Line Study
Aim: – Asch wanted to investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform
Method: – Asch conducted a lab experiment to study conformity
– He used 50 male students from a college and asked them to participate in a ‘vision test’
– Asch put a naïve participant in room with seven confederates
– The confederates had agreed in advance what their responses would be when presented with the line task
– The real participant did not know this and was led to believe that the other seven
participants were also real participants
– each person in the room had to state which comparison line was most like the target line;
the answer was always obvious
– Throughout some of the trials, the confederates gave the wrong answer; Asch was
interested to see whether the real participants would also give the wrong answer and
conform to the majority
Results: – about 32% of the participants conformed with the clearly incorrect answer
– 75% conformed at least once
– 25% never conformed
Evaluation: – lacks ecological/external validity – lacks mundane realism – does not reflect a real-life
scenario of conformity as it was based on people’s perceptions of lines
– lacks generalisability – sample of participants consisted of only men – lacks population
validity as the findings cannot be generalised to females
– ethnocentric – used only American males – findings cannot be generalised to a larger
population of different ethnicities
– reliable – conducted a lab study – highly controlled conditions – study can be
replicated
FACTORS AFFECTING CONFORMITY
Group size: – Asch altered the number of confederates in his study to examine if this affected
conformity
– The greater the number of confederates (majority group), the more people that
conformed, but only up to a certain point
– With one extra confederate, the group conformity was 3%
– With two extra confederates, the group conformity was 13%
– With three extra confederates, the group conformity was 32%
– Brown and Byrne (1997) suggest that if the majority increases beyond three or four,
people may suspect collusion. Hence the conformity levels are unlikely to change. Asch
found that after four confederates were placed in the scenario, conformity did not
increase much
Group unanimity: – When all the members in a group give the same answer, a person is more likely
to conform
– Asch (1951) found that conformity can fall by 80% in the presence of just one
confederate contradicting the majority choice
Difficulty of task: – when the difficulty of the task increased (Asch – the comparison lines became
more similar in length) – conformity increased as it was harder to depict the
correct answer
Answering in private – conformity decreased when the participant was allowed to give their answer
in private so the rest of the group does not know their answer
– due to the absence of group pressure, normative influence is not as
powerful, hence conformity decreases