Conformity Experiment

The Solomon Asch’s Conformity Study is an experiment where a standard line is shown to an audience along with three other lines: one will be longer, one will be shorter, one will be the exact same line as the standard. The goal is to identify which is the same line- A, B, or C- and the answer was always obvious. The task is simple, but a person will be the only real participant in the room while the seven others are confederates who were pretending to be participants and who were trying to use social pressure to get the participant to conform with the majority group. For example, if the real answer was A, the confederates would try to throw off the real participant by saying the answer is B. With the majority saying B is the correct answer, the real participant would agree with them, even knowing the answer is wrong because everyone else didn’t say A. The experiment was tested on 50 male students from Swarthmore College, and on average, about 32% of the participants conformed to the incorrect answer with the majority.

There is a fundamental human need to belong to social groups especially if people were to live and work together, it is likely that they need to agree on common beliefs, values, attitudes and behaviours in order to get along and fit-in. Thus, we learnt to conform to rules of other people, the more people see others behaving in a particular way or making particular decisions, the more likely people will feel obliged to follow the suit. This is called conformity and can be defined in different ways, Aronson, Wilson & Akert (2014) stated it is the changing of one’s behavior due to the real or imagined influence of other people. According to Deutsch and Gerard (1955), social influence should be distinguished into two types, the informational social influence and normative social influence. The occurrence of social influence has implied to many real life events, which has drawn many researchers to attention. This has lead many researchers to design distinct experiments to try and understand the cause of the conformity, whether conformity is situation dependent, and whether we are able to resist social influences.

5.) Repeat step 4 only changing the time to 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s, 6s, 7s, 8s, 9s, and 10s. Label each interval

In pyschology conformity can be descibed as an indiviual’s tendency to follow the unspoken rules or behaviours of the social group to which he/she belongs to or wants to be apart of. Many psychologists including , Jenness (1932), Sherif (1935) both experimented in psychology, investigating conformity and group pressure. However, perhaps the most famous conformity experiment was done by Solomon Asch (1951) and his line judgment experiment. (McLeod 2007)

Figure 1 5. Now the accomplice will have to switch hands. The less dominant hand will now be used to test reaction time, either your right or left. Repeat steps 1-4 at least five times and record your data. 6.

This character would look at his watch and approximate how much time he could get to a location in and tell himself that by a

Sherif (1936) conducted a study on conformity. This experiment tested how people were influenced by others in their perception and judgement of the autokinetic effect. Sherif concluded that people when judging an ambiguous stimulus will rely upon others to resolve uncertainty – shared norms were created. Participants tend to compromise and change their opinion to resemble others in the group. Similarly, Asch (1951) carried out an experiment with not ambiguous stimulus – with an apparent, correct answer to a line judgement task. However, this experiment reached the same conclusions – even though, the answer was obviously wrong, participants were influenced by other group members and tend to conform to a majority. 76.4% of naïve participants gave a wrong answer in at least one of the 12 trials. Asch (1951) concluded that people tend to conform because of the normative influence -

Conformity falls under the realm of Social Psychology as it deals with social interaction often exploring its roots, effects and influences. Conformity is an intriguing topic as it is not entirely visible but

This paper will review the research conducted in social influence, specifically majority and minority influence, why people conform and the factors that make them more likely to conform. Conformity is defined as “a form of social influence in which a person yields to group pressure in the absence of any explicit order or request from another person to comply, as in the Asch experiment” (Colman, or Dictionary of Psychology, 2009). Conformity encompasses majority and minority influence. Kelman (1958) proposed three types of conformity for influence of a majority; Compliance, internalisation and identification. Compliance refers to an individual changing their public opinion or behaviour even if they privately disagree. Internalisation is the changing of public and private opinions/behaviours. This may be because the other opinion is more valued, which may convince the individual, and lead to acceptance of the other point of view. Identification is when an individual may accept influence to develop a closer connection or relationship. It consists a little of both compliance and internalisation as the individual accepts influence as correct (internalisation), however the reason for this is to be accepted / obtain approval (compliance).

Conformity is a concept that has been heavily researched in the field of social psychology. Conformity is defined as a change in behavior, beliefs, and attitudes due to group pressure perceived as real (encompassing the presence of others) or imagined (encompassing the pressure of social standards) (Myers, 2010, p. 192). The concept of conformity is a powerful influence on the tendency for people to arrange their thoughts, perspectives, and ideas with others, especially when in a group. This takes away from a person’s individuality because they want to feel accepted by others and therefore, a person will accomplish this basic need of approval through conforming.

Social psychologists try to understand human behavior in terms of the influence others have in producing it (Aronson, Wilson & Akert, 1994). The following passage explains specifically how social groups can influence behavior. In particular, the discussion will Center on the role groups play in the formation of social norms and social roles. With reference to experiments, the passage will show the terms and degree to which people are likely to conform under group pressure to those norms and roles.

Additionally, Spector (1983) utilised Rotter’s scale on 157 students to evaluate whether conformity is linked with locus of control. He discovered that participants with a higher internal locus of control weren’t as likely to conform only in circumstances of normative social influence, where people adapt in order to be accepted, whereas there was no significant difference between the two groups in situations of informational social influence, where people conform for their need to be right. (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955) This finding proposes that normative social influence

This study presented results showing that the more a person’s attitudes were different from the group the more the individual changed their personal attitudes to match the group. The authors saw these results even after the participants were removed from the group setting. This showed that social influences on attitudes will persist even when the source of influence is removed. A significant correlation was found between initial differences in opinions compared to the attitude change that followed a group discussion. This altering of private views showed that participants didn’t agree just to go along with the group, and then immediately change back to their private attitudes once the group disbanded. Conformity to the group attitudes turned into a private attitude change that persisted well beyond the group setting. The authors also found a significant correlation between participants that initially conformed and long term conformity. This data explained that subjects that showed initial conformity on an issue were more likely to preserve attitudes consistent with the group after the group disbanded. All of the results are consistent with the results found in this study. Different from the Levitan & Verhulst study; this study looked at specific behavioral changes. Together these studies show that conformity can elicit attitudinal and behavioral changes in an

Conformity is thought to be an important force in human evolution because it has the potential to stabilize cultural similarities between cultural diversity groups (Claidière, Bowler, Brookes, Brown, & Whiten, 2014). However, the effects of conformity can make us change the way we behave and think due to the individuals are around us. According to Myers and Twenge (2015), there are two varieties of conformity that happen when we are trying to adapt or change our behavior in order to feel socially accepted by society. The first type of conformity is acceptance, which is when we sincerely believe what others are telling us. The second type of conformity is compliance, which is when we conform to the expectations

A small group of high school sociology students were interested in conducting an experiment to observe if the social pressure from one's peers has the ability to influence individuals to conform their opinions. Conformity is the idea of matching your attitudes, beliefs and opinions to fit in with group norms to avoid being different. When asking a group of grade 8 and 11 students a set of questions using a blind vote students would voice their true opinions. However, when taking away the blind vote the grade 8 students would conform their opinions to match those of grade 11’s, because of both the social pressure and the age difference. The power of social pressure is enormous, continuing to take over society as decades bypass. The students