Hypothesis On Conformity

Each experiment has helped gain insight into the effects of conformity on human behavior. I am not certain if these two experiments can be generalized in a sense, but they do give us an idea as to the social implications of conformity and obedience. I have learned that social situations can have an enormous influence on behavior causing normal functioning people to behave badly despite knowing that the situation will produce negative

Samantha Callahan, Department of Psychology, Lindenwood University; Danielle Patrick, Department of Psychology, Lindenwood University; Sara Roderick, Department of Psychology, Lindenwood University; Kahla Stygar, Department of Psychology, Lindenwood University.

This assignment is being submitted on June 13, 2016, for Professor Kehiante McKinley’s G148/PSY1012 Section 02 General Psychology course.

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.

This investigation will focus on; “What impact does family size have on conformity?” This is an experimental design using quantitative subjective data which is achieved through the form of statistics from questionnaires. The independent variable of family sizes will be tested against individual percentages of conformity. According to the Oxford Dictionaries, The definition of conformity is the behaviour with accordance to socially accepted convention or standards. (Oxford Dictionaries, 2016)

The following investigation is designed to determine whether there is a relationship between the number of siblings and conformity levels. As the investigation was a quantitative observational design, participants naturally fell into the three pre-existing groups of family size, those of which ranged from no siblings to two siblings. The campaign score data was collected through a survey where

The participants were 20 men and 60 women with ages ranging from 17 to 26. The participants were from different majors at Texas State University and were recruited from introductory psychology classes. The participants were 51% Caucasian, 38% Hispanic, 4% African American, and 7% other. The participants were not

Introductory Psychology students (N = 305) from a mid-western university participated in the study online for course credit. Sixty-eight percent of the participants identified as female, 32% of the participants identified as male, and one participant did not indicate their gender. The majority of the participants were Caucasian (73%), and the average age of the participants was 19.04 (SD = 1.10).

The sample for this study consisted of 222 participants who were second year psychology students from the University of Newcastle. All students were participating as part of a course requirement and all had given their consent to participating in the study.

Conformity – Asch conformity studies examined independence and conformity among individuals in a group setting.

The materials used for this study included PsychMate Student Version 2.0 (St. James, Walter Schneider and Amy Eschman.) Psychology Software Tools, Inc. Along with the PsychMate software, a computer provided by Queens College was used in order to successfully complete the study.

The subject of this report is Sarah Hix, a junior in 2nd period AP Psychology. Based on these naturalistic observations, some conclusions were met.

Conformity is a situation of changing one’s behavior in order to match the actions of the society around the person. The social influence cause people to agree or even behave like the majority of the people in the specific group so that the group can perceive them as normal. Solomon Asch (1956) was interested to know the act of people in conformity pressure. Because of that, he created an experiment to investigate the process by asking college students in a group of eight to match the lengths of different lines. The experiment shows that 95% of the students correctly match 12 lines without pressure of group. Ash repeats the experiment by changing the situation. The students now need to hear answers of five other people who are actually confederates

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.

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)