In this video I discuss how we can experience an indirect pressure to conform to the attitudes or behaviors of a group. I describe Muzafer Sherif’s early research using the autokinetic effect to demonstrate informational influence, followed by Solomon Asch’s well-known work on conformity. Asch distinguished between private acceptance and public compliance to explain why participants conformed and how they also experienced normative influence to go along with the group. Lastly I consider some criticisms of the Asch paradigm and a study by Baron, Vandello, and Brunsman investigating how task importance and desire for accuracy might influence levels of conformity.
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous video we considered how the presence of others can influence our performance but what we didn’t consider is that when we’re in the presence of others we often hear their attitudes and we observe their behaviors and this means we can experience an indirect social pressure to go along with group attitudes or group behaviors. This is referred to as conformity.
Now one of the earliest studies of conformity was done by Muzafer Sherif in the 1930s and Sherif took advantage of a perceptual illusion called the “autokinetic effect“. He used this to investigate conformity because this auto-kinetic effect is the idea that if you’re in a dark room and you look at a small spot of light, the spot of light will appear to move. And how much it moves is subjective; some people will report that it only moves in inch or 2, others might report it moving as much as a foot. So what Sherif did was he put participants into groups of three and he wanted to see, do the estimates of other people influence your answers? So if you hear how much other people think the light is moving, do you change your answers over time? And what Sherif found was that participants showed a tendency to change their answers and the group estimates would converge over the course of multiple trials. In other words, some people who initially gave very low estimates, they thought it was moving an inch or two, would increase their estimates. And some people who thought it was moving a foot would gradually reduce their estimates until the group reached a consensus in the middle. Even though, of course, the spot of light was not actually moving at all.
What this demonstrates is that hearing the answers of other people was actually influencing the responses of the participants and this was referred to as “informational influence“. The idea is that the responses and the behaviors of others actually provide us with information and that information can be used to guide our decision-making. So when we’re not sure what the correct answer is, we use the information that we get from hearing other people’s answers.
Now one of the most famous studies of conformity was conducted in the 1950s by Solomon Asch. Here’s a picture of Asch here and what Asch did was he asked participants to match a line length with one of three lines. So in this case here, this would be the stimulus, the participants would be asked to say the number corresponding with that line length. So in this case the correct answer would be 3. Now the participants did this in a room with a group of other participants, but what they didn’t know was that these five other participants were actually confederates who are in on the experiment. And on some of the trials, all of these other confederates would unanimously give an incorrect response. And they would be saying their answers as we went along the table and then it would get to the actual participant and the question was, would the participants be swayed by hearing these incorrect responses? So in this case here, if this were the stimulus, then the other participants who were actually confederates might go around and say 2, 2, 2 and then when it got to the participant’s turn, Asch wondered would the participant say 2 or would they say the correct answer of 3?
What he found was on these trials where the confederates intentionally gave the wrong answers, about the third of the time the participants also gave this incorrect response. So he interviewed participants following the study to find out “why did you go along with the group? What was it that made you say the incorrect response?” What he found it in some cases, the people actually believed the group. They said, you know, “there’s five of them and one of me, so I must have been wrong”. “Maybe I had a poor angle” or “maybe the lighting was different where I was sitting” or “maybe my vision isn’t as good as the others.” So he thought sometimes people actually seem to believe that the group was correct and this was referred to as “private acceptance“.
But this wasn’t the only reason that people conformed, because sometimes people said “I knew the group was wrong but I didn’t want to disagree with them”, “I wanted to avoid the tension of disagreement”, you know, you’re basically telling these other people in the room with you that they’re wrong and they wanted to avoid that. They didn’t want to make waves or stand up for what they thought was the correct answer. So this was referred to as “public compliance“; where inside their own heads they knew it was the wrong answer but they said it to make things easier and avoid disagreement.
This brings us to the idea of what’s called “normative influence“. It’s not just the case that other people provide us with information about the correct answer, they also tell us how we should behave. They establish norms and those norms tell us how we’re supposed to act in a certain situation. In this case, we’re supposed to say the answer is 2, even though we actually believe it to be 3. This normative influence can be easily disrupted and Asch demonstrated this in another variation of the study where he had what he called a “social supporter“. This was one confederate who would break the unanimity of the group and give the correct response. What Asch found is as soon as one person disagreed with the group, it became much easier for the actual participants to also disagree. Conformity dropped.
Now when we think about the Asch paradigm for investigating conformity, which has been done in many countries around the world over the course of many decades, we might ask “who cares?”. Even if we can see that, okay, people conform with the group, what difference does it make? It’s not an important task. I mean it doesn’t really matter which line you say. If you say 2 or 3, there’s really no effects and there’s very little desire for being accurate. You don’t get anything for giving the correct response, so why wouldn’t you just go along with the group? I mean you don’t, it doesn’t matter if you give the wrong answer. And it’s an artificial situation. I mean this is something you will never do in your real life. These are valid criticisms of this approach to investigating conformity.
So how can we look at other research that might try to get around these problems? This brings us to a study in 1996 by Robert Baron, Joseph Vandello, and Bethanny Brunsman. What Baron, Vandello, and Brunsman did was they tried to make a task that was important and where accuracy mattered, where people would want to do a good job. The task that they used was identifying criminals in a lineup. So the participants would briefly see a photo of a suspect and then they’d have to pick that person out from a real lineup. And they were given additional incentives to make the task seem even more important and to increase their desire to get the right answer. The first part of this was they were offered an additional reward for getting a high level of accuracy. If you get enough of the correct responses, we’ll give you an extra $20. And to increase the importance of the task they were told this study is going to be reviewed by law enforcement and it’s going to be looked at by judges who are going to take this into consideration in their courtrooms and how they use eyewitness evidence, so please try your best to do a good job.
So they increased the sense of importance of the task. And as people gave these answers to the lineup, they could hear the responses of other participants who were actually confederates, but the order was varied. So the participant was not always answering after everyone else. Sometimes the participant answered first, and then those trials didn’t really matter. What the researchers wanted to see was when the participant answers after the confederates, and the confederates have intentionally given the wrong answer, how often will they conform? And what they found is similar to Asch’s results. They found a rate of about 35% conformity.
But then they made the task harder. They thought, what if it’s really difficult to identify the suspect in the lineup? And the way that they did this was they showed the photograph very, very briefly and the people that lined up were wearing different clothing than in the photographs. So it was very hard to identify the correct person. What they found is, in this case, conformity actually increased. So what does this mean?
Well, this suggests that when we have a desire to be accurate, and we want to do a good job, and we think it’s important that we give the correct answer, then this might actually make us more reliant on the informational influence that we’re getting from others. In other words, if we really want to get the right guy and we just heard four other people say that it’s guy number 3, and we really want to make sure that we’re right, we might actually use that informational influence more than we would if we didn’t think the task was important or if we had gotten a better chance to see the guy in the photograph earlier. Ok, so these are some ways we can investigate the idea of conformity and in the next video we’ll look at slightly more direct pressures from others around us when we look at compliance and persuasion. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
