Brief Lecture Notes for Unit 12
In the interests of time, the technical details of the Asch and Milgram experiments will not be summarized below. Attend lecture to learn about them.
Social psychology refers to the study of individual behavior in a social context and thus represents an interface between psychology and sociology (as promised at the start of Unit 1).
As a representative topic in social psychology, we will be examining conformity, defined as the alteration of behavior as the result of contact with, or influence from, a group. If there is no alteration of behavior (if you act as you would have in any case), there is no conformity, only coincidence. Usually, however, when a group of people act in a similar manner, there is some degree of conformity as defined above.
The classic study by Solomon Asch (outlined in lecture) is often used as a prototypical example of conformity behavior.
Two types of conformity are compliance and acceptance. With compliance, you go along outwardly with the behavior approved by the group, but inward attitudes, values, and beliefs do not change. In essence, you are pretending to agree with the group (or acting as if you agree), but your agreement is on a surface level only. With acceptance, the group is taken as a valid source of norms or information; thus, your inner attitudes and perspectives do change along with your outwardly observable behavior.
People conform for two general reasons. One (normative influence) is because they want to gain acceptance and avoid ridicule, or otherwise wish to gain rewards or avoid punishments dispensed by the group. The other (informational influence) is because they view or utilize the group as a source of viable, valid, or useful information about what is right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable, desirable or undesirable. Obviously, conformity produced by normative influence only (there is no informational influence) is usually compliance only. In contrast, conformity produced by informational influence often represents, or turns into, acceptance.
At least four factors influence the probability that a person will conform:
1. Personality factors: for instance, people lower in self-esteem or social status are more likely to conform; younger people are more likely to conform (conformity peaks at about age 14, increasing up to that point and then gradually declining thereafter).
2. Stimulus factors: ambiguous situations (where the right way to think or act is hard to discern) are more likely to lead to conformity, as a way of handling the ambiguity.
3. Intergroup factors: for instance, you are more likely to conform to a group of people who are similar to you than to a group of people who are vastly dissimilar to you; to some extent, you are more likely to conform as the group size increases (though groups of even 4 to 6 others are large enough to exert strong conformity pressures).
4. Situational factors: for instance, the presence of even one dissenting individual (even if s/he disagrees with both you and the group) sharply decreases the probability that you will conform (it's standing completely alone that appears to be difficult); being part of a homogeneous culture or one that emphasizes group over individual needs will increase conformity.
Milgram's experiment on obedience (discussed in lecture) illustrates the potency of situational influences on conformity. Subjects are asked to act in a manner that appears to do direct harm to a third person (delivering supposedly fatal levels of electric shock). While a panel of psychiatrists predicted that fewer than 1% of normal adults would do so, in fact upwards of 65% of subjects acted in this fashion. Compliance increased as the experimenter's proximity increased, decreased as the victim's (confederate's) proximity increased. A common explanation for these findings involves the notion of the diffusion of responsibility. Replications of the Milgram experiment have shown no correlation between the year in which the replication took place and the amount of conformity behavior, so these results are probably not due to an age cohort effect.
See this hyperlink for additional information about this topic.