Conformity
Conformity or conformism is the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to group norms, politics or being like-minded. Norms are implicit, specific rules, guidance shared by a group of individuals, that guide their interactions with others. People often choose to conform to society rather than to pursue personal desires – because it is often easier to follow the path others have made already, rather than forging a new one. Thus, conformity is sometimes a product of group communication. This tendency to conform occurs in small groups and/or in society as a whole and may result from subtle unconscious influences, or from direct and overt social pressure. Conformity can occur in the presence of others, or when an individual is alone. For example, people tend to follow social norms when eating or when watching television, even if alone.
Solomon Asch, a social psychologist whose obedience research remains among the most influential in psychology, demonstrated the power of conformity through his experiment on line judgment. The Asch conformity experiment demonstrates how much influence conformity has on people. In a laboratory experiment, Asch asked 50 male students from Swarthmore College in the US to participate in a 'vision test'. Asch put a naive participant in a room with seven stooges in a line judgment task. When confronted with the line task, each stooge had already decided what response they would give. The real members of the experimental group sat in the last position, while the others were pre-arranged experimenters who gave apparently incorrect answers in unison; Asch recorded the last person's answer to analyze the influence of conformity. Surprisingly, about one third of the participants who were placed in this situation sided with the clearly incorrect majority on the critical trials. Over the 12 critical trials, about 75% of participants conformed at least once. Ash demonstrated in this experiment that people could produce obviously erroneous responses just to conform to a group of similar erroneous responders, this was called normative influence. After being interviewed, subjects acknowledged that they did not actually agree with the answers given by others. The majority of them, however, believed that groups are wiser or did not want to appear as mavericks and chose to repeat the same obvious misconception. There is another influence that is sometimes more subtle, called informational influence. This is when people turn to others for information to help them make decisions in new or ambiguous situations. Most of the time, people were simply conforming to social group norms that they were unaware of, whether consciously or unconsciously, especially through a mechanism called the Chameleon effect. This effect is when people unintentionally and automatically mimic others' gestures, posture, and speech style in order to produce rapport and create social interactions that run smoothly. It is clear from this that conformity has a powerful effect on human perception and behavior, even to the extent that it can be faked against a person's basic belief system.
Changing one's behaviors to match the responses of others, which is conformity, can be conscious or not. People have an intrinsic tendency to unconsciously imitate other's behaviors such as gesture, language, talking speed, and other actions of the people they interact with. There are two other main reasons for conformity: informational influence and normative influence. People display conformity in response to informational influence when they believe the group is better informed, or in response to normative influence when they are afraid of rejection. When the advocated norm could be correct, the informational influence is more important than the normative influence, while otherwise the normative influence dominates.
People often conform from a desire for security within a group, also known as normative influence—typically a group of a similar age, culture, religion or educational status. This is often referred to as groupthink: a pattern of thought characterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics, which ignores realistic appraisal of other courses of action. Unwillingness to conform carries the risk of social rejection. Conformity is often associated in media with adolescence and youth culture, but strongly affects humans of all ages. The concept of conformity can also be understood in relation to obedience, as demonstrated by Stanley Milgram’s obedience study. While Milgram’s participants were instructed to obey an authority figure, many did so not only out of obedience, but also due to the pressure to align with perceived social expectations in the experimental setting. This blurring of obedience and conformity illustrates how people may follow authority while simultaneously seeking acceptance or avoiding conflict, especially when placed in unfamiliar or high-pressure environments. From a psychological standpoint, both phenomena show how situational factors can heavily influence behavior.
Although peer pressure may manifest negatively, conformity can be regarded as either good or bad. Driving on the conventionally-approved side of the road may be seen as beneficial conformity. With the appropriate environmental influence, conforming, in early childhood years, allows one to learn and thus, adopt the appropriate behaviors necessary to interact and develop "correctly" within one's society. Conformity influences the formation and maintenance of social norms, and helps societies function smoothly and predictably via the self-elimination of behaviors seen as contrary to unwritten rules. Conformity was found to impair group performance in a variable environment, but was not found to have a significant effect on performance in a stable environment.
According to Herbert Kelman, there are three types of conformity: 1) compliance identification internalization.
Major factors that influence the degree of conformity include culture, gender, age, size of the group, situational factors, and different stimuli. In some cases, minority influence, a special case of informational influence, can resist the pressure to conform and influence the majority to accept the minority's belief or behaviors.
Definition and context
Definition
Conformity is the tendency to change our perceptions, opinions, or behaviors in ways that are consistent with group norms. Norms are implicit, specific rules shared by a group of individuals on how they should behave. People may be susceptible to conform to group norms because they want to gain acceptance from their group.Peer
Some adolescents gain acceptance and recognition from their peers by conformity. This peer moderated conformity increases from the transition of childhood to adolescence. It follows a U-shaped age pattern wherein conformity increases through childhood, peaking at sixth and ninth grades and then declines. Adolescents often follow the logic that "if everyone else is doing it, then it must be good and right". However, it is found that they are more likely to conform if peer pressure involves neutral activities such as those in sports, entertainment, and prosocial behaviors rather than anti-social behaviors. Researchers have found that peer conformity is strongest for individuals who reported strong identification with their friends or groups, making them more likely to adopt beliefs and behaviors accepted in such circles.There is also the factor that the mere presence of a person can influence whether one is conforming or not. Norman Triplett was the researcher that initially discovered the impact that mere presence has, especially among peers. In other words, all people can affect society. We are influenced by people doing things beside us, whether this is in a competitive atmosphere or not. People tend to be influenced by those who are their own age especially. Co-actors that are similar to us tend to push us more than those who are not.
Social responses
According to Donelson Forsyth, after submitting to group pressures, individuals may find themselves facing one of several responses to conformity. These types of responses to conformity vary in their degree of public agreement versus private agreement.When an individual finds themselves in a position where they publicly agree with the group's decision yet privately disagrees with the group's consensus, they are experiencing compliance or acquiescence. This is also referenced as apparent conformity. This type of conformity recognizes that behavior is not always consistent with our beliefs and attitudes, which mimics Leon Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory. In turn, conversion, otherwise known as private acceptance or "true conformity", involves both publicly and privately agreeing with the group's decision. In the case of private acceptance, the person conforms to the group by changing their beliefs and attitudes. Thus, this represents a true change of opinion to match the majority.
Another type of social response, which does not involve conformity with the majority of the group, is called convergence. In this type of social response, the group member agrees with the group's decision from the outset and thus does not need to shift their opinion on the matter at hand.
In addition, Forsyth shows that nonconformity can also fall into one of two response categories. Firstly, an individual who does not conform to the majority can display independence. Independence, or dissent, can be defined as the unwillingness to bend to group pressures. Thus, this individual stays true to his or her personal standards instead of the swaying toward group standards. Secondly, a nonconformist could be displaying anticonformity or counterconformity which involves the taking of opinions that are opposite to what the group believes. This type of nonconformity can be motivated by a need to rebel against the status quo instead of the need to be accurate in one's opinion.
To conclude, social responses to conformity can be seen to vary along a continuum from conversion to anticonformity. For example, a popular experiment in conformity research, known as the Asch situation or Asch conformity experiments, primarily includes compliance and independence. Also, other responses to conformity can be identified in groups such as juries, sports teams and work teams.