Think for a moment of all the places that we wait in line. Most places we go in public require us to take turns being helped. It might even be difficult to imagine this because we are socialized so well to conform in these situations.
It might help to think of when we learn to wait in line: preschool or kindergarten. We might see a lot of shoving and pushing to be helped first. Our early socialization allows us to know that it is important to form lines, to not move ahead or cut in the line, and to wait patiently. So, it seems that conformity can be both good and bad. It can also be neither good nor bad — just neutral. It can be something like wearing a certain type of clothing to work, to church, to a dance or to play a sport.
Sometimes conformity can take the shape of acceptance: we think that the behavior we are being influenced to follow is the correct thing to do in the situation.
We agree with this behavior both publicly and privately. You accept that this is the correct thing to do. So, when it is appropriate, you wait in line and agree that it is what you should be doing. Can you think of other things you conform to with acceptance? Do you accept that people should stand or sit at a certain distance from someone else?
This type of conformity is called compliance. I always think of my husband as an example here. He hates to dress up and would rather live in t-shirts and jeans or track pants. Sometimes you have to wear a suit and tie or wear more formal clothing.
In all of these instances my husband is complying from the real or imagined pressure of others to wear a suit and tie to a funeral, to a wedding or to a job interview.
You might love talking about politics, but feel pressure to not speak about it at social gatherings. So, privately you would choose to talk about politics all the time, but the pressure from the real or imagined others keeps you from starting political discussions.
The final type is actually a subtype of compliance, obedience. In these situations, you comply with a direct order from a perceived authority. A doctor tells you to take an antibiotic for 10 days. With obedience, we follow this direct order and take the medicine for the prescribed time period. As the professor of this course, I might tell you that I will need you to turn something in by a certain date in order for you to receive credit.
You might want to stop taking the medicine sooner because you feel fine or you might need longer to complete the assignment, but none of that matters when you receive an order from an authority — you just do as they request. Muzafer Sherif was convinced that our views of the world were shaped by those around us. This construction of our reality or truths was necessary to give our perceptions meaning.
In order to empirically support these beliefs, he conducted a number of studies using the autokinetic effect. This is an illusion that when a pinpoint of light is projected in a dark space it appears to move even though it is actually stationary.
In the individual studies, he would bring in participants, seat them 18 ft. They were to make a note each time they saw the light move and then to estimate as accurately as possible the distance the light moved in inches. They went through trials. These experiments involved two consecutive days of testing. Confirming his hypothesis, Sherif noted that participants would develop a framework for making their estimates and this resulted in similar answers the second day.
The group studies that were conducted used a similar procedure, but this time participants were either tested individually and then placed with two or three other people across three sessions of judging — OR — they were placed with two or three other people across three sessions of judging and then tested individually.
In other words, if some participants established a framework of inches of movement and another inches when alone, once in a group together both would move their judgments to inches as their new framework for making judgments. We can also think of norms as representing what we ought to do or the correct thing to do. They are the accepted way of thinking, feeling and behaving that the group supports. Researchers assessed the incoming freshmen who were often from wealthy, conservative families in the area and found that their belief systems lined up with their families.
I think for most of us social norms become the most obvious when someone violates them. There are many rules for appropriate behavior in public spaces. Often the groups we belong to and that we value, socialize us early on what is expected and acceptable ways of thinking and behaving. It is typically only through violation of norms that we are aware of their existence. Having taught this course numerous times, I ask students to choose a social norm to intentionally violate.
I ask them to describe how the people reacted to their violation and how it felt for them to violate the norm. I have learned quite a few things from this assignment.
First, to always clarify there is a difference between a norm and a law. I have also learned that there are norms I was never aware of. For example, men have several bathroom norms, one involves which urinal is appropriate to use under what condition.
Can you think of some norms you may have violated recently or as it is often easier, can you think of someone who violated a norm around you? How did it make you feel? Did you feel like you needed to let them know that they were breaking a rule?
Norms can vary in importance to the group and the reactions to the adoption or violation of the norm can vary in intensity. Most often, the social approval in following the norm is what encourages us to adopt it. For little girls, they are often showered with praise for following the gender norm expectations of wearing pretty dresses, bows and playing with dolls.
Little boys experience greater negative reactions to norm violations. Boys who wear colors associated with girls or play with dolls are more harshly criticized by adults and peers. Children learn early the rules of their gender group. The examples above demonstrate different motivations for conforming to social norms. Deutsch and Gerard suggest that there are two reasons we conform, normative influence and informational influence.
We either conform because we want to be accepted by others normative or we conform because we think it is the right thing to do informational. It is possible to be motivated by both types of influence, however in the case of acceptance, we typically are conforming because of informational influence, we believe what we are doing is the right thing to do. In the Bennington College example, it is possible that initially the girls were motivated to conform because of normative pressure.
They wanted to be included and liked, so publicly they went along but privately, they disagreed. We will see in a moment that this is compliance. We learned in an earlier section of the textbook about the hindsight bias. It is hard for us when presented with information to not feel like it is obvious or that we knew it all along. This is especially true for students in social psychology. As we are presented with research findings, we think this seems like common sense or why did we waste time doing this study — everyone already knows this.
Every time I present the work of Solomon Asch, I like to first present what he found. This seems like common sense. However, Asch believed strongly that if the situation was straightforward and there was an obvious answer, people would not behave like sheep and they would resist conforming and say the correct answer. He recruited male participants to an experiment called the visual discrimination task study.
There were men seated at a table, where one is the participant and the rest are confederates they are working with the experimenter or aware of what is being tested. Everyone was asked to publicly announce which one of the three lines matched a standard length line. See image For the first two trials, all confederates answered correctly. The other trials all the confederates agreed on an incorrect answer. The participants were seated so that they heard all but one confederates response before giving their own.
They went along with the group even though the answer was clearly wrong. What would motivate them to conform in this way — to publicly agree, but privately disagree? Why not just say the correct answer? As you recall from earlier, there are two motivations for conforming based on the work of Deutsch and Gerard The first is accuracy or informational goals.
We are searching for the correct and appropriate behavior in any given situation. They are trying to find the correct frame of reference or norm for the situation. We want to have meaningful social relationships with others. Why would they feel motivated to comply with strangers? Research by Burger et al. If you wanted to encourage others to behave as you did during the Day of Nonconformity, what psychological techniques would you use?
If you were to predict your behavior one month from now, do you think it will be changed in any way as a result of participating in the Day of Nonconformity? If so, how? If not, why not? In carrying out this assignment, try to go beyond superficial descriptive accounts and see if you can arrive at social psychological insights about yourself or others. Later in the semester, Professor Plous will share a few of these accounts with the class.
If you prefer that your account not be shared, simply make a note of this on the sheet that you turn in. Living Experiment 1: Day of Nonconformity. Finally, we observed differential brain patterns for both groups in the amygdala during social conflict with group opinion, specifically related to non conformity behavior.
We speculate that this might suggest that dependent on the level of psychopathic traits people used distinct neural mechanisms in order to achieve similar behavioral outcomes, possibly reflecting altered emotional salience of experiencing social conflict. Our findings emphasize the need to further explore the role of individual differences in social conformity, especially since the effects are rather small and only tested in relatively small groups.
However, our sample was unique in its focus on psychopathic traits in an all-female sample. Gaining more insights into psychopathic traits in females is important, as it might have implications for the diagnosis and treatment of psychopathic traits in women Wynn et al. Future studies should further investigate alterations in the neural mechanisms of social conformity, not only in females, but also in the male and clinical population. Additionally, future studies should collect data on how conformity is experienced.
Perhaps individuals with high levels of psychopathic traits do not experience non-conformity as a social aversive learning signal. In that case, conforming to group norms might only be a strategy to successfully adapt to uncertain circumstances for the females scoring high on psychopathic traits, whereas the low scoring females might be predominantly motivated by a desire for social approval.
Moreover, it would also be interesting to focus on whether individuals scoring high on psychopathic traits publically conform to group norms in order to be able to successfully adapt to uncertain circumstances or out of a desire for social approval, possibly reflecting a discrepancy between conformity behavior and inward beliefs.
Such investigations could provide us with broader insights into the behavioral and neural anomalies associated with psychopathic traits, as well as potential gender differences. To conclude, the current study takes a first step in investigating individual differences in adaptive behavior when facing uncertain social situations and the neural mechanisms involved in this process.
This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the Institutional Review Board of the Leiden University Medical Center with written informed consent from all subjects.
All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. All authors approved the final version. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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