Social influence and conformity

Norms

attitudes and behaviours that define group membership and differentiate between groups

Social influence

Process whereby attitudes and behaviour are influenced by the real or implied presence of other people.

Compliance

Superficial, public change in behaviour and expressed attitudes in response to requests, coercion or group pressure.

Obedience

Compliance with another’s authority

Milgram 1974 experiment

• Teacher (participant) and a learner (confederate)

 

• Learner had to remember and recall a list of paired associates

 

• Teacher administered an electric shock to the learner after every error made.

 

• Teacher administered progressively larger shocks to the learner (15-450V)

Findings of Milgram’s 1974 experiment

65% willing to give shocks described as extreme/ dangerous

Agentic state

unquestioning obedience in which personal responsibility is transferred to the person giving orders

Factors influencing obedience

• sunk cost fallacy

• immediacy of the victim

• immediacy of the authority figure

Sunk cost fallacy

Foot-in-the-door-technique of persuasion

Immediacy of the victim evidence

(Milgram 1974)

• When victim was neither seen nor heard – 100%

• When the victim was visible (in the same room) – 40%

• When the teacher had to hold victim’s hand down – 30%

Immediacy of authority figure

• When experimenter relayed instructions via telephone – 20.5%

• When no orders were given at all – 2.5%

• Presence of two disobedient peers – 10%

• Presence of two obedient peers – 92.5%

Conformity

Deep-seated private and enduring change in behaviour and attitudes due to group pressure (less direct)

Convergence effect (Sheriff)

 

• Estimates converge to the estimate of others, even when on our own to make us more accurate

• Need to be certain that a behaviour is correct and appropriate

Frame of reference

• Middle positions perceived to be more correct than fringe positions

• supported by Allport (people in groups give less extreme judgements)

Asch 1951 study

Do people conform in unambiguous situations?

• Groups of 7-9 respondents

 

• Took it in turns in a fixed order to call aloud their response

 

• All were confederates except one naïve participant

 

• Participant always provided the penultimate response

 

• 18 trials

Results of Asch study

• Found confederates gave incorrect responses on 12 trials and correct responses on 6 trials.

 

• 25% of naïve participants did not conform to confederates incorrect responses at all

 

• 50% conformed to the erroneous majority on six or more trials

 

• 5% conformed on all twelve erroneous trials

 

• Overall conformity rate of 33%

Why did participants conform in Asch study?

• Feelings of uncertainty and self-doubt

• To avoid standing out

• Self-presentational concerns

Percentage of participants who conformed when wrote response down

12.5%

Deutsch and Gerard (1955)

• Responded face-to-face with three confederates

• Responded anonymously and privately in a cubicle

• Responded face-to-face with confederates and told to be as accurate as possible

• Half responded with stimulus was present other half had been removed (increased uncertainty).

Individual and group characteristics of conformity

• Lack of expertise/ familiarity

• Cultural variation

• Situational factors

Sistruck and McDavid (1971)

• Males and females faced group pressures in identifying various stimuli

• Stimuli were either: Typically masculine, Typically feminine or neutral

• Found when not your familiar object- turn to the other sex and conform (lack of expertise)

Bond and Smith 1996

• Meta-analysis of the Asch paradigm in seventeen countries

• People who score high on Hofstede’s (1980) collectivism scale conform more than people who score low.

Situational factors of conformity

Group size (Asch): as the unanimous group increased, conformity increased.

Group unanimity: presence of a correct reporter – reduces conformity from 33% to 5.5%

Informational influence

• Accepting information from another as evidence about reality.

• Affects us when we are uncertain (ambiguous or disagreement)

• E.g., sheriff study

Normative influence

To conform to the positive expectation of others to gain approval or avoid social disapproval. E.g., Asch study

Herman, Roth, Polivy (2003)

• Significant concern for most people is not being seen to eat excessively.

• associated with negative stereotypes

• People engage in social comparison to avoid this (norm model of eating)

Referent informational influence

Pressure to conform to a group norm that defines oneself as a group member.

Social identity theory

Group membership based on self-categorisation and social comparison.

Moscovici and Facheux (1972): Three social influence modalities

 

• Conformity – majority influence – majority persuades the minority

• Normalisation – mutual compromise leading to convergence

• Innovation – minority creates a conflict in order to persuade the majority.

Genetic model of minority influence

• Consistency across time and context

• Showing investment in its position- Making significant sacrifice

• Autonomy- Acting out of principle rather than from ulterior motives

What is the most important component of minority influence

Consistency

Why is Consistency most important?

• Disrupts the majority norm and produces uncertainty and doubt.

• Draws attention to the minority

• Creates the impression that an alternative view exists.

• Demonstrates certainty and commitment to this view.

• Shows that to resolve the social conflict, one must adopt the minority’s viewpoint.

 Moscovici, Lage and Naffrechoux (1969) study

• Four participants confronted two confederates in a colour perception task

• Confederates were either:

  • Consistent – always calling the slides ‘green’

  • Inconsistent – calling the slides ‘green’ 2/3 of the time and ‘blue’ 1/3

• Found the consistent minority was most effective

Conversion theory: Moscovici (1980)

argued that majorities and minorities exert influence through different processes

Process of majority influence

• Direct public compliance through normative or informational dependence.

• Comparison processes: focussing on how others behave to know how to fit in

• Views are accepted passively

• Involves little/no private attitude change

Process of minority influence

• Produces private change in opinion due to cognitive conflict

• Validation processes: examine the validity of their beliefs

• Outcome: Little/no overt public agreement with minority but private internal change.

Conversion Effect:

Sudden internal change in the attitudes of the majority.

Evidence of conversion theory: Moscovici and Personnaz 1980 study

• Used the blue-green paradigm

• Individuals judged the colour of clearly blue slides, varying in intensity

• Exposed to a single confederate who always called the slides ‘green’

• Participants were led to believe that either most (82%; majority influence) or very few (18%; minority influence) people would respond the same way.

• Participants publicly called out the colour of the slide. The slide then disappeared and the participant had to write down the colour of the after-image

• Blue slides: Yellow after-image

• Green slides: Purple after-Image

Moscovici and Personnaz 1980 findings

When confederate view (of green) is presented as a minority view, people process this at a deeper level

Doms and Van Avertmaet (1980)

found after-image changes after both minority and majority influence.

Sorrentino, King, and Leo (1980)

found after-image shift after minority influence only among participants suspicious of the experiment

Convergent-divergent theory:

• When we have attitudes which are in disagreement with the majority, we find this surprising and stressful (social pressure)

• Leads to narrow-focused (convergent) thinking.

• In contrast, disagreement with the minority is not stressful (but expected) and may allow for more divergent views.

Martin & Hewstone 1999

Minority influence improves performances on tasks related to divergent thinking, as compared with majority influence

Nemeth 1986

using Asch and blue-green paradigm, showed that exposure to minority influence stimulated divergent, novel, creative thinking.

Referent informational influence theory

• Prototypical in-group members are the most reliable source of information.

• Minority must cause the majority to focus on intergroup comparisons which are shared.

Leniency contract

• When the minority is already part of the in-group the majority may be more reluctant to reject this message

• There is a greater leniency towards in-group minorities because they are unlikely to want to destroy the majority’s core attributes.

Moscovici 1980: issues with conversion theory

Whether minorities or majorities are influential or not may be a matter of social identity dynamics.

Wood et al 1994

People who are confronted with a minority position with real social minorities/majorities, tend to not only resist overt alignment with minority, but also privately avoid alignment