Ever wonder why people do what they do? This course—which includes more than $1,000 of video and reading materials—offers some answers based on the latest research from social psychology. Students taking the course for a Certificate will also receive free membership in Social Psychology Network (SocialPsychology.org). COURSE DESCRIPTION FROM PROFESSOR PLOUS: Each of us is dealt a different hand in life, but we all face similar questions when it comes to human behavior: What leads us to like one person and dislike another? How do conflicts and prejudices develop, and how can they be reduced? Can psychological research help protect the environment, and if so, how? This course offers a brief introduction to classic and contemporary social psychology, covering topics such as decision making, persuasion, group behavior, personal attraction, and factors that promote health and well-being. Our focus will be on surprising, entertaining, and intriguing research findings that are easy to apply in daily life. The course will also draw from the websites of Social Psychology Network, the world's largest online community devoted to social psychology. I hope you'll join me for this course, have fun, and learn some useful information that enriches your life.
Lecture 3.4: Group Pressure and Conformity (Part 2)
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From the course by Wesleyan University
Social Psychology
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From the lesson
WEEK 3: Obedience, Conformity, and Deindividuation
This week's goals are to: (1) understand the psychological dynamics of obedience to authority; (2) review studies on group pressure and conformity; (3) learn about the dark side of deindividuation; and (4) consider ethical issues related to psychology research.
Meet the Instructors
Scott PlousProfessor of Psychology; Executive Director, Social Psychology Network; recipient of the American Psychological Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching
Department of Psychology
In the last video, I ended by asking whether the level of conformity that
Solomon Asch found seemed very high, or fairly high, or fairly low, or very low.
For over 20 years after he published his findings, most psychologists thought that
it was surprisingly high given how mild the situation was.
After all, the experimental participants weren't members of a cohesive group in
which they had to, for example, face their friends afterward, or justify their answers,
or even interact with members of their group once the study was over.
Second, there weren't penalties or financial losses or physical punishments,
like electric shock for guessing incorrectly.
And third, the correct answers were embarrassingly obvious—
so obvious, you'd almost feel weird giving a different answer.
That was the prevailing view until 1976, when Lee Ross, Günter Bierbrauer, and
Susan Hoffman published an article in the American Psychologist arguing
just the opposite. That is, they argued that the Asch
experiment created a unique situation in which "the assault on the
potential dissenter's judgment reaches an intensity virtually unparalleled
outside the laboratory."
Why? Well, consider: In daily life the things that we tend to disagree about include
politics, religion, books, movies— not the nature of physical reality.
Few of us have ever faced a majority who steadfastly contradict the evidence of
our senses, where, for example, we say an orange is orange,
and the majority says, no, it's blue.
And we say, "Orange." And they say, "Blue."
"Orange." "Blue."
"Orange." "Blue." "Orange!"
Simply never happens.
Also, the experimental participants were at a loss to explain the majority opinion
on the basis of either situational forces or dispositional differences.
Unless they saw through the conspiracy, they simply had no good explanation for
what was going on. Ross, Bierbrauer, and Hoffman argued
that, in this sense, Asch had created a thoroughly unique "attribution crisis" for
the participants. People had no good explanation for their
group's behavior, and they feared that the group would be equally at a loss to
explain any dissent on their part. Here's how one of Asch's participants
described it: "This is unlike any experience I have had in my life.
I'll never forget it as long as I live." Interestingly, this revisionist view of
Asch's research is very consistent with how Asch himself saw the situation.
In December of 2012, I looked through some of his papers at the Center for the
History of Psychology, and by his own hand, he described the
situation as "Extreme when a majority contradicted the evidence of a
person's senses about a virtually undeniable matter of fact."
He also noted that the conflict created severe tension and concern,
and in another note, he said that it was "Frightening to have one's
perceptions appear strange." This might seem obvious in hindsight,
but remember the hindsight bias that we discussed earlier.
One of the most revealing tidbits I found in the archive is that in the beginning,
Asch himself didn't realize the power of the situation.
Here's what he wrote. "While planning the study, I was quite
uncertain as to whether the investigation could at all be done.
It seemed to me that the action of the majority would appear so unreasonable and
bizarre that the subjects would quickly see through, laugh the majority out of
court and dismiss them as unworthy of respect.
This did not happen. In fact, it was chastening to observe how
easy it was to entangle individuals in the difficulty, and thus to bring them
under the sway of the forces. The means were absurdly simple."
As you might imagine, there have been literally hundreds of conformity studies
and dozens of spin-offs since Asch first published his experiments.
In fact, in the 1990s, Rod Bond and Peter Smith published a meta-analysis of
133 different studies from 17 countries in an effort to take stock of the
research literature, and the analysis was particularly interesting
because Bond and Smith were able to simultaneously examine different
factors to see which ones had a significant effect on conformity levels.
So, for example, they found that when you put women and men in the Asch situation,
either in single-sex groups or mixed-sex groups, women tend to conform somewhat
more than do men—a gender gap that has not closed significantly over the decades.
Overall, however, conformity levels have
steadily declined since the 1950s. And the meta-analysis found that
conformity increases as majority size increases, from 2 people all the way up
to 13 people. Another thing that Bond and Smith found
was that conformity is more likely when the majority is made up of ingroup
members (that is, members of your own group—
for example, friends or family members) than when it's made up of
outgroup members. And finally, one last factor worth
noting—and they studied others as well—is the role of culture.
In general, collectivist countries like Japan, that tend to put group goals ahead
of personal goals, show higher rates of conformity than do individualist
countries like the United States. Now, which of these various factors is
most important when it comes to conformity?
Let's pause so that you can take a guess,
and then I'll share what Bond and Smith concluded.
The correct answer is culture. According to Bond and Smith, there's a huge difference
between individualist and collectivist cultures when it comes to conformity,
probably in part because, while we in the United States and in other individualist
countries tend to view conformity somewhat negatively, people in
collectivist cultures often see it in terms of harmony, or cooperativeness,
or even tactfulness. And this may also help to explain some of the
gender differences in conformity. So, for example, American males often see
nonconformity and uniqueness as positive characteristics, but others may see the
very same behavior as selfish or as deviant.
So, we have to be very careful about the labels that we use.
One person's conformity may be another person's effort to be accommodating
or to be supportive of others. Now, before this video ends there's just
one more topic that I would like to address, so hang on for just a few more minutes.
The research we've discussed so far focuses on the influence a majority has
on a minority, often one or two people, but an equally important question
concerns the influence of a minority on the majority.
In 1969, Serge Moscovici and two colleagues published a landmark study
that examined minority influence using a variant of the Asch procedure.
Moscovici was born in Romania and spent time in a forced labor camp during
World War II, and later became a friend of Milgram's.
So, like Asch and Milgram, he was personally interested in the Holocaust
and the interplay between individual and group behavior.
What Moscovici and his colleagues showed is that a consistent minority can have a
significant influence even when it's not particularly powerful or prestigious.
In Moscovici's experiments, the group consisted of two confederates and
four experimental participants. In other words, it turned the Asch
procedure on its head. Everyone was seated together and shown
a series of slides in what appeared to be an experiment on color perception.
On each trial, group members judged the color and light intensity of the slide.
The confederates were seated either in the first two positions or in the first
and fourth positions (by the way, this variable turned out not to have an effect).
All the slides were various shades of blue,
but the confederates were instructed to judge them as green.
What Moscovici found was that, even though a control group only mistook the
slides for green twice in 792 judgments— that is, the slides were very clearly blue—
and even though all the participants had been previously
checked to ensure that they had no serious visual impairments,
majority group members judged the slides as green on 8% of the trials,
and 32% of majority group members judged them as green at least once.
In other words, a minority was able to exert a substantial degree of influence
on the majority. There was just one key requirement:
the minority had to be consistent. If the pair of confederates labeled some slides
blue and some green, majority group members were only swayed by the
minority 1% of the time. The minority only had a significant
influence when it consistently judged all the slides as green.
Still, this is an empowering result. With Asch, we've already seen that just
one person dissenting from the majority can dramatically reduce the pressure that
people feel to conform. And now with Moscovici, we've seen that a consistent
minority can get majority group members to judge the color blue as green.
So, the message is "individuals count."
Minority perspectives have an effect— not always and maybe not immediately—
but more often that it might seem. In fact, when I first learned about
Moscovici's results, it inspired me to join with a couple of friends and create
a performance group that you may have heard of: Green Man Group.
I'll let you figure out which one is me. Just kidding!
Seriously, I hope that you've enjoyed this video.
The next video is going to continue our exploration of the tension between
individuals and groups, with a discussion of deindividuation and the Stanford
Prison Experiment. Also, if you haven't finished the
next assignment, this is a very good time to do it,
because it brings together many of the topics that we've been exploring:
the psychology of persuasion, social influence, and of course, conformity.
It's packed with social psychology.
Does it seem green in here?
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