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Lecture 3.4: Group Pressure and Conformity (Part 2)

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Social Psychology

Wesleyan University

4.9 (244 ratings) | 28K Students Enrolled

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.

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4.9 (244 ratings)

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F

Nov 08, 2018

Learning so much and I'm only in week 1. It's untangled and clarified some of my own experiences and interactions in such an easy format with relevant and informative resources.

SS

May 10, 2019

Professor Plous has made this course interesting with a number of additional videos, Ted talks and snapshot quiz. It is one of the best courses that I have taken on Coursera.

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.

Lecture 3.3: Group Pressure and Conformity (Part 1)13:43

Lecture 3.4: Group Pressure and Conformity (Part 2)11:43

Taught By

Scott Plous
Professor of Psychology; Executive Director, Social Psychology Network; recipient of the American Psychological Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching

Transcript

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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