Why conform to norms

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These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. This is relatively impervious to change because it is about an actual behavior. Thus, the person can only really change the first two statements. The theory is unable to predict for certain which of the two opinions will most likely change. This inability is a weakness of the dissonance hypothesis. The second possible outcome when a behavior statement is part of the equation is that the person will not experience dissonance and will not need to change beliefs.

This can happen because he or she may come to believe that the act of compliance is a result of pressure from the group. The group, and not the person, is responsible for the conforming action.

If this occurs, the fact that the person complied is irrelevant to his or her beliefs. There is no need to change opinions. For example, Heidi agrees to paint a house with a group. After doing so, she realizes that she does not like the group, and she does not like to paint. She may feel that she has agreed to be part of the group and is herself responsible for joining it. If she feels this way, Heidi probably will experience some internal conflict.

In that case, she needs to decide either that she does not really mind the group or that she likes painting. Or Heidi may tell the group that she wants to quit painting, but the group pressures her and says that she must continue.

In such a case, Heidi probably feels no dissonance; and she does not feel a need to change her beliefs. She can continue to paint, feeling inside that she does not like what she is doing or the group around her.

Thus, dissonance is a factor only when there is inconsistency between a person's beliefs and a behavior for which the person feels personally responsible. If someone does not feel responsible for a conforming action, there is no internal conflict. We can find similar conclusions regarding responsibility for actions within attribution theory, which was described in Chapter 3.

This similarity is no accident, as Bem has shown. Kiesler and DeSalvo study. Kiesler and DeSalvo performed a study in to explore the idea that a feeling of personal responsibility is necessary before someone will experience dissonance. In their study, the researchers assigned women to task groups. They also led these women to believe that they disagreed with the rest of their group members regarding which tasks the group should perform. There were two possible tasks.

The experimenters further "gently" induced half of the participants to perform the "disapproved" task, while the other half merely "knew" of the disagreement but did not act on it. Lastly, they led the participants to believe that they would either like or dislike the group.

For example, Mary and Sue come to the experiment. The researchers tell Mary that the best task to do is Task Alpha. However, they also tell her that the group will want to do Task Beta instead. They further tell Mary that she can feel free to go ahead and pursue Task Alpha when the group meets and that she will like the other group members.

Sue, on the other hand, hears that Task Alpha is the best, but the researchers do not comment on whether she should work on Task Alpha or Task Beta. Sue hears that she will dislike her group. Kiesler and DeSalvo placed their participants in conditions similar to the ones we have described for Sue and Mary. Results showed that there were differences between the participants who simply "knew" about the disapproved task and the subjects who were "gently" induced to perform the disapproved action.

Those who merely "knew" of their disagreement with the group came to see less difference between the two tasks if they liked the other members, rather than if they disliked the group.

The participants started to agree with their groups. They liked the task they had originally preferred less and liked the task the group preferred more. In contrast, participants who complied with the "gentle" inducements came to see less difference between the tasks when they disliked the group, as opposed to when they liked it. This outcome fits cognitive dissonance theory.

When a person dislikes the group, he or she must come to like the task to alleviate the internal conflict that results. As we have seen before, performing a duty and feeling personally responsible is very difficult if a person dislikes both the group and the task.

It is best if the person can come to like either the group or the group's task. As we can see, the study results agreed with cognitive dissonance theory. The less a group pressures a person to comply with the group, the more "inside" pressure a person will feel to accept the beliefs that compliant behavior would imply. For example, Matt belongs to a group that voluntarily helps clean inner-city parks and playgrounds.

When Matt helps clean, his compliant behavior implies certain beliefs about the value of cleaning the parks. In order not to experience dissonance, Matt is likely to come to believe that there is value in his task. However, the amount of pressure that Matt feels from the group affects how much he personally urges himself to believe that cleaning is valuable.

For instance, he may belong to a group with a carefree leader who lets people work at their own pace. In such a group, Matt will probably feel "internal pressure" to like the task of improving the inner-city areas. In contrast, Matt might be in a group with a leader who starts to pressure group members, demanding compliance with the leader's rules.

In this group, Matt will probably feel less compelled to believe personally in the project. Reactance theory. Brehm extended this notion in in his reactance theory. He claimed that people need to feel as if they have freedom to control their behavior. If a group threatens this freedom, individuals will be aroused to protect it. Thus, extreme pressure from a group can backfire and lead to increased deviance.

Matt, for instance, may even begin to dislike the very work he volunteered to do, cleaning parks, if his group becomes too pressure-filled.

Compliance Versus Private Acceptance. In the previous section we summarized some reasons that people conform to their groups. However, in our discussion, we have not formally divided these into the reasons behind compliance versus the causes that foster private acceptance. It may be impossible to make a clear division between the causes. It is true that, as one of their tasks, some theories definitely attempt to explain why private acceptance can occur. For instance, this is the case for the social comparison, dissonance, and reactance theories.

It is also true that a factor such as agreeing with a group only to impress a member is unquestionably a reason that leads to compliance. However, the other reasons that we have mentioned, such as conforming to reach a decision, could cause either private acceptance or compliance. There are further complications regarding this matter.

What starts as compliance may end up as private acceptance. The theory of cognitive dissonance predicts this, and the experiment by Kiesler and DeSalvo revealed the process at work. Thus, it is not always possible to distinguish between the reasons that lead to private acceptance and those that cause compliance.

Nevertheless, researchers have done some studies that relate specifically to compliance or to private acceptance. Asch study. Imagine the following situation: You consent to participate in an experiment that you think is about perception. You show up at the site of the experiment and find eight other people waiting. The experimenter says that the nine of you will perform the study together. The researcher takes you all into a room, where you line up and face a viewing screen.

You are the seventh person in the line. The researcher flashes a slide on the screen showing this series of lines:. The person conducting the study asks which of the lines on the right is the same length as the "standard" on the left.

The first person in the line answers, "A. When your turn comes you say, "A," and think about how obvious the answer is. The second trial in the study is similar to the first. The lines look like this:. On the third trial, the lines look like this:. The researcher begins to go down the line again, asking the participants for answers. The first person says, "A. The second person answers, "A. The third person also says, "A," as does the fourth. You cannot believe what you are hearing, but now the fifth and sixth participants answer, "A.

What do you say? This situation is the prototype for a series of studies performed by Asch , Researchers have interpreted his experiments as being relevant to compliance. Unknown to the real participant, the other eight "participants" in the line were confederates working with the researcher. Asch instructed the confederates to unanimously give the wrong answer during 12 of the 18 trials.

He intended their answers to be so obviously wrong that the real participants could not fail to be amazed at the discrepancy between what they saw and what they heard. Scientists have made the assumption that if the real participant in Asch's study conformed with the incorrect confederates, the conformity was compliance, not private acceptance.

This assumption requires some further analysis. Numeric results. First, let us examine the numeric results of Asch's experiment. On the average, 3. We can compare this outcome with the results from control groups. In the control groups, participants could see what others did, but they did not verbalize their own choices.

Hence, there was no pressure to conform. These participants erred an average of only. Thus, it seems that the high level of conformity in the experimental trials was due to group pressure. The pressure successfully led the test participants to give an opinion that they did not really share. However, this overall conformity result is misleading. It masks the great individual differences among the participants.

Out of participants, 29 did not ever conform with their group, 33 conformed on eight or more trials, and the remaining 61 participants went along with their groups only on occasion. Only As we can see, we must keep these individual results in mind as we examine the assumption that Asch's experiment shows compliance at work.

Postexperimental interview results. Next, let us look at the results of postexperimental interviews with the participants. These are crucial to our analysis of Asch's study. Participants who never conformed reported that they had not conformed for one of two reasons. Some did not conform because they were confident that their choices were right, and they were confident even though they acknowledged that they had been deviant in the face of unanimous agreement among the confederates.

Others who had not conformed claimed that they had concentrated totally on the demands of the task, and they had not really noticed what the confederates said. As for the conformists, a small percentage of them claimed to actually have seen the wrong line as a correct match. If these participants were telling the truth, we must conclude that private acceptance was at work in Asch's study.

These participants privately accepted the belief of the majority opinion. They were not simply complying with the group. About half of the rest of the conformists claimed that they had seen the lines correctly but that when they heard the majority choice, they decided that they must have been wrong. They then went along with the group. Whether this is compliance or private acceptance is debatable.

However, the remaining conformists clearly complied. They said that they thought their choice was correct but that they had gone along with the group anyway. Thus, as we can see, we cannot assume that Asch's experiment revealed solely elements concerning compliance.

It appears that perhaps both types of conformity, compliance and private acceptance, were at work in his study. Nevertheless, Asch's work reveals a great deal about compliance. He also performed variations on his original test that yielded further findings. In addition, other researchers have been able to build on Asch's work. Asch compared his original findings with the results of some variations on his first test procedure.

Some examples of his experiments, along with their results, are:. A test with two "real" participants instead of one. If one of the two did not immediately comply, the other knew that he or she had an ally.

This circumstance lowered the conformity rate to A study that had one confederate who always answered correctly. The real participant now always had an ally. This decreased the conformity rate further, to 5.

We can conclude from this test that one ally is enough to markedly decrease conformity when someone faces an overwhelming majority. An experiment in which a confederate answered correctly at the beginning and then soon "deserted" to the majority. This situation did not help the real participant's courage. The conformity rate was A study that had a confederate who stopped conforming and started to say the right answer, thereby joining the real participant. This was quite helpful for the participant and lowered conformity rates to 8.

Asch also varied the number of confederates facing a lone test participant. He did this to discover whether conformity would increase as the size of the opposing majority grew. As you recall, the control groups had participants who conformed at the rate of only.

The results when Asch increased the majority size to various levels were:. As the numbers show, there is a high percentage of conformity when a lone dissenter faces a unified majority of only three people.

It appears that this small group size is sufficient to cause a conformity rate that is close to maximum potential. Increasing the number of confederates beyond three does not seem to raise conformity levels significantly. Gerard study. More than a decade after these original experiments, Gerard examined the plight of the lone dissenter. He applied the tenets of cognitive dissonance theory to the results from Asch's study.

As Gerard pointed out, the naive participant is faced with two unpleasant choices in Asch's experiment. He or she can conform, in opposition to his or her true impressions, or he or she can dissent in the face of possible ridicule and embarrassment.

Both choices lead to dissonance. We can see how conformity would cause a state of dissonance in Asch's experiment. The compliant participant has three internal statements that reveal how the internal conflict occurs. He or she is thinking, for instance, "I saw that line C was closest to the standard," "I said that line A was closest to the standard," and "Line A and line C cannot both be closest to the standard.

Gerard hypothesized that a compliant participant could lower his or her internal dissonance as the experiment continued. The participant could do so by. This is what a small majority claimed to have done in Asch's study. Deciding that what they see is wrong. Many participants did this. Attributing the responsibility for what they say to the group.

In this way, they feel that the group pressured them to say the wrong thing and that they can comply with a clear conscience. Quite a few of Asch's participants relieved their dissonance in this way.

It is similarly true that deviation, as well as conformity, leads to a state of dissonance. The participant feels that, "I said that line C was closest to the standard," "The group said that line A was closest," and "I am a member of the group. A person could do this by telling himself or herself something like, "I know I am a member of this group, but I don't care whether the group likes me. I will continue to say the truth. Gerard saw these conditions at work in Asch's experiments.

Gerard took these findings and hypothesized that a participant's first choice of behavior is important. The person can choose to deviate or to conform on the first trial. Whichever action the person chooses, his or her cognitions will probably change so that internal dissonance will decrease in subsequent trials. For example, Joe feels pressured by his group of friends to help them steal a car. Internally, Joe does not believe that he should help them.

Joe needs to decide what he will do the first time his friends ask him to steal. Let us say that, as a first example, Joe does not go along with his friends. To have internal harmony, Joe dissociates himself from the group and decides that these particular friends are not very important to him. As time goes by and as his friends pressure him to steal other things, the likelihood is that Joe will continue to refuse. He can do this because the group does not mean very much to him anymore.

On the other hand, if Joe steals a car the first time, it is likely that he will continue to do so. He will probably tell himself that the group is right and that stealing is not so bad, in order to lower his internal dissonance. As you recall, there were consistencies in individual participants' behavior over trials during Asch's study.

These results supported Gerard's hypothesis. What is interesting about the dissonance interpretation of Asch's study is how it relates to an idea we discussed earlier.

As we showed, a member will continue to disbelieve a group's opinion if he or she blames the group for his or her act of compliance. If, for instance, Joe is forced to go with his friends and steal the car, Joe will probably not come to believe that stealing is all right. This is similar to the third response that we noted above for people who comply with a group. In fact, a person who feels this way may come to dislike the group and deviate more.

However, once the compliant member comes to blame himself or herself for compliance, the stage is set for the person to begin to privately accept the group's decision.

If this happens, in all likelihood the person will like the group more. This is the method by which "brainwashing" can occur. For instance, if Joe's group taunts him by saying that he is just like them or he would not have had them for friends in the first place, Joe may begin to feel personally responsible for having friends who ask him to steal.

He may begin to believe his group and start to think that stealing is all right. If this happens, Joe's group has successfully "brainwashed" him.

Private acceptance can occur in other ways also. The following experiment shows this. Private Acceptance. Sherif study. Imagine the following circumstances: You have again consented to participate in an experiment that you think is about perception. This time the experimenter promises you that no confederates will pressure you to do anything. The researcher takes you into a dark room, where you are alone.

Suddenly, a point of light appears before you. It seems to move erratically for a few seconds, and then it disappears.

The experimenter asks you to report how far the light appeared to move. There is a problem, however. You are not sure how big the room is.

Nor do you know how far the light was from you. In other words, you have no frame of reference against which you can compare the light's movement.

How can you make your judgment when you have no frame of reference or basis that you can use to evaluate the light? This is the prototype procedure for a series of studies that Sherif performed in In reality, the light did not move at all. What occurred was a physiological phenomenon that scientists call an " autokinetic effect. Subjective standards. Sherif's first studies showed that his participants quickly established subjective standards that they could use as points of reference.

They would then judge the amount of apparent movement against these "standards. The participants would often use their first judgment and the movement that they saw in it as their standard for comparison. They would then use the immediately subsequent judgments in order to estimate the range of possible movement for the light.

In Sherif's study, there was a wide range of standards that the participants created. The smallest standard for the range of movement for the light was about one inch. By contrast, the largest standard was about 7 inches. Once an individual established a subjective standard, he or she continued to use that standard in subsequent experimental sessions. A group "norm" for judgment. Sherif's next concern was to discover what would occur if individuals performed the task in groups.

In the groups, the participants announced their estimates, one by one, in one another's presence. We can hypothesize two possible results for this study.

As you recall, the light does not actually move. Do you call the police or leave the robber be, so the orphanage can keep the money? We posed this moral dilemma to participants recruited online in our first experiment.

Before they made their choice, we also presented information about how similar participants in a previous experiment had imagined acting during this dilemma. Half of our participants were told that most other people had imagined reporting the robber. The remaining half were told that most other people had imagined not calling the police. Instead, the norm was said to have occurred due to some faulty code in the experiment that randomly allocated the previous participants to imagining reporting or not reporting the robber.

Simply telling people that many other people had been randomly allocated to imagine reporting the robber increased their tendency to favour reporting the robber. A series of subsequent experiments, involving new participants recruited online, showed that this result was robust.

It held over different participants and different moral dilemmas. These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data.

We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification. I Accept Show Purposes. Table of Contents View All. Table of Contents. Research and Experiments. Influential Factors. Essentially, conformity involves giving in to group pressure. Was this page helpful?

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