Conformity

Conformity or conformism is the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to group norms, politics or being like-minded. Norms are implicit, specific rules, guidance shared by a group of individuals, that guide their interactions with others. People often choose to conform to society rather than pursue personal desires – because it is often easier to follow the path others have already made than to forge a new one. Thus, conformity is sometimes a product of group communication. This tendency to conform occurs in small groups and/or in society as a whole and may result from subtle unconscious influences (predisposed state of mind), or from direct and overt social pressure. Conformity can occur in the presence of others or when an individual is alone. For example, people tend to follow social norms when eating or when watching television, even if alone.

Solomon Asch, a social psychologist whose obedience research remains among the most influential in psychology, demonstrated the power of conformity through his experiment on line judgment. The Asch conformity experiment demonstrates the extent to which conformity influences people. In a laboratory experiment, Asch asked 50 male students from Swarthmore College in the US to participate in a 'vision test'. Asch put a naive participant in a room with seven stooges in a line judgment task. When confronted with the line task, each stooge had already decided what response they would give. The real members of the experimental group sat in the last position, while the others were pre-arranged experimenters who gave apparently incorrect answers in unison; Asch recorded the last person's answer to analyze the influence of conformity. Surprisingly, about one-third (32%) of participants placed in this situation sided with the clearly incorrect majority on the critical trials. Over the 12 critical trials, about 75% of participants conformed at least once. Ash demonstrated in this experiment that people could produce obviously erroneous responses to conform to a group of similar erroneous responders; this was called normative influence. After being interviewed, subjects acknowledged that they did not actually agree with the answers given by others. The majority, however, believed that groups are wiser, or did not want to appear as mavericks, and chose to repeat the same obvious misconception. There is another influence, sometimes more subtle, called informational influence. This is when people turn to others for information to help them make decisions in new or ambiguous situations. Most of the time, people were simply conforming to social group norms that they were unaware of, whether consciously or unconsciously, especially through a mechanism called the Chameleon effect. This effect is when people unintentionally and automatically mimic others' gestures, posture, and speech style in order to produce rapport and create social interactions that run smoothly (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). It is clear from this that conformity has a powerful effect on human perception and behavior, even to the extent that it can be faked against a person's basic belief system.

Changing one's behavior to match others' responses, which is conformity, can be conscious or unconscious. People have an intrinsic tendency to unconsciously imitate other's behaviors such as gesture, language, talking speed, and other actions of the people they interact with. There are two other main reasons for conformity: informational influence and normative influence. People display conformity in response to informational influence when they believe the group is better informed, or in response to normative influence when they are afraid of rejection. When the advocated norm could be correct, the informational influence is more important than the normative influence, while otherwise the normative influence dominates.

People often conform from a desire for security within a group, also known as normative influence—typically a group of a similar age, culture, religion or educational status. This is often referred to as groupthink: a pattern of thought characterized by self-deception, the forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics, which ignore a realistic appraisal of other courses of action. Unwillingness to conform carries the risk of social rejection. Conformity is often associated in the media with adolescence and youth culture, but it strongly affects people of all ages. The concept of conformity can also be understood in relation to obedience, as demonstrated by Stanley Milgram’s obedience study. While Milgram’s participants were instructed to obey an authority figure, many did so not only out of obedience, but also due to the pressure to align with perceived social expectations in the experimental setting. This blurring of obedience and conformity illustrates how people may follow authority while simultaneously seeking acceptance or avoiding conflict, especially when placed in unfamiliar or high-pressure environments. From a psychological standpoint, both phenomena show how situational factors can heavily influence behavior.

Although peer pressure may manifest negatively, conformity can be regarded as either good or bad. Driving on the conventionally approved side of the road may be seen as a form of beneficial conformity. With the appropriate environmental influence, conforming, in early childhood years, allows one to learn and thus, adopt the appropriate behaviors necessary to interact and develop "correctly" within one's society. Conformity influences the formation and maintenance of social norms, and helps societies function smoothly and predictably via the self-elimination of behaviors seen as contrary to unwritten rules. Conformity was found to impair group performance in a variable environment, but was not found to have a significant effect on performance in a stable environment.

According to Herbert Kelman, there are three types of conformity: 1) compliance (which is public conformity, and it is motivated by the need for approval or the fear of disapproval; 2) identification (which is a deeper type of conformism than compliance); 3) internalization (which is to conform both publicly and privately).

Major factors that influence the degree of conformity include culture, gender, age, group size, situational factors, and different stimuli. In some cases, minority influence, a special case of informational influence, can resist the pressure to conform and influence the majority to accept the minority's belief or behaviors.