Social conformity versus freedom

“Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth”, John F. Kennedy

Recent research in applied psychology have established that making people aware of the behaviour of others is a useful technique for inducing positive behavioural change on a societal level. The influence of others on our attitudes, opinions, and behaviours is called social influence and it can take a variety of forms.

Types of social influence:

Conformity: Changing your behaviour to go along with the group even if you do not agree with the group;

Compliance: Going along with a request or demand;

Normative: Conformity to a group norm to fit in, feel good, and be accepted by the group;

Informational: Conformity to a group norm prompted by the belief that the group is competent and has the correct information;

Obedience: Changing your behaviour to please an authority figure or to avoid aversive consequences;

Groupthink: Group members modify their opinions to match what they believe is the group consensus;

Group polarization: Strengthening of the original group attitude after discussing views within a group;

Social facilitation: Improved performance when an audience is watching versus when the individual performs the behaviour alone;

Social loafing: Less effort by a person working in a group because individual performance is not evaluated separately from the group, thus causing performance decline on easy tasks.

Conformity is the process whereby people change their beliefs, attitudes, actions, or perceptions to fit in a group. Usually, this group is the one they belong to or want to belong to or a group whose approval they desire. Not everyone conforms to social pressure. Indeed, many factors contribute to an individual’s desire to remain independent of the group. The scholars Bond and Smith discovered cultural differences in conformity between western and eastern countries. People from western cultures are more likely to be individualistic and don’t like to be seen as being the same as everyone else. They consider independence and self-sufficiency as values and they are more likely to participate in non-conformity. In this kind of society, the individual is more important that the group.

In contrast, people of eastern cultures are more likely to put the needs of the family and other social groups before their own. This is what is called a collectivist culture, where people are more likely to conform. Rates of conformity can vary between cultures and can change over different times within the same culture. “In individualist cultures, most people’s social behavior is largely determined by personal goals that overlap only slightly with the goals of collectives such as the family, the work group, the tribe, political allies, co-religionists, fellow countrymen and the state. When a conflict arises between personal and group goals, it is considered acceptable for the individual to place personal goals ahead of collective goals. By contrast, in collectivist cultures social behavior is determined largely by goals shared with some collective, and if there is a conflict between personal and collective goals, it is considered socially desirable to place collective goals ahead of personal goals.” (Bond and Smith, 1996)

In our society, conformity is something that happens regularly. Sometimes we are aware of our behaviour, but in many cases, it happens without much thought or awareness on our parts. In some cases, we go along with things that we disagree with or behave in ways that we know we should not. The majority of the experiments brought to light in the field show that people, most of the time, go along with the group, even when they know the group is wrong. A social experiment conducted by Solomon Asch in 1951 showed that a person is most likely to give the same answer of the group even if the answer is not correct, just to conform to the group. The purpose of it was to study social conformity. Although some other scholars, for different reasons, criticized the method, the study can be a starting point to demonstrate the power of social influence.

During the experiment, the participants had been given two cards: one had one line, and the other had three lines. They were asked to compare the length of the one line with the other three to determine which the same length as the original line was. The only real participant sat at the end of the row and gave his answer last. The other participants were actors and gave their answers first, aloud. Their answers were purposefully incorrect because they had detailed instructions and knew the aim of the experiment. Over the 12 critical trials, where the confederates gave the wrong answer, about 75% of participants conformed at least once, and only 25% never conformed.

When the participants were asked why they didn’t stick with their answer and went along with the obviously incorrect answer, most of them said that they did that in fear of being ridiculed. Some of them said, instead, they really believed that the group’s answer was correct and that they must have been missing something. These answers lead to two types of social conformity: normative and informational, which we will deepen in the next article. To fit in with a group might has some benefits, but it can happen that conformity lead to unpleasant consequences. People who try to conform can feel like they have to change their appearance or personality to be members of a group. Conforming to a group way of acting means taking the good but also the bad features of the group and sometimes it can also result in acts of prejudice or illegal behaviour. Nevertheless, also openness to new ideas and arguments can be blocked by conformity, where thinking out of the box is not even an option.

Giudi Aligi

References:

Britannica, Conformity, John M. Levine

https://www.britannica.com/topic/conformity

Frontiers in Neuroscience, The neuroscience of social conformity: implications for fundamental and applied research, Mirre Stallen, Alan G. Sanfey (2015)

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2015.00337/full

Simply psychology, What is conformity? S.A. McLeod, (2016)

https://www.simplypsychology.org/conformity.html

Simply psychology, Solomon Asch – Conformity Experiment S.A. McLeod, (2018)

https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html

Verywell mind, What is conformity? Kendra Cherry (2022)

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-conformity-2795889

Social Conformity Definition: Normative vs. Informational (2021)

https://study.com/academy/lesson/social-conformity-definition-social-vs-informational.html

IB Psychology, Conformity rates across cultures, Travis Dixon (2016)

https://www.themantic-education.com/ibpsych/2016/10/04/key-study-bond-and-smith-1996/

Culture and Conformity: A Meta-Analysis of Studies Using Asch’s ( 1952b, 1956) Line Judgment Task, Rod Bond and Peter B. Smith (1996)