Types of conformity: internalisation, identification and compliance
● Aronson defined conformity as a change in a person’s behavior or opinions as a result
of real or imagined social pressure
● Kelman (1958) suggested 3 levels of conformity: Compliance (shallow), Identification
(intermediate) and internalisation (deep).
1. Compliance is publicly conforming to the group behaviours/ideas, but privately
keeping one’s own personal opinions. It results in a temporary change in
behaviour.
2. Identification is where an individual values membership of a group and so will
conform to their behaviour and ideas publicly and privately in order to feel part of
said group, but doesn’t fully agree so will revert to personal ideas/behaviours if
separated from the group for long enough. So this form of conformity is
temporary, but longer lasting than compliance.
3. Internalisation is the deepest form of conformity. The individual’s personal
opinions genuinely change to match those of the group. This is a permanent
change in beliefs
Explanations for conformity: informational social influence and normative social
influence
The two explanations of conformity are informational social influence and normative social
influence.
★ Informational social influence (ISI) occurs in situations where the correct behaviour is
unclear, so individuals look to the majority for guidance how to behave because they
want to be correct. ISI often results in internalisation, that is, permanently adopting the
views of the majority.
★ Normative social influence (NSI) occurs in situations where individuals want to appear
to be normal and one of the majority so that they are approved of and not rejected. NSI
often results in compliance, or a superficial change in behaviour without change in
personal values.
Variables affecting conformity including group size, unanimity and task difficulty as
investigated by Asch
● A piece of research supporting normative social influence (and thus compliance) is
Asch’s (1951) study.
● Aim: Asch wanted to examine the extent to which social pressure from a majority could
cause a person to conform.
● Procedure: Asch’s sample consisted of 50 male students from Swarthmore College in
America, who believed they were taking part in a vision test. Asch used a line judgement
task, where he placed one real naïve participant in a room with seven confederates
(actors), who had agreed their answers in advance. The real participant was deceived
and was led to believe that the other seven people were also real participants. The real
participant always sat second to last.
, ● In turn, each person had to say out loud which line (A, B or C) was most like the target
line in length
● The correct answer was always obvious. Each participant completed 18 trials and the
confederates gave the same incorrect answer on 12 trials, called critical trials. Asch
wanted to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view, even when the
answer was clearly incorrect.
● Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the majority view.
● Findings: On average, the real participants conformed to the incorrect answers on 32%
of the critical trials. 74% of the participants conformed on at least one critical trial
compared to 0.04% in a control group, and 26% of the participants never conformed.
Asch also used a control group, in which one real participant completed the same
experiment without any confederates. He found that less than 1% of the participants
gave an incorrect answer.
● Asch interviewed his participants after the experiment to find out why they conformed.
Most of the participants said that they knew their answers were incorrect, but they went
along with the group in order to fit in, or because they thought they would be ridiculed.
● Conclusions: This confirms that participants conformed due to normative social
influence and the desire to fit in.
Evaluation of Asch
★ Generalisability- Asch used a biased sample (50 male students from Swarthmore
College in America). Therefore, we cannot generalise the results to other populations, for
example female students, and we are unable to conclude if female students would have
conformed in a similar way to male students. As a result Asch’s sample lacks population
validity and further research is required to determine whether males and females
conform in the same way.
★ Reliability- As a standard procedure was used this study has high internal reliability as it
can be easily replicated to obtain the same results.
★ Application- Asch’s experiment has low levels of ecological validity. Asch’s test of
conformity, a line judgement task, is an artificial task, which does not reflect conformity in
everyday life. Consequently, we are unable to generalise the results of Asch to other real
life situations, such as why people may start smoking or drinking around friends, and
therefore these results are limited in their application to everyday life.
★ Validity- Perrin and Spencer (1980) did a replication of Asch’s original study with
British engineering students and found over 396 trials that only one student conformed.
This means that Asch’s study may suffer from lack temporal validity and have limited
population validity, in that participants were American and so may have originally
conformed due to the significant political pressure to conform there due to the Red Scare
of the 1950s.
- However, engineering students are more familiar with measurement than the general
population, so it could be argued that this sample was biased and so the results were
invalid.
★ However Rosander (2011) supports Asch’s findings. Rosander used Facebook, Twitter,
and other online communities to investigate the effect of task difficulty on conformity.
