Conformity In Solomon Asch's Paradigm

What do we call a type of social influence involving the tendency to change thoughts, beliefs or behaviour in order to fit in with a group or social norm? Conformity. Through research, theories and studies, conformity is analysed further in order for us to understand how and why conformity occurs. There are two types of conformity; Normative (yielding to group pressure because a person wants to fit in) and Informational (one lacks confidence or knowledge and, therefore, looks to the group for guidance). These two types of conformity will be seen through the following research. The research of Solomon Asch through an experiment called the Paradigm experiment (normative), Berry’s experiment which was a variation of Asch’s experiment and Sherif’s …show more content…
Asch used a lab experiment to study conformity. He included a male subject being placed in a room with six confederates (a person one works with, especially in something secret) and the experimenter. The subject was then deceived that the confederates were all normal participants. The subject and confederates were seated in a room and required to select and say aloud, which comparison line A,B or C was most like the line on the second card size wise. Some lines were completely and obviously different lengths while others were the same or similar. The subject was seated at the end of the row and asked to answer the experimenter's questions just like the confederates apart from they (the confederates) were instructed to answer correctly and incorrectly. This experiment was repeated with over fifty male subjects. The results were that seventy-five percent of subjects conformed at least once and twenty-five percent did not conform at all. However, in a control group with no pressure to conform to the confederates, less than one percent of the subjects gave the wrong …show more content…
The Temne in Sierra Leone in Africa relied on agriculture for survival and had to work together in order to successfully grow crops to feed meaning they learn conformity from the age of children. This compared to the Inuits of Baffin Island in Canada who relied more on hunting and fishing which is done on their own so they learn to be more individual from a young age. The concept of individualism versus collectivism is seen here. Berry found that Inuits were almost non-conforming whereas the Temne showed a high degree of conformity. A limitation of Berry’s experiment would be that Berry was choosing these two tribes because they represented cultures which make his experiment false in a way as it was pre-planned and would obviously have these results. A strength found was that individualist cultures are less likely to conform while collectivist cultures are due to the way they have been brought up to survive in their culture, however, this is not a valid application that can be made to the world because you cannot divide the universe up into individualists and collectivists. The Smith and Bond study carried out thirty-one conformity studies and found levels of conformity were lower in individualist cultures like North America and West Europe (twenty-five percent) compared to a high conformity rate in collectivist cultures seen through some