Conformity

Conformity is the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to group norms, politics or being like-minded.^[1] 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 to pursue personal desires – because it is often easier to follow the path others have made already, rather than forging a new one. Thus, conformity is sometimes a product of group communication.^[2] 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.^[3]

The Asch conformity experiment demonstrates how much influence conformity has on 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 confederates/stooges in a line judgment task. When confronted with the line task, each confederate 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. The results were very surprising on average, about one third (32%) of the participants who were 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. After being interviewed, subjects acknowledged that they did not actually agree with the answers given by others. The majority of them, however, believe that groups are wiser or do not want to appear as mavericks and choose to repeat the same obvious misconception. 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.^[4]

Changing one's behaviors to match the responses of others, which is conformity, can be conscious or not.^[5] 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.^[6] There are two other main reasons for conformity: informational influence and normative influence.^[6] 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.^[7] When the advocated norm could be correct, the informational influence is more important than the normative influence, while otherwise the normative influence dominates.^[8]

People often conform from a desire for security within a group, also known as normative influence^[9]—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, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics, which ignores realistic appraisal of other courses of action. Unwillingness to conform carries the risk of social rejection. Conformity is often associated in media with adolescence and youth culture, but strongly affects humans of all ages.^[10]

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 beneficial conformity.^[11] 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.^[12] 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.^[13] 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.^[14]

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).^[15]

Major factors that influence the degree of conformity include culture, gender, age, size of the group, 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.^[7]