sociology conformity experiment

The Asch Conformity Experiments

What Solomon Asch Demonstrated About Social Pressure

• Recommended Reading
• Key Concepts
• Major Sociologists
• News & Issues
• Research, Samples, and Statistics
• Archaeology

The Asch Conformity Experiments, conducted by psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s, demonstrated the power of conformity in groups and showed that even simple objective facts cannot withstand the distorting pressure of group influence.

The Experiment

In the experiments, groups of male university students were asked to participate in a perception test. In reality, all but one of the participants were "confederates" (collaborators with the experimenter who only pretended to be participants). The study was about how the remaining student would react to the behavior of the other "participants."

The participants of the experiment (the subject as well as the confederates) were seated in a classroom and were presented with a card with a simple vertical black line drawn on it. Then, they were given a second card with three lines of varying length labeled "A," "B," and "C." One line on the second card was the same length as that on the first, and the other two lines were obviously longer and shorter.

Participants were asked to state out loud in front of each other which line, A, B, or C, matched the length of the line on the first card. In each experimental case, the confederates answered first, and the real participant was seated so that he would answer last. In some cases, the confederates answered correctly, while in others, the answered incorrectly.

Asch's goal was to see if the real participant would be pressured to answer incorrectly in the instances when the Confederates did so, or whether their belief in their own perception and correctness would outweigh the social pressure provided by the responses of the other group members.

Asch found that one-third of real participants gave the same wrong answers as the Confederates at least half the time. Forty percent gave some wrong answers, and only one-fourth gave correct answers in defiance of the pressure to conform to the wrong answers provided by the group.

In interviews he conducted following the trials, Asch found that those that answered incorrectly, in conformance with the group, believed that the answers given by the Confederates were correct, some thought that they were suffering a lapse in perception for originally thinking an answer that differed from the group, while others admitted that they knew that they had the correct answer, but conformed to the incorrect answer because they didn't want to break from the majority.

The Asch experiments have been repeated many times over the years with students and non-students, old and young, and in groups of different sizes and different settings. The results are consistently the same with one-third to one-half of the participants making a judgment contrary to fact, yet in conformity with the group, demonstrating the strong power of social influences.

Connection to Sociology

The results of Asch's experiment resonate with what we know to be true about the nature of social forces and norms in our lives. The behavior and expectations of others shape how we think and act on a daily basis because what we observe among others teaches us what is normal , and expected of us. The results of the study also raise interesting questions and concerns about how knowledge is constructed and disseminated, and how we can address social problems that stem from conformity, among others.

Updated  by Nicki Lisa Cole, Ph.D.

• An Overview of the Book Democracy in America
• The Social Transformation of American Medicine
• McDonaldization: Definition and Overview of the Concept
• Understanding Durkheim's Division of Labor
• Émile Durkheim: "Suicide: A Study in Sociology"
• Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point"
• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
• Definition of the Sociological Imagination and Overview of the Book
• Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity
• The Main Points of "The Communist Manifesto"
• Overview of The History of Sexuality
• A Book Overview: "The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit Of Capitalism"
• Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools
• 15 Major Sociological Studies and Publications
• Learn About Various Sanctions in Forcing Compliance With Social Norms
• Understanding Resocialization in Sociology

The Asch Line Study (+3 Conformity Experiments)

Sheep. Complicit. Doormat. There are a lot of negative connotations associated with conformity, especially in the United States. Individualist societies push back on "going along with what everyone is doing." And yet, we conform more than we think. According to studies like the Asch Line Study, humans have a natural tendency to conform.

The Asch Line Study is one of the most well-known experiments in modern psychology, but it's not without its faults. Keep reading to learn about how the Asch Line Study worked, its criticisms, and similar experiments!

How Did the Asch Line Study Work?

In his famous “Line Experiment”, Asch showed his subjects a picture of a vertical line followed by three lines of different lengths, one of which was obviously the same length as the first one. He then asked subjects to identify which line was the same length as the first line.

Solomon Asch used 123 male college students as his subjects, and told them that his experiment was simply a ‘vision test’. For his control group, Asch just had his subjects go through his 18 questions on their own.

However, for his experimental group, he had his subjects answer each of the same 18 questions in a group of around a dozen people, where the first 11 people intentionally said obviously incorrect answers one after another, with the final respondee being the actual subject of the experiment.

Who was Solomon Asch?

Solomon E. Asch was a pioneer in social psychology. He was born in Poland in 1907 and moved to the United States in 1920. Asch received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1932 and went on to perform some famous psychological experiments about conformity in the 1950s.

One of these studies is known as the “Asch Line Experiment”, where he found evidence supporting the idea that humans will conform to and accept the ideas of others around them, even if those ideas are obviously false. This study is one of the most influential studies in social psychology .

Findings of Asch's Conformity Study

​ Asch found that his subjects indeed were more likely to give a false response after the other members of their group (the actors) gave false responses. As shown in this ‘Table 1’ from his experiment, during 18 trials, the ‘Majority Error’ column shows no error when the group response was the correct response, such as in Trial #1.

However, when the entire group intentionally gave a false answer (these situations are designated with an * under the “Group Response” column), the ‘Majority Error’ did exist and was slanted toward the opinion of the group.

For example, if the group answered with a line that was too long, such as in Trial #3, the ‘Majority Error’ column shows that the subjects generally estimated the line to be longer than it really was (denoted with a ‘+’), and vice-versa for when the group answered with a line that was too short, such as in Trial #4.

As for his control group, Asch found that people generally said the correct answer when they did not have a group of actors saying answers before them.

Interviewing the Participants

​ After the experiment, Asch revealed the true experiment to his subjects and interviewed them. Some subjects had become very agitated during the experiment, wondering why they kept disagreeing with the group. When the group pressed one particular subject on why he thought that he was correct and the entire group was wrong, he replied defiantly, exclaiming: “You're probably right, but you may be wrong!”

Other subjects admitted during the interview that they changed their answers after hearing others in their group reply differently. One was recorded saying, “If I’d been the first I probably would have responded differently.” Another subject admitted, “...at times I had the feeling: 'to heck with it, I'll go along with the rest.' "

Conclusions from the Asch Line Study

​ Asch found that his subjects often changed their answers when they heard the rest of the group unanimously giving a different response.

After the interviews, Asch concluded in his study that his subjects conformed to the opinions of the group for three different reasons:

Distortion of perception due to the stress of group pressure: This group of subjects always agreed with the group and said during the interview that they wholeheartedly believed that their obviously incorrect answers were correct. Asch concluded that the stress of group pressure had distorted their perception.

Distortion of judgment: This was the most common outcome, where subjects assumed that their individual answers were incorrect after seeing the rest of the group answer differently, so they changed their answer to align with the group.

Distortion of action: These subjects never doubted that they were correct and the group was wrong, but out of fear of being perceived as different, they suppressed their opinions and intentionally lied when it was their turn to give an answer.

Asch Line Study vs. Milgram Experiment

Both the Asch Line Study and the Milgram Experiment look at conformity, obedience, and the negative effects of going along with the majority opinion. Those negative effects are slightly awkward, like in the Asch Line Study, or dangerous, like in the Milgram Experiment. Both experiments were conducted in the Post-WWII world as a response to the conformity that was required for Nazi Germany to gain power. The premise of Asch's study was not nearly as dramatic. Milgram's was. 

To test conformity, Milgram and his researchers instructed participants to press a button. Participants believed that the buttons would shock another "participant" in a chair, who was really an actor. (No one was shocked.) The study continued as long as participants continued to shock the participant at increasingly dangerous levels. The participants knew that they could cause serious harm to the person in the chair. Yet, many obeyed.

Further Experiments and Variations

Solomon Asch didn't just conduct one experiment and move on. He replicated his experiment with new factors, including:

• Changing the size of the actor group
• Switching to a non-unanimous actor group
• Having a unanimous actor group, except for one actor who sticks to the correct response no matter what the group or subject says
• Instructing the one actor who gives the correct response come in late
• Having one actor decide to change their answer from the group’s answer to the subject’s answer

There are also many reproductions and replications of this study online. Not all of them come to the same conclusions! Read through the following texts to get a sense of how other psychologists approached this subject:

• Mori K, Arai M. No need to fake it: reproduction of the Asch experiment without confederates. Int J Psychol. 2010 Oct 1;45(5):390-7. doi: 10.1080/00207591003774485. PMID: 22044061.

Why Is The Asch Line Study Ethnocentric? And Other Criticisms

​ One big issue with the Asch line study is that the subjects were all white male college students between the ages of 17 and 25, with a mean age of 20. Since the experiment only shows results for this small and specific group of people, it alone cannot be applied to other groups such as women or older men.

Experimenter Bias in the Asch Line Study

Only choosing subjects from one demographic is a form of Experimenter Bias . Of course, researchers can use one demographic if they are specifically studying that demographic. But Asch was not just looking at young, white men. If he had expanded his research to include more participants, he may have produced different answers.

We assume Asch did not go about his study with the intention of being biased. That's the tricky thing about biases. They sneak up on us! Even the way that we share information about psychology research is the result of bias. Reporter bias is the tendency to highlight certain studies due to their results. The Asch Line Study produced fascinating results. Therefore, psychology professors, reporters, and students find it fascinating and continue to share this concept. They don't always share the full story, though.

Did you know that 95% of the participants actually defied the majority at least once during the experiment? Most textbooks don't report that. Nor did they report that the interviewees knew that they were right all along! Leaving out this key information is not Asch's fault. But it should give you, a psychology student, some pause. One thing that we should take away from this study is that we have a natural tendency to conform. This tendency also takes place when we draw conclusions from famous studies! Be critical as you learn about these famous studies and look to the source if possible.

Further Criticisms of the Asch Line Study

Does the Asch Line Study stand the test of time? Not exactly. If we look at what was happening in 1950s society, we can see why Asch got his results. Young white men in the early 1950s may have responded differently to this experiment than young white men would today. In the United States, which is where this experiment was performed, the mid-1950s was a historic turning point in terms of rejecting conformity. Youth were pushing toward a more free-thinking society. This experiment was performed right around the time that the movement was just starting to blossom, so the subjects had not grown up in the middle of this new anti-conformist movement. Had Asch performed this experiment a decade later with youth who more highly valued free-thinking, he may have come across very different results.

Another thing to note is that, at least in the United States, education has evolved with this movement of encouraging free-thinking. Teachers today tell students to question everything, and many schools reject ideas of conformity. This could once again mean that, if done again today, Asch would have found very different results with this experiment.

Another problem with this experiment is that, since subjects were not told it was a psychological experiment until after it was over, subjects may have gone through emotional and psychological pain during what they thought was just a simple ‘vision test’.

Finally, it’s good to remember that the ‘Asch Line Experiment’ is just that: an experiment where people looked at lines. This can be hard to apply to other situations because humans in group settings are rarely faced with questions that have one such obvious and clear answer, as was the case in this experiment.

Related posts:

• Solomon Asch (Psychologist Biography)
• 40+ Famous Psychologists (Images + Biographies)
• Stanley Milgram (Psychologist Biography)
• Experimenter Bias (Definition + Examples)
• The Monster Study (Summary, Results, and Ethical Issues)

Reference this article:

About The Author

PracticalPie.com is a participant in the Amazon Associates Program. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

Follow Us On:

Youtube Facebook Instagram X/Twitter

Psychology Resources

Developmental

Personality

Relationships

Psychologists

Serial Killers

Psychology Tests

Personality Quiz

Memory Test

Depression test

Type A/B Personality Test

© PracticalPsychology. All rights reserved

Privacy Policy | Terms of Use

Asch Conformity Experiments

Title: The Asch Conformity Experiments: An Exploration of Social Influence and Group Dynamics

Introduction.

The Asch Conformity Experiments, conducted by Solomon Asch in the 1950s, are seminal studies in social psychology that illuminate the power of conformity within group settings. These experiments highlight how individuals often conform to majority opinions, even when they contradict their own senses and perceptions. This paper aims to define, explain, and explore the sociological implications of the Asch experiments, providing a detailed analysis of the phenomena of conformity, group dynamics, and social influence.

Definition of Key Concepts

• Conformity : Conformity refers to the process of aligning one’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to match the norms or standards of a group. It is a social influence that can often compromise personal beliefs or perceptions in favor of group consensus.
• Social Influence : This involves the effect that the words, actions, or mere presence of other people have on our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or behavior. It encompasses a broad range of phenomena, including conformity, socialization, peer pressure, obedience, and persuasion.
• Group Dynamics : This term describes the systemic behaviors and psychological processes that occur within a social group or between social groups. It involves the ways individuals interact and form relationships, impacting the group’s structure and function.

The Asch Experiments Explained

Solomon Asch’s experiments were cleverly designed to measure the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform. In his most famous study, participants were placed in a group with confederates (individuals who were in on the experiment) and asked to match line lengths. Each participant had to state aloud which comparison line (A, B, or C) matched the length of a target line. Unbeknownst to the real participant, the confederates were instructed to unanimously choose an incorrect line for certain trials.

Remarkably, about one-third of the participants conformed to the clearly incorrect majority on the critical trials, demonstrating the strong influence of group pressure on individual judgment. These results suggest that the tendency to conform is powerful, often compelling individuals to forsake their own perceptions to align with the group’s consensus.

Sociological Perspective

From a sociological perspective, the Asch experiments underscore the profound impact of social norms and the fear of deviance on individual behavior. Conformity serves as a social mechanism that promotes social cohesion and stability, facilitating predictable interactions within a community or group. However, this can also suppress individuality and promote uniformity, potentially leading to dysfunctional or unjust group decisions.

Examples and Implications

Consider a workplace where the majority of employees agree with a flawed business strategy because they perceive that dissent might lead to isolation or retaliation. Such scenarios illustrate how conformity can lead to poor group decisions, emphasizing the need for mechanisms that promote healthy dissent and diversity of thought.

Further, the impact of the Asch experiments extends into understanding phenomena such as group polarization and groupthink, where isolated groups may make extreme or irrational decisions as a result of their internal dynamics and the suppression of dissenting opinions.

The Asch Conformity Experiments offer invaluable insights into the mechanisms of social influence and group dynamics, revealing both the strengths and pitfalls of social conformity. They serve as a cautionary tale about the limits of social influence, highlighting the need for fostering environments where healthy dissent is respected and encouraged. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for leaders, educators, policymakers, and individuals who navigate complex social environments daily.

Sociological Implications

In conclusion, the legacy of Solomon Asch’s work continues to influence contemporary social psychology and sociology , providing a critical lens through which to examine the interplay between individual autonomy and social conformity. By studying these dynamics, we can better equip societies to balance conformity and individuality, leading to more robust and adaptive social systems.

Related Posts:

• Applied Social Psychology Definition & Explanation
• Anthrozoology Definition and Explanation
• Age Definition & Explanation
• Appropriation Definition & Explanation
• Class Consciousness Definition & Explanation
• Action Research Definition & Explanation
• Atomism Definition & Explanation
• Arranged Marriage Definition & Explanation
• Anticipatory Socialization Definition and Explanation
• Anthropology Definition & Explanation

Conformity: Definitions, Types, and Evolutionary Grounding

• First Online: 01 January 2015

Cite this chapter

• Julie C. Coultas Ph.D. 6 , 7 &
• Edwin J. C. van Leeuwen Ph.D. 8  

Part of the book series: Evolutionary Psychology ((EVOLPSYCH))

6452 Accesses

10 Citations

6 Altmetric

Conformity research in social psychology spans a century, but researchers have only adopted an evolutionary perspective in the past 25 years. This change has been driven by gene-culture coevolutionary models and research on nonhuman animals. In this chapter, we outline why there is a credible basis for an evolutionary explanation for widespread behavioral conformity in humans. However, we caution that not all conformity in humans is the same because conforming in a perceptual judgment task in the laboratory (as per the Asch paradigm) is not equivalent to being an unwitting participant in a behavioral field study. Moreover, conformity has not been consistently defined across research disciplines, which hampers a valid assessment of its evolutionary origins. Theoretical models within social psychology and the study of gene-culture coevolution are valuable tools in the quest for evolutionary explanations of conformist behavior; they have utilized gained insights while inspiring simulations and empirical tests. We propose the idea of incorporating individuals’ habit adherence into the models to advance the study of conformity. Conformity is a powerful force in human decision making and is best understood from an evolutionary perspective.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save.

• Get 10 units per month
• Download Article/Chapter or eBook
• 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
• Cancel anytime
• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info
• Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Conformity cannot be identified based on population-level signatures

Sigmoidal Acquisition Curves Are Good Indicators of Conformist Transmission

Social learning may lead to population level conformity without individual level frequency bias

Asch proposed that conformity leveled off at a group size of three in perceptual judgment experiments.

Lumsden and Wilson ( 1981 ) used these findings when constructing their trend-watcher curve.

Allport, F. H. (1924). Social psychology . Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Google Scholar  

Allport, F. H. (1934). The j-curve hypothesis of conforming behavior. Journal of Social Psychology, 5, 141–185.

Article   Google Scholar  

Aoki, K., & Feldman, M. W. (2013). Evolution of learning strategies in temporally and spatially variable environments: A review of theory. Theoretical Population Biology, 90, 64–81.

Aronson, E., & O’Leary, M. (1983). The relative effectiveness of models and prompts on energy conservation. Journal of Environmental Systems, 12, 219–224.

Asch, S. E. (1951). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgment. In H. Guetzkow (Ed.), Groups, leadership and men (pp. 117–190). Pittsburgh: Carnegie Press.

Asch, S. E. (1955). Opinions and social pressure. Scientific American, 193, 31–35.

Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs, 70, 1–70.

Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54, 462–479.

Bond, R. (2005). Group size and conformity. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 8, 331–354.

Bond, R., & Smith, P. B. (1996). Culture and conformity: A meta-analysis of studies using Asch’s (1952b, 1956) line judgment task. Psychological Bulletin, 119, 111–137.

Bonnie, K. E., Horner, V., Whiten, A., & de Waal, F. B. M. (2007). Spread of arbitrary conventions among chimpanzees: A controlled experiment. Proceedings of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences, 274, 367–372.

Article   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Boyd, R. (1988). Is the repeated prisoner’s dilemma game a good model of reciprocal altruism? Ethology and Sociobiology , 9, 211–221.

Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (1985). Culture and the evolutionary process . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (1991). Culture and cooperation. In R. A. Hinde & J. Groebel (Eds.), Cooperation and prosocial behavior (pp. 27–48). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Buss, D. M. (2003). The evolution of desire: Strategies of human mating (2nd ed.). New York: Basic Books.

Campbell, A. (2002). A mind of her own: The evolutionary psychology of women . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Book   Google Scholar  

Campbell, J. D., & Fairey, P. J. (1989). Informational and normative routes to conformity: The effect of faction size as a function of norm extremity and attention to the stimulus. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 457–468.

Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., & Feldman, M. W. (1981). Cultural transmission and evolution : A quantitative approach . Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chartrand, T. L., & Bargh, J. A. (1999). The chameleon effect: The perception—b ehavior link and social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 893–910.

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Cialdini, R. B., & Goldstein, N. J. (2004). Social influence: Conformity and compliance. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 591–621.

Claidière, N., & Whiten, A. (2012). Integrating the study of conformity and culture in humans and nonhuman animals. Psychological Bulletin , 138 , 126–145.

Claidière, N., Bowler, M., & Whiten, A. (2012). Evidence for weak or linear conformity but not for hyper-conformity in an everyday social learning context. PLoS One, 7, e30970.

Article   PubMed Central   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Coultas, J. C. (2004). When in Rome… An evolutionary perspective on conformity. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 7, 317–331.

Coultas, J. C., & Eriksson, K. (May, 2014). Milgram revisited: Imitative behaviour is influenced by both the size and entitativity of the stimulus group. Paper presented at the Annual British Psychological Society , Birmingham.

Crutchfield, R. S. (1955). Conformity and character. American Psychologist, 10, 191–198.

Darley, J. M. (1966). Fear and social comparison as determinants of conformity behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4, 73–78.

David, B., & Turner, J. C. (2001). Majority and minority influence: a single process self-categorisation analysis. In C. K. W. De Dreu & N. K. de Vries (Eds.), Group consensus and minority influence: Implications for innovation (pp. 91–121). Malden: Blackwell.

Day, R. L., MacDonald, T., Brown, C., Laland, K. N., & Reader, S. M. (2001). Interactions between shoal size and conformity in guppy social foraging. Animal Behaviour, 62, 917–925.

Deutsch, M., & Gerard, H. B. (1955). A study of normative and informational social influences upon individual judgment. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 51, 629–636.

Dindo, M., Whiten, A., & de Waal, F. B. M. (2009). In-group conformity sustains different foraging traditions in capuchin monkeys ( Cebus apella ). PloS One, 4, e7858.

Eagly A. H., & Chaiken S. (1993). The psychology of attitudes . Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace.

Efferson, C., Lalive, R., Richerson, P. J., McElreath, R., & Lubell, M. (2008). Conformists and mavericks: The empirics of frequency-dependent cultural transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior, 29, 56–64.

Eriksson, K., & Coultas, J. C. (2009). Are people really conformist-biased? An empirical test and a new mathematical model. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 7, 5–21.

Eriksson, K., Enquist, M., & Ghirlanda, S. (2007). Critical points in current theory of conformist social learning. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 5, 67–87.

Festinger, L. (1950). Informal social communication. Psychological Review, 57, 271–282.

Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7, 117–140.

Galef, B. G. (2012). Social learning and traditions in animals: Evidence, definitions, and relationship to human culture. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews-Cognitive Science, 3, 581–592.

Galef, B. G., & Whiskin, E. E. (2008). ‘Conformity’ in Norway rats? Animal Behaviour, 75, 2035–2039.

Gallup, A. C., Hale, J. J., Sumpter, D. J. T., Garnier, S., Kacelnik, A., Krebs, J. R., & Couzin, I. D. (2012). Visual attention and the acquisition of information in human crowds. PNAS, 109, 7245–7250.

Gerard, H. B., Wilhelmy, R. A., & Connolley, E. S. (1968). Conformity and group size. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 8, 79–82.

Goldstein, N. J., Cialdini, R. B., & Griskevicius, V. (2008). A room with a viewpoint: Using social norms to motivate environmental conservation in hotels. Journal of Consumer Research, 35, 472–482.

Griskevicius, V., Goldstein, N. J., Mortensen, C. R., Cialdini, R. B., & Kenrick, D. T. (2006). Going along versus going alone: When fundamental motives facilitate strategic (non)conformity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 281–294.

Haddock, G., & Maio, G. R. (2008). Attitudes: Content, structure and function. In M. Hewstone, W. Stroebe, & K. Jonas (Eds.), Introduction to social psychology: A European perspective (4th ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Haun, D. B. M., & Tomasello, M. (2011). Conformity to peer pressure in preschool children. Child Development, 82, 1759–1767.

Haun, D. B. M., Rekers, Y., & Tomasello, M. (2012). Majority-biased transmission in chimpanzees and human children, but not orangutans. Current Biology, 22, 727–731.

Haun, D. B. M., van Leeuwen, E. J. C., & Edelson, M. G. (2013). Majority influence in children and other animals. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 3, 61–71.

Henrich, J., & Boyd, R. (1998). The evolution of conformist transmission and the emergence of between-group differences. Evolution and Human Behavior, 19, 215–241.

Hinde, R. (1982). Ethology: Its nature and relations with other sciences . Glasgow: Fontana Press.

Hopper, L. M., Schapiro, S. J., Lambeth, S. P., & Brosnan, S. F. (2011). Chimpanzees’ socially maintained food preferences indicate both conservatism and conformity. Animal Behaviour, 81, 1195–1202.

Hoppitt, W., & Laland, K. N. (2013). Social learning: An introduction to mechanisms , methods, and models . Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press.

Jacobs, R. C., & Campbell, D. T. (1961). The perpetuation of an arbitrary tradition through several generations of a laboratory culture. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 12, 649–658.

Jenness, A. (1932). The role of discussion in changing opinion regarding a matter of fact. Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology, 27, 279–296.

Jolles, J. W., de Visser, L., & van den Bos, R. (2011). Male Wistar rats show individual differences in an animal model of conformity. Animal Cognition, 14, 769–773.

Kameda, T., & Nakanishi, D. (2002). Cost-benefit analysis of social/cultural learning in a nonstationary uncertain environment—An evolutionary simulation and an experiment with human subjects. Evolution and Human Behavior, 23, 373–393.

Kelman, H. C. (1961). Processes of opinion change. Public Opinion Quarterly, 25, 57–78.

Kendal, R. L., Coolen, I., & Laland, K. N. (2004). The role of conformity in foraging when personal and social information conflict. Behavioral Ecology, 15, 269–277.

Kendal, R. L., Coolen, I., & Laland, K. N. (2009). Adaptive trade-offs in the use of social and personal information. In R. Dukas & J. Ratcliffe (Eds.), Cognitive ecology II (pp. 249–271). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Kiesler, C., & Kiesler, S. B. (1969). Conformity . Reading: Addison Wesley.

King, A. J., & Cowlishaw, G. (2007). When to use social information: the advantage of large group size in individual decision making. Biology Letters, 3, 137–139.

Knowles, E., & Bassett, R. (1976). Groups and crowds as social entities: Effects of activity, size and member similarity on nonmembers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34, 837–845.

Krützen, M., Willems, E. P., & van Schaik, C. P. (2011). Culture and geographic variation in orangutan behavior. Current Biology, 21, 1808–1812.

Laland, K. N. (2004). Social learning strategies. Learning & Behavior, 32, 4–14.

Latané, B. (1981). The psychology of social impact. American Psychologist, 36, 343–356.

Latané, B., & Wolf, S. (1981). The social impact of majorities and minorities. Psychological Review, 88, 438–453.

Lumsden, C. J., & Wilson, E. O. (1981). Genes, mind and culture: The coevolutionary process . London: Harvard University Press.

Luncz, L., & Boesch, C. (2013). Tradition over trend: Neighboring chimpanzee communities maintain differences in cultural behavior despite frequent immigration of adult females. American Journal of Primatology, 76, 649–657.

MacCoun, R. J. (2012). The burden of social proof: Shared thresholds and social influence. Psychological Review, 119, 345–372.

Mann, L. (1969). Social psychology . London: Wiley.

Mann, L. (1977). The effect of stimulus queues on queue-joining behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 6, 437–442.

McElreath, R., Lubell, M., Richerson, P. J., Waring, T. M., Baum, W., Edsten, E., et al. (2005). Applying evolutionary models to the laboratory study of social learning. Evolution and Human Behavior, 26, 483–508.

Mesoudi, A. (2009). How cultural evolutionary theory can inform social psychology and vice versa. Psychological Review, 116, 929–952.

Milgram, S. (1970). The experience of living in cities. Science, 167, 1461–1468.

Milgram, S., Bickman, L., & Berkowitz, L. (1969). Note on the drawing power of crowds of different sizes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 13, 79–82.

Moore, C., & Coultas, J. C. (March, 2010). Strangers in a strange land: Social norms, situational variables and the conformist bias. Paper presented at the 5th European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association Conference , University of Wroclaw, Poland.

Morgan, T. J. H., & Laland, K. (2012). The biological bases of conformity. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 6, 87.

Morgan, T. J. H., Rendell, L., Ehn, W., Hoppitt, W., & Laland, K. (2011). The evolutionary basis of human social learning. Proceedings of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences, 279, 653–662.

Moscovici, S., Lage, E., & Naffrechoux, M. (1969). Influence of consistent minority on the responses of a majority in a color perception task. Sociometry, 32, 365–379.

Mullen, B., Copper, C., & Driskell, J. E. (1990). Jaywalking as a function of model behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 16, 320–330.

Nemeth, C., Wachtler, C., & Endicott, J. (1977). Increasing the size of the minority: Some losses and some gains. European Journal of Social Psychology, 7, 15–27.

Newcomb, T. M. (1943). Personality and social change . New York: Dryden Press.

Newcomb, T. M., Koenig, K. E., Flacks, R., & Warwick, D. P. (1967). Persistence and change: Bennington College and its students after twenty five years . New York: Wiley.

Newman, J. & McCauley, C. (1977). Eye contact with strangers in city, suburb and small town. Environment and Behavior , 9 , 547–558.

Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D., (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84, 231–259.

Nowak, A., Szamrej, J., & Latané, B. (1990). From private attitude to public opinion. Psychological Review, 97, 362–376.

Perry, S. (2009). Conformism in the food processing techniques of white-faced capuchin monkeys (Cebus capucinus). Animal Cognition, 12, 705–716.

Pike, T. W., & Laland, K. N. (2010). Conformist learning in nine-spined sticklebacks’ foraging decisions. Biology Letters, 6, 466–468.

Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (2005). Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sherif, M. (1935). A study of some social factors in perception. Archives of Psychology, 27, 187.

Sherif, M. (1936). The psychology of social norms . Oxford: Harper.

Simon, H. (1990). A mechanism for social selection and successful altruism. Science, 250, 1665–1668.

Stang, D. J. (1976). Group size effects on conformity. Journal of Social Psychology, 98, 175–181.

Strimling, P., Enquist, M., & Eriksson, K. (2009). Repeated learning makes cultural evolution unique. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106, 13870–13874.

Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33–47). Monterey: Brooks/Cole.

Tanford, S., & Penrod, S. (1984). Social influence model: A formal integration of research on majority and minority influence processes. Psychological Bulletin, 95, 189–225.

Turner, J. C. (1991). Social influence . Belmont: Wadsworth.

Turner, J. C., Hogg, M. A., Oakes, P. J., Reicher, S. D., & Wetherell, M. S. (1987). Rediscovering the social group: A self-categorization theory . Oxford: Blackwell.

van de Waal, E., Borgeaud, C., & Whiten, A. (2013). Potent social learning and conformity shape a wild primate’s foraging decisions. Science, 340, 483–485.

van Leeuwen, E. J. C., & Haun, D. B. M. (2013). Conformity in primates: Fad or fact? Evolution and Human Behavior, 34, 1–7.

van Leeuwen, E. J. C., & Haun, D. B. M. (2014). Conformity without majority? The case for demarcating social from majority influences. Animal Behaviour , 96, 187–194.

van Leeuwen, E. J. C., Cronin, K. A., Schütte, S., Call, J. & Haun, D. B. M. (2013). Chimpanzees flexibly adjust their behaviour in order to maximize payoffs, not to conform to majorities. PloS One, 8 (11), e80945. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0080945.

White, G. M. (1975). Contextual determinants of opinion judgments: Field experimental probes of judgmental relativity boundary conditions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 1047–1054.

Whiten, A., Horner, V., & de Waal, F. B. M. (2005). Conformity to cultural norms of tool use in chimpanzees. Nature, 437 (7059), 737–740.

Wolf, S., & Latané, B. (1983). Majority and minority influences on restaurant preferences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45, 282–292.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Centre for the study of Cultural Evolution, Stockholm University, 106 91, Stockholm, Sweden

Julie C. Coultas Ph.D.

Department of Psychology, University of Sussex, BN1 9QH, Falmer, UK

Department of Developmental Psychology, University of Jena, Am Steiger 3/1, 07743, Jena, Germany

Edwin J. C. van Leeuwen Ph.D.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Julie C. Coultas Ph.D. .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

Department of Psychology, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, USA

Virgil Zeigler-Hill

Lisa L. M. Welling

Todd K. Shackelford

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this chapter

Coultas, J., van Leeuwen, E. (2015). Conformity: Definitions, Types, and Evolutionary Grounding. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Welling, L., Shackelford, T. (eds) Evolutionary Perspectives on Social Psychology. Evolutionary Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12697-5_15

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12697-5_15

Published : 07 May 2015

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-319-12696-8

Online ISBN : 978-3-319-12697-5

eBook Packages : Behavioral Science Behavioral Science and Psychology (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

• Mental Health
• Social Psychology
• Cognitive Science
• Psychopharmacology
• Neuroscience

Scientists revisit Solomon Asch’s classic conformity experiments — and are stunned by the results

(Photo credit: OpenAI's DALL·E)

In a compelling revival of a classic social psychology experiment, a new study has found that group pressure significantly influences individual decisions, not just in simple tasks but also in expressing political opinions. This modern replication and extension of Solomon Asch’s famed experiments of the 1950s provides new insights into human behavior. The findings appear in the journal PLOS One .

Over 70 years ago, Solomon Asch conducted a series of groundbreaking experiments that fundamentally changed our understanding of conformity. Asch’s experiment was straightforward but powerful. He invited individuals to participate in a group task where they had to match line lengths.

Unbeknownst to the main participant, the rest of the group were confederates — people in on the experiment. These confederates gave deliberately wrong answers to see if the participant would conform to the group’s incorrect consensus or trust their own judgment. Astonishingly, Asch found that a significant number of people chose to conform to the obviously wrong group decision rather than rely on their own perceptions.

Fast forward to the present, and researchers at the University of Bern decided to revisit and expand upon Asch’s seminal work. Their motivation was twofold. Firstly, they wanted to see if Asch’s findings, primarily conducted with American students, still held true in a different cultural and temporal context. Secondly, they were curious to explore the impact of monetary incentives on decisions and how this dynamic plays out in more complex decision-making areas like political opinions.

“The study of Solomon Asch is a classic study that has attracted a lot of attention for a long time in the social sciences,” explained study authors Axel Franzen and Sebastian Mader , a professor and a postdoctoral researcher, respectively, at the university’s Institute of Sociology . “The Asch experiment is part of the class ‘classical studies of empirical social research’ which we teach regularly at the University of Bern in Switzerland. Since the results of Asch look very impressive we were often wondering whether they still hold today or whether it is a phenomenon of the United States during the 1950s.

“There was also a lot of discussion about replicability in psychology and in the social sciences in general. Hence, we decided that it might be a good idea to conduct a replication of Asch. Moreover, we were sitting in our home offices during the COVID-19 pandemic observing many governments and many people thinking and doing the same thing. This inspired us to investigate conformity.

The researchers designed a three-part experiment involving 210 participants, mainly students from the University of Bern. The first part replicated Asch’s line length judgment task, with a twist. In addition to the original format (now the non-incentivized group), they introduced a group where correct answers were monetarily rewarded (the incentivized group).

In the second part, participants were presented with political statements and asked to express their agreement or disagreement, again in the presence of confederates who had predetermined responses. The final part involved an online questionnaire designed to measure various traits, including the Big Five personality dimensions, self-esteem, intelligence, and the need for social approval.

The study’s findings were striking in their similarity to Asch’s original results. In the non-incentivized group, the average error rate in the line judgment task was 33%, closely mirroring Asch’s findings. However, in the incentivized group, the error rate dropped to 25%. This suggests that while financial rewards can reduce the impact of group pressure, they do not eliminate it.

“When we started the study, we could not imagine to be able to replicate the original findings as close as it turned out,” Franzen and Mader told PsyPost. “We thought Asch’s findings were overstated. We also believed that providing incentives for correct answers would wipe out the conformity effect. Both did not happen. The replication turned out to be very close to the original results and providing monetary incentives did not eliminate the effect of social pressure.”

In terms of political opinions, the experiment revealed that group pressure significantly influenced participants’ responses to political statements. An average conformity rate of 38% was observed. This extension of Asch’s work into the realm of opinion demonstrates the broader applicability of his findings beyond simple perceptual tasks.

As for personality traits, the results indicated that openness was the only trait among the Big Five that had a significant correlation with conformity levels. Individuals who scored higher on the openness trait tended to conform less to the group’s incorrect answers in the line judgment task. This suggests that people who are more open-minded and independent in their thinking are less likely to be swayed by the opinions or judgments of others, even when faced with the pressure of a unanimous group decision.

Other traits, including intelligence, self-esteem, and the need for social approval, showed no substantial impact on the tendency to conform.

Regarding what people should take away from the findings, the researchers remarked: “Here we like to cite Mark Twain, ‘Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.'”

While the study offers valuable insights, it’s important to note its limitations. Primarily, the participants were university students, which may not represent the broader population. Future research with more diverse demographics could provide a more comprehensive understanding of conformity across different social backgrounds and age groups.

Additionally, the study raises intriguing questions for further exploration. For instance, would the results hold in a group of friends or acquaintances rather than strangers? How might larger monetary incentives impact conformity? Would the findings be similar for more extreme or personally relevant political statements?

“Our research leaves much room for further studies: For example, we also used a student sample,” Franzen and Mader explained. “Hence, it would be nice to demonstrate the power of conformity with non-student samples. Such an extension would also allow to study the effect of age, education, social class, and occupations on the susceptibility to conformity. Furthermore, our monetary incentives were small, giving rise to the question whether lager incentives further decrease the level of conformity. There are also other forms of incentives, e.g. social reputation, which are interesting to study further.”

The study, “ The power of social influence: A replication and extension of the Asch experiment “, was published November 29, 2023.

Twitter polls exhibit large pro-Trump bias — but these researchers have a fix

A recent study found that polls on X (formerly Twitter) during the 2016 and 2020 U.S. elections were biased toward Donald Trump, influenced by conservative user participation and bot activity, making them less reliable than traditional polls.

Parents’ concerns about future reproduction shape their reactions to a child’s sexual orientation disclosure

New research published in Archives of Sexual Behavior found that parental negativity toward their child disclosing a minoritized sexual orientation may be influenced by reproductive concerns.

Taylor Swift’s political endorsement: How powerful would it be? New study has a surprising answer

A new study has found that associating Taylor Swift's name with a public policy reduces disagreement among young respondents, though it has little effect on increasing agreement with the policy.

Moral character is shaped by self-view, reputation, and shared perceptions

Researchers found that perceptions of moral character are highly subjective, with significant differences between self-perceptions and others' views, largely influenced by individual biases.

Adolescents addicted to short-form videos tend to have more sleep problems and social anxiety

A study in China found that adolescents with more severe addiction to short-form videos tend to have worse sleep quality and higher levels of social anxiety. The paper was published in BMC Psychology.

Long-term unemployment leads to disengagement and apathy, rather than efforts to regain control

Prolonged unemployment strongly correlates with loss of personal control, leading to decreased well-being, psychological disengagement, and reduced social and political involvement.

Contact with nature has this heartening effect on our psychological disposition, scientists find

Spending time in nature helps us see others as more human, boosting empathy and kindness. This effect is linked to feeling connected to something larger than ourselves, promoting positive social interactions.

Study reveals social and psychological factors behind men’s facial hair choices

Men motivated by social status, competition, and gender role stress are more likely to maintain their facial hair, using it as a way to enhance their image and fulfill societal expectations of masculinity.

STAY CONNECTED

Scientists uncover brain circuit that balances eating for necessity and eating for pleasure, microplastics discovered in human brains for the first time: what it means for our health, humans are the exception: new research reveals surprising brain size trends across mammals, family-based foster care reduces irritability in teens exposed to early psychosocial deprivation, study finds, neurofeedback training enhances emotional skills in alcohol rehabilitation, study finds, people with an evolutionarily-mismatched lifestyle are more likely to face several negative outcomes.

• Privacy policy
• Terms and Conditions

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Remember Me

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Add New Playlist

- Select Visibility - Public Private

• Cognitive Science Research
• Mental Health Research
• Social Psychology Research
• Drug Research
• Relationship Research
• About PsyPost
• Privacy Policy

Social Psychology Experiments: 10 Of The Most Famous Studies

Ten of the most influential social psychology experiments explain why we sometimes do dumb or irrational things. 

Ten of the most influential social psychology experiments explain why we sometimes do dumb or irrational things.

“I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?” –Philip Zimbardo

Like famous social psychologist Professor Philip Zimbardo (author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil ), I’m also obsessed with why we do dumb or irrational things.

The answer quite often is because of other people — something social psychologists have comprehensively shown.

Each of the 10 brilliant social psychology experiments below tells a unique, insightful story relevant to all our lives, every day.

Click the link in each social psychology experiment to get the full description and explanation of each phenomenon.

1. Social Psychology Experiments: The Halo Effect

The halo effect is a finding from a famous social psychology experiment.

It is the idea that global evaluations about a person (e.g. she is likeable) bleed over into judgements about their specific traits (e.g. she is intelligent).

It is sometimes called the “what is beautiful is good” principle, or the “physical attractiveness stereotype”.

It is called the halo effect because a halo was often used in religious art to show that a person is good.

2. Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort people feel when trying to hold two conflicting beliefs in their mind.

People resolve this discomfort by changing their thoughts to align with one of conflicting beliefs and rejecting the other.

The study provides a central insight into the stories we tell ourselves about why we think and behave the way we do.

3. Robbers Cave Experiment: How Group Conflicts Develop

The Robbers Cave experiment was a famous social psychology experiment on how prejudice and conflict emerged between two group of boys.

It shows how groups naturally develop their own cultures, status structures and boundaries — and then come into conflict with each other.

For example, each country has its own culture, its government, legal system and it draws boundaries to differentiate itself from neighbouring countries.

One of the reasons the became so famous is that it appeared to show how groups could be reconciled, how peace could flourish.

The key was the focus on superordinate goals, those stretching beyond the boundaries of the group itself.

4. Social Psychology Experiments: The Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford prison experiment was run to find out how people would react to being made a prisoner or prison guard.

The psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who led the Stanford prison experiment, thought ordinary, healthy people would come to behave cruelly, like prison guards, if they were put in that situation, even if it was against their personality.

It has since become a classic social psychology experiment, studied by generations of students and recently coming under a lot of criticism.

5. The Milgram Social Psychology Experiment

The Milgram experiment , led by the well-known psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s, aimed to test people’s obedience to authority.

The results of Milgram’s social psychology experiment, sometimes known as the Milgram obedience study, continue to be both thought-provoking and controversial.

The Milgram experiment discovered people are much more obedient than you might imagine.

Fully 63 percent of the participants continued administering what appeared like electric shocks to another person while they screamed in agony, begged to stop and eventually fell silent — just because they were told to.

6. The False Consensus Effect

The false consensus effect is a famous social psychological finding that people tend to assume that others agree with them.

It could apply to opinions, values, beliefs or behaviours, but people assume others think and act in the same way as they do.

It is hard for many people to believe the false consensus effect exists because they quite naturally believe they are good ‘intuitive psychologists’, thinking it is relatively easy to predict other people’s attitudes and behaviours.

In reality, people show a number of predictable biases, such as the false consensus effect, when estimating other people’s behaviour and its causes.

7. Social Psychology Experiments: Social Identity Theory

Social identity theory helps to explain why people’s behaviour in groups is fascinating and sometimes disturbing.

People gain part of their self from the groups they belong to and that is at the heart of social identity theory.

The famous theory explains why as soon as humans are bunched together in groups we start to do odd things: copy other members of our group, favour members of own group over others, look for a leader to worship and fight other groups.

8. Negotiation: 2 Psychological Strategies That Matter Most

Negotiation is one of those activities we often engage in without quite realising it.

Negotiation doesn’t just happen in the boardroom, or when we ask our boss for a raise or down at the market, it happens every time we want to reach an agreement with someone.

In a classic, award-winning series of social psychology experiments, Morgan Deutsch and Robert Krauss investigated two central factors in negotiation: how we communicate with each other and how we use threats.

9. Bystander Effect And The Diffusion Of Responsibility

The bystander effect in social psychology is the surprising finding that the mere presence of other people inhibits our own helping behaviours in an emergency.

The bystander effect social psychology experiments are mentioned in every psychology textbook and often dubbed ‘seminal’.

This famous social psychology experiment on the bystander effect was inspired by the highly publicised murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964.

It found that in some circumstances, the presence of others inhibits people’s helping behaviours — partly because of a phenomenon called diffusion of responsibility.

10. Asch Conformity Experiment: The Power Of Social Pressure

The Asch conformity experiments — some of the most famous every done — were a series of social psychology experiments carried out by noted psychologist Solomon Asch.

The Asch conformity experiment reveals how strongly a person’s opinions are affected by people around them.

In fact, the Asch conformity experiment shows that many of us will deny our own senses just to conform with others.

Author: Dr Jeremy Dean

Psychologist, Jeremy Dean, PhD is the founder and author of PsyBlog. He holds a doctorate in psychology from University College London and two other advanced degrees in psychology. He has been writing about scientific research on PsyBlog since 2004. View all posts by Dr Jeremy Dean

Join the free PsyBlog mailing list. No spam, ever.

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List

The effects of information and social conformity on opinion change

Daniel j. mallinson.

1 School of Public Affairs, The Pennsylvania State University - Harrisburg, Middletown, Pennsylvania, United States of America

Peter K. Hatemi

2 Department of Biochemistry, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States of America

3 Department of Molecular Biology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States of America

4 Department of Political Science, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States of America

Associated Data

Data are available from the corresponding author’s Harvard Dataverse ( http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YVCPDT ).

Extant research shows that social pressures influence acts of political participation, such as turning out to vote. However, we know less about how conformity pressures affect one’s deeply held political values and opinions. Using a discussion-based experiment, we untangle the unique and combined effects of information and social pressure on a political opinion that is highly salient, politically charged, and part of one’s identity. We find that while information plays a role in changing a person’s opinion, the social delivery of that information has the greatest effect. Thirty three percent of individuals in our treatment condition change their opinion due to the social delivery of information, while ten percent respond only to social pressure and ten percent respond only to information. Participants that change their opinion due to social pressure in our experiment are more conservative politically, conscientious, and neurotic than those that did not.

Introduction

Information and persuasion are perhaps the most important drivers of opinion and behavioral changes. Far less attention, however, has been given to the role of social pressure in opinion change on politically-charged topics. This lacuna is important because humans have a demonstrated proclivity to conform to their peers when faced with social pressure. Be it in the boardroom or on Facebook, Solomon Asch and Muzafer Sherif’s classic studies hold true today. Individuals conform based on a desire to be liked by others, which Asch [ 1 , 2 ] called compliance (i.e., going along with the majority even if you do not accept their beliefs because you want to be accepted), or a desire to be right, which Sherif et al. [ 3 ] termed private acceptance (i.e., believing that the opinions of others may be more correct or informed than their own). These two broad schemas encompass many specific mechanisms, including, motivated reasoning, cognitive dissonance, utility maximization, conflict avoidance, and pursuit of positive relationships, among others. Information-based social influence and normative social influence (i.e., conformity pressure) both play important, albeit distinct, roles in the theories of compliance and private acceptance (see [ 4 ]). In both cases, humans exhibit conformity behavior; however only in private acceptance do they actually update their beliefs due to the social delivery of new information.

Extensions of Asch and Sherif’s path-breaking works have been widely applied across a number of behavioral domains [ 5 – 9 ], to include political participation. For example, significant attention has been focused on the import of conformity on voter turnout and participatory behaviors [ 10 ], including the effects of social pressure on the electoral behavior of ordinary citizens [ 11 – 15 ]. This body of work points to both the subtle and overt power of social influence on electoral behavior, yet little is known about the import of social conformity for politically charged topics in context-laden circumstances, particularly those that challenge one’s values and opinions.

Testing conformity pressure in the ideological and political identity domain may explicate whether the pressure to align with an otherwise unified group is different when dealing with politically charged topics versus context-free topics such as the size of a line or the movement of a ball of light [ 2 , 16 ]. Opinions on politically charged topics are complex, value laden, aligned with cultural norms, and not easily changed [ 17 – 21 ]. It remains unknown if the effects of social conformity pressures on political opinions are conditioned by the personal nature of the locus of pressure. To be sure, social conformity is a difficult concept to measure without live interaction. An observational approach makes it difficult to untangle if or how social pressure independently affects behaviors given these variegated casual mechanisms, and whether changes in opinion that result from social interaction are due to compliance or private acceptance. Nevertheless, experiments provide one means to gain insight into how and why opinion change occurs. Here, we undertake an experiment to test the extent to which opinion change is due to persuasion through new information, social conformity pressure, or a combination of the two in a more realistic extended discussion environment.

Conformity and political behavior

Both observational and experimental research has addressed different aspects of the impact of socially-delivered information on individual behavior. Observational analyses of social networks form the backbone of much of the recent research on social influence and political behavior. Sinclair [ 22 ], for instance, demonstrates that citizen networks convey a bounded set of political information. Individuals may turn to highly informed peers [ 23 ] or aggregate information from trusted friends and family [ 24 ] in order to reduce the cost of gathering the information required to engage in political behavior (e.g., voting). In turning to their network, they are open to privately accepting this useful information. Political information, however, is not the only type of information transmitted through personal networks. Social pressure helps the network induce compliance with desired social norms [ 25 – 27 ]. In this case, members of the network provide information regarding the group’s expectations for appropriate engagement in politics. Individuals that are concerned about whether or not the group will continue to accept them therefore conform out of a desire to be liked, broadly defined. Norms are often self-enforcing, with merely the perceived threat of potential sanctions being enough to regulate behavior through compliance and self-sanctioning [ 28 , 29 ].

The debate over the practicality and reality of deliberative democracy further highlights the importance of understanding the role of political conformity in public and elite discourse. Scholars and theorists argue that political decisions are improved and legitimized under a deliberative process [ 30 – 34 ], even though deliberation does not necessarily result in consensus [ 35 ]. The crux of democratic deliberation is that participants are engaging in a rational discussion of a political topic, which provides the opportunity for each to learn from the others and thus privately update their preferences (i.e., out of a desire to be right). It results in a collectively rational enterprise that allows groups to overcome the bounded rationality of individuals that would otherwise yield suboptimal decisions [ 36 ]. This requires participants to fully engage and freely share the information that they have with the group.

Hibbing and Theiss-Morse [ 37 ], however, raise important questions about the desirability of deliberation among the public. Using focus groups, they find that citizens more often than not wish to disengage from discussion when they face opposition to their opinions. Instead, they appear averse to participation in politics and instead desire a “stealth democracy,” whereby democratic procedures exist, but are not always visible. In this view, deliberative environments do not ensure the optimal outcome, and can even result in suboptimal outcomes. In fact, the authors point directly to the issue of intra-group conformity due to compliance as a culprit for this phenomenon. The coercive influence of social pressure during deliberation has been further identified in jury deliberations [ 38 , 39 ] and other small group settings [ 40 ].

Beyond politics, there is experimental evidence of the propensity to conform out of a desire to either be liked or to be right [ 25 , 41 – 45 ]. Using a simple focus group format and pictures of lines, Asch [ 1 , 2 ] demonstrated that individuals would comply with the beliefs of their peers due to a desire to be accepted by the group, even if they disagree and even when they believe the group opinion does not match reality. To do this, Asch asked eight members of a group to evaluate two sets of lines. The lines were clearly either identical or different and group members were asked to identify whether there was a difference. Unknown to the participant, the seven other group members were confederates trained to act in concert. At a given point in the study, the confederates began choosing the wrong answer to the question of whether the lines were equal. Consequently, the participant faced social pressure from a unified group every time they selected their answer. Asch varied the behavior of the group, including the number of members and number of dissenting confederates. Participants often exhibited stress and many eventually complied with the group consensus, even though the group was objectively wrong and participants did not agree with them privately.

Using a much more complex and context-laden format—a youth summer camp with real campers—Sherif et al. [ 3 ] demonstrated private acceptance whereby humans internalize and conform to group norms because consensus suggests that they may have converged on a right answer. In this case, the boys in the camp quickly coalesced into competing factions and initial outliers in the groups conformed out of a desire to win competitions (i.e., be right). While the groundbreaking Robbers Cave experiments revealed a great deal about group behavior well beyond conformity, we focus specifically on this particular aspect of the findings, which have stood the test of time in numerous replications and extensions across a wide variety of social domains [ 46 – 52 ].

Replication of Asch’s experimental work, in particular, has met varying degrees success. Lalancette and Standing [ 53 ]found that Asch’s results were mixed when using a prompt more ambiguous than unequal lines. Further, Hock [ 54 ] critiques the Asch design for not replicating a real life situation. Focusing on divorce attitudes, Kenneth Hardy provided an early application of Asch’s public compliance and Sherif’s private acceptance theories to political opinions using a similar small-group format with six confederates and one participant. Confederates offered not only their opinions, but also reasons for their opinions, which provided a methodological innovation by introducing more information than just the confederates’ votes. Hardy’s work provided an important starting point for identifying the process of conformity in the political realm, but it remains limited. He only utilized men in his study and did not allow for repeated discussion to assess how long participants hold up to conformity pressure. In a more recent study, Levitan and Verhulst [ 55 ]found persistence in political attitude change after interaction with a unanimously-opposing group, but they did not incorporate any discussion.

Our experiment builds on these works by examining the micro-process underlying opinion change for a politically charged topic discussed in a real context. We bridge between studies that allow for no discussion with those that study day-long deliberations in order to determine if group influence has a stronger effect, even when the discussion centers on an attitude closely tied with social identity. Our interaction of about an hour simulates a likely real-world example of dialogue. More importantly, our design allows us to speak to the debate over social influence by pulling apart the desires to be right (private acceptance) and liked (compliance). Our main goal is not to completely predict the general public’s behavior, but rather to identify the independent causal role of social pressure on opinion change, given the known import of information effects. We expect conformity pressure and information to have joint and independent effects on opinion change.

Variation in conformity behavior

While our primary interest is in identifying the average effects of information and conformity pressure on opinion change, we nevertheless recognize that there is variation in humans’ responses to social pressure, depending on observed and unobserved individual characteristics. Thus the average treatment effect recovered can mask substantively important heterogeneity [ 56 , 57 ]. For instance, not all of Asch’s or Hardy’s subjects complied with group opinion and there was a great deal of variation in how willing Sherif et al.’s campers coalesced into cohesive and functioning groups. In order to address this possibility we test three factors that have been previously identified as covarying with the average propensity to conform: personality traits, self-esteem, and ideology. The most consistent evidence points towards those who change their opinions as being generally more agreeable, neurotic, and having lower self-esteem [ 58 ].

Generating hypotheses regarding the import of other personality and ideological dispositions on opinion change for political, moral and identity-laden topics is more complicated. Extant research indicates support for both stability and change for these traits and differs in the source of that change, i.e., whether it is informational or social. For example, on the one hand we might expect those who are more politically conservative to be more likely to conform to the group overtly, given extant studies showing conservatives think less negatively toward conformity and comply more often to group pressure and norms [ 59 – 61 ]. In addition, conservatives are also higher on the Conscientiousness personality trait, and this trait both reflects and is related to more conformist behavior [ 62 – 64 ].

On the other hand, conservatism, by definition, advocates the status quo and is related to resistance to change and greater refusal to privately accept new information, specifically if that information contradicts one’s values [ 65 , 66 ], leading to a greater likelihood of internal stability. In a similar manner, those high in openness and more politically liberal, while more likely to take in new information, and thus possibly more likely to privately accept it, are also less prone to restrictive conformity, and thus possibly less likely to conform publicly [ 67 ]. We treat these propositions as secondary hypotheses, and explore their import in a limited manner given restrictions in the data.

Materials and methods

In order to explicate the independent and joint effects of compliance and private acceptance, we designed an experiment, conducted at the Pennsylvania State University from May to December of 2013, which placed participants in a deliberative environment where they faced unified opposition to their expressed opinion on a political topic that is relevant to their local community. We assessed participants’ privately-held opinions, absent the group, before and after the treatment in order to determine whether those who expressed a change in opinion during the discussion only did so verbally in order to comply with the group and gain acceptance or if they privately accepted the group’s opinion and truly updated their own values. The group discussed the topic openly, for approximately 30–45 minutes, also allowing us to assess participant behavior throughout the discussion. We discuss the specifics in more detail below.

In designing the experiment, we leveraged a unique time in Penn State’s history, the aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky child abuse scandal and the firing of longtime Head Coach Joe Paterno. The firing provided an ideal topic of discussion and a hard test of conformity pressure given the fact that it exhibited high salience on campus, was politically charged, and connected to the participants’ identities as Penn State students. The question posed to our participants was whether or not they felt that Coach Paterno should have been fired by the University’s Board of Trustees in November 2011. Previous research demonstrates that undergraduates may not have as clearly defined political attitudes as older adults on many topics and thus may be more susceptible to conformity pressure from peers due to non-attitudes [ 68 ]. This informed our choice of the discussion topic, as Paterno’s role in the abuse was not only highly salient on the Penn State campus, but typically invoked strong and diametrically opposed opinions in the undergraduate population and the general Penn state community. We begin by providing some background on this issue and its connection to identity and politics.

Firing of Penn State football Head Coach Joe Paterno

The first week of November 2011 was a whirlwind for students at Penn State. Police arrested former defensive coach Jerry Sandusky on charges of child sexual abuse following the release of a grand jury report by the Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General. In the midst of a national media firestorm and with evidence mounting that the University President, Athletic Director and Head football Coach had been aware of Sandusky’s activities, Penn State President Graham Spanier resigned and the Board of Trustees relieved Paterno of his duties. They also placed the Athletic Director, Tim Curley, and Vice President, Gary Schultz, on administrative leave after being indicted for perjury regarding their testimony about their knowledge of Sandusky’s sexual assaults of young boys. Immediately after the firings and suspensions, students poured into campus and downtown State College, causing damage and flipping a news van [ 69 ]. Various student protests persisted for weeks. The following summer brought Sandusky’s conviction, but controversy has not subsided, especially in Pennsylvania. The firing is continually alive at Penn State, as lawsuits against the university and the trials of Spanier, Curley, and Shultz continue to progress as Paterno’s family and supporters seek to restore his legacy.

While the real-life context of our design adds to its external validity, the discussion topic’s high salience and likelihood of evoking a strong opinion also improves the internal validity of the experiment. Paterno was more than an employee; he was the image of Penn State, “an extension of [the students’ and alumni’s] collective self” ([ 70 ], 154), and thus tied to students’ identities as members of the community [ 71 ]. As reported at the time of the scandal:

“More than any other man, Mr. Paterno is Penn State–the man who brought the institution national recognition… Paterno is at the core of the university’s sense of identity.” [ 72 ].

Given the emotion surrounding this issue, it is not unlike morality policies that evoke strong responses from individuals [ 73 ], thereby providing a hard test of conformity pressure on value- and identity-laden opinions. There is no better example of this than the ongoing pursuit of justice by the children subjected to abuse by Catholic priests and the mounting evidence of systematic concealment and enablement of such abuse by the Catholic Church. The similarities between Penn State and the Church persist on nearly every level, including the scandals threatening an important aspect of its members’ identities. In this way, the experience of students following the child abuse scandal at Penn State generalizes to politically relevant circumstances where organizational power and personal identities are challenged.

In addition to being a highly salient and identity-laden topic of discussion, the Paterno firing is a social and political issue. It weighed heavily on the 2012 Board of Trustees elections, when many candidates campaigned on their support for Paterno. Furthermore, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett was a de facto member of the Board and originally launched the Sandusky investigation while serving as the state Attorney General. As a board member, Corbett advocated for Paterno’s firing and faced both praise and criticism across the Commonwealth. As a result of the scandal, Pennsylvania passed legislation that clarifies responsibilities for reporting child abuse and heightens penalties for failures to report. The abuse received national recognition. When asked for his reaction to the firing, President Obama called on Americans to search their souls and to take responsibility for protecting children [ 74 ]. Thus, there is recognition by elites, the public, the media, and the academy that Paterno’s firing is an inherently political issue. Furthermore, the topic has personal importance to the participants, is identity laden, and relevant at the local, state, and national-levels. Having described the context of the topic of discussion, we now turn to describing the experimental protocol.

Participant recruitment

The experiment was advertised as a study on political discussion in upper- and lower-level social science courses, as well as through campus fliers and a university research website. As an incentive, participants were entered into a raffle for one of eight $25 gift cards to Amazon. The first participants completed the study in May 2013 and data collection closed in December 2013. There were no major developments in the Sandusky scandal during our data collection phase, thus we believe that no outside events threaten the validity of the study. The firing of the four university officials, Joe Paterno’s death, Jerry Sandusky’s conviction, issuance of the Freeh Report, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s sanctions all occurred prior to the start of data collection. This study was approved by the Pennsylvania State University Office for Research Protections Institutional Review Board (Study# 41536) on February 20, 2013. All participants in the treatment group signed a written informed consent form prior to participating in the study. Participants in the control group supplied implied consent by completing the online survey after reading an informed consent document on the first web page of the survey. Penn State’s IRB approved both methods of consent. Consent materials can be found with other study reproduction materials at the corresponding author’s dataverse ( http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YVCPDT ). Thus, all participants provided informed consent and all procedures contributing to this work complied with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committees on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975.

A total of 58 students participated in either the treatment or control groups. Compared to observational studies, this may appear a small number, but it comports with current research norms that require high participant involvement and a substantial amount of their time [ 75 , 76 ] and is consistent with the sample sizes for the foundational work in this area [ 2 , 6 ]. The pre- and post-test, discussion session and debriefing required at least 1.5 hours of each participant’s time. Researchers spent, on average, at least eight hours per participant recruiting, coordinating, and scheduling discussion groups, running discussion sessions, and coding behavioral data. The study generally targeted current undergraduates, but three graduate students and one recent graduate also participated. Upon volunteering to take part in the study, participants were randomly assigned to either the treatment (n = 34) or control (n = 24) group using a coin flip. The total sample includes an un-randomized 16 person pilot of the experimental protocol. See S3 File for additional information on this pilot group, its characteristics, and analyses showing their inclusion does not affect the main findings.

Pre-test survey

Fig 1 presents the study design including information provided to the treatment and control groups (in black) and the points at which we measured their opinion regarding Paterno’s firing (in red). Both groups were administrated a pre-test survey using Qualtrics. The treated group completed this survey before attending a discussion session. In addition to basic demographic characteristics, we collected a number of psychological and behavioral traits for every participant. Ideology was measured by an attitudinal measurement of ideology, a Liberalism-Conservatism scale [ 77 ] widely used to prevent measurement error that arises from the difficulty in accurately collapsing a complex view of politics into a single dimension. This measure of ideology is well validated (e.g., Bouchard et al. 2003) and serves as the basis for modern definitions of ideology across disciplines [ 78 , 79 ]. The measure relies on respondents simply agreeing or disagreeing with a broad range of political and social topics, from evolution to taxes. In this case, we used 48 different topics, which generate an additive scale of conservatism ranging from 0 (very low) to 48 (very high). In addition to measuring our participant’s political ideology, we assessed their self-esteem using Rosenberg’s [ 80 ] scale and personality using McCrae and John’s [ 81 ] 44-question Big 5 dimensions of personality: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

This figure presents each phase of the study, including information provided to treated and control groups (in black) and the points at which we measured their opinion of the Paterno firing (in red).

Finally, all participants were asked their opinion on five policies that affect undergraduates at Penn State: alcohol possession on campus; government oversight of academic performance; the firing of Paterno; prevention of State Patty’s Day celebrations; and use of the student activities fee. Participants recorded their opinion using a five-point Likert scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” We included five different topics on the survey so that treatment group participants would be unsure as to which topic they would be discussing.

Discussion group

After completion of the online survey, participants in the treatment group were scheduled individually for a discussion session. Each discussion group was comprised of a single participant and two to four trained confederates (we compare differences in the number of experimenters and find no effects; for more information see S4 File ). A total of five unique confederates, three females and two males, were used across the length of the study. Among them were four political science Ph.D. candidates of varying experience and one recent graduate who majored in political science. The confederates looked young and dressed informally, and were not distinguishable from our undergraduate students. In terms of training, the confederates were not strictly scripted so that the discussion would not appear forced or scripted. Instead, the experimenter and other volunteers took part in pre-experiment tests as mock participants so that the confederates could argue both sides of the Paterno firing and develop the consistent points they used for the duration of the study (see S2 File ). Fig 2 shows a typical discussion session. Discussion sessions were held in a conference room with all of the group members sitting around a table. There was no fixed seating arrangement.

Clockwise from bottom left: Experimenter, confederate, confederate, participant, and confederate. Note the participant’s seemingly disengaged body language. This participant ultimately changed their opinion.

At the beginning of each discussion session, the experimenter reminded the group that the general purpose of the experiment is to understand political decision-making and how individuals form political opinions. They were told that a topic was randomly selected for each discussion group from the five included in the pre-test survey, with their topic being the firing of Paterno. Prior to the start of open discussion, group members were provided a sheet of excerpts from the Freeh Report [ 82 ] regarding Paterno’s involvement in the Sandusky scandal at Penn State (see S1 File ). They were told that the information was drawn from independent investigations and was meant to refresh their memories, given that two years had passed since the firing.

After providing time to read the information sheet, the group was polled verbally regarding whether or not they believed Paterno should have been fired (yes or no). The participant was always asked to answer first. This allowed the confederates to subsequently express the opposite opinion throughout the discussion. Though very little time passed between completion of the pre-test surveys and participation in the discussion groups, we did not rely on the opinions expressed in the pre-test surveys as the basis of our confederates’ opinion. We recorded and used the verbal response as the respondents’ opinion. This also ensures that our confederates were responding to the precise opinion held by the participant at the start of the discussion session. This way we could track the effect of conformity pressure on their opinion throughout the session.

The group was then provided 30 minutes for open discussion; however, discussion was allowed to go beyond 30 minutes in order allow participants to finish any thoughts and reflect a more natural interaction. During this discussion, up to four confederates argued the opposition position to greater or lesser degrees depending on the confederate, including responding to and interacting with the participant and even agreeing with the participant on certain points. At the conclusion of the discussion time, group members were told that researchers wished to understand their true opinion at that moment and that we would be aggregating the individual opinions from our groups in order to gain a sense of overall student opinion on each of the five topics. Thus, they were instructed to complete an anonymous ballot with their final opinion. The anonymous ballot allowed us to measure whether their opinion had actually changed during the discussion, conforming to other people’s behavior due to private acceptance that what they are saying is right, or were only publicly complying with other people’s behavior, without necessarily believing in what they are doing or saying.

Each discussion session was video recorded for the purposes of coding both verbal and non-verbal indications of their opinion. Two coders were hired to review each discussion session video and record a series of behavioral characteristics of the participants (not reported in this paper) as well as their impression regarding whether the participants verbally changed their opinion during the course of the discussion (a binary yes/no). The principal investigators also coded each video. We used the modal code from all four coders, with the principal investigators re-reviewing the videos to break six ties. Fleiss’s Kappa [ 83 ] indicates moderate agreement among raters on the verbally expressed opinion (0.54, p < 0.001).

The combination of anonymous balloting and video recording for verbal cues is an important aspect of the study design that allows us to pull apart whether participants conformed out of a desire to be right, liked, or a combination of the two. Finally, we debriefed each participant to explain the full purpose of the study, including any and all possible points of deception, and to gather information about their personal feelings on being in the minority during the discussion.

Control group

We utilized a control group in order to identify the independent effect of social pressure on opinion change. Their behavior established a baseline expectation for the amount of opinion change we could expect with just the introduction of new information and no interpersonal interaction. This baseline then allows us to compare the two groups, social influence treatment and control, in order to tease apart the independent and joint effects of social conformity pressure and information on opinion change.

To this end, the control group took the same pre-test survey as the treatment group. However, after completion of the survey, instead of being in a deliberative session, control group participants read additional information on a topic that was “randomly” selected from the five opinion questions. Based on their opinion regarding the firing of Paterno, we presented them with the same sheet of information provided to the treated as well as a summary of the same pro- and counter-arguments used by the actual confederates during the discussion group sessions (see S1 and S2 Files). After reading these, control group participants were asked whether they believe Paterno should have been fired (yes or no) and the strength of that opinion (very strongly, somewhat strongly, neutral). If they changed their opinion at this juncture, we consider they did so only because of the introduction of new information, as there was an absence of social pressure. Thus, our design allows us to parse out the effect of the discussion group and the social pressure emerging from an unanimity of opinion opposite to the participants.

Results and discussion

The core finding of this study revolves around the question to what extent will people conform to an opposing opinion on a topic that is salient, politically charged, and informs some aspect of their identity? Furthermore, can we evoke deviation rates similar to the foundational studies that relied on less complex aspects of one’s psychology [ 1 ]? And most important, what type of change is occurring? For those participants who changed their opinions, was it due to new information (i.e., private acceptance), social pressure (i.e., public compliance), or some combination of the two? To answer these questions, we first examined the degree of opinion change in both the treatment and control groups. For the control group, we compared their initial opinion from the pre-test survey with the opinion they provided after reading the information sheet and counter-arguments. Fig 3 displays the percentage of each group that did and did not change their opinion. Within the control group, which received the same information as the discussion group, but had no social interaction, only 8 percent of the participants changed their opinion. The information-based change we observed is consistent with extant research [ 84 , 85 ]. In addition, though a large proportion of the control group did not change their opinion, some did moderate it (i.e., strengthened or weakened) based on the receipt of new information alone. See S5 File for a further breakdown of these changes.

Turning to the treatment group, 38 percent of our treated participants changed their opinion between the initial vote (after receiving information and prior to the discussion) and the final secret ballot. Our complex, identity, and value-laden topic returned findings that comport remarkably close to the deviation rates of Asch [ 2 ] and those that follow (for a meta-analysis, see [ 6 ]). If we consider all other things equal, the 30 percent increase in opinion change is dependent on the treatment of participating in the group discussion (χ 2 = 5.094, p < 0.05). This finding remains unchanged if the 16 non-randomized members of the pilot study are removed from the treatment group (though the p-value of the chi-square declines to 0.10, due to the smaller n, see S3 File ). As further evidence, Table 1 presents logistic regression results demonstrating the treatment effect. Namely, being in the treatment condition increases the odds of opinion change by 581 percent. Meaning, social pressure and/or the personal delivery of information, as opposed to simple exposure to new information, had a profound influence on either true opinion change through private acceptance or conformity through public compliance. Due to the small sample size, we are hesitant to include additional covariates in this model, but instead use t-tests below to examine differences in the characteristics of participants who changed their opinion and those who did not.

* p < 0.05; standard errors in parentheses and 95% confidence intervals in brackets

Sources of change

Moving to our secondary analyses, the research design also allowed us to parse out the specific sources of change within the treatment group. Recall we accounted for both true opinion change (i.e., the anonymous ballot at the end of discussion) and verbal opinion change (i.e., declared opinion change during group discussion captured in video and coded by independent raters) for those in the treatment condition. Therefore, we divided those in the treatment group into four subgroups in order to better understand why they changed their opinion. Table 2 shows the percentages of participants in the treatment group who changed their opinion overtly, covertly, or not at all. In sum, 47 percent did not change their opinion between the start and end of the discussion session. A total of 33 percent changed both overtly and covertly, meaning they verbally expressed an opinion change and wrote a changed opinion on their secret ballot. We argue that this group responded to a combination of the desires to be right and liked. Of the remaining participants, 10 percent changed due to a desire to be liked (overtly, but not covertly) and 10 percent due to a desire to be right (covertly, but not overtly). Though only anecdotal, one of the participants in the desire to be right category went so far as to tell the experimenter that he agreed with the group but adamantly refused to agree openly. Such participants were swayed by the introduction of new information out of a strong desire to be right, but apparently did not want to look like they were changing their opinion. Thus, our first set of analyses confirms that information plays an important role in opinion change, but social pressure also has a substantive and, at least in this context, a larger effect. For even a topic so important to one’s identity, participants changed their previously held opinions.

N = 34, only includes treatment group

Psychological differences

Having established the main findings of our study and the relative import of the two causal mechanisms for why participants changed their opinion, we now turn to examining how underlying traits, including ideology, personality, age and sex, differ between those that changed their opinion and those that did not. Demographic differences are included for descriptive purposes. First, we assessed differences between pro- and anti-firing participants. Second, we examined the relationship between direction of opinion change and trait differences between participants that changed their opinion and those that held firm. Due the nature of the experiment and specific focus on the question of causality, these tests are secondary to the main findings in the paper. For the following analyses, the sample sizes are small and in some cases and the findings only speculative.

Across both the treatment and control groups, the pre-test survey showed almost two-to-one support for Paterno keeping his job (i.e., against the firing). As mentioned earlier, “JoePa” was not only a symbol of Penn State, but also an icon to its students, and to some degree seen as a reflection of them. Table 3 displays the average demographic and psychological measures for those for and against the firing, based on the pre-test survey. The only statistically significant difference between the groups is their political ideology. The group opposed to Paterno’s firing is, on average, more conservative in their attitude positions than those that called for his firing. It is important to note that these are college students, and thus the overall distribution of ideology exhibits a liberal skew. However, Fig 4 demonstrates that the pro-firing group is not only less conservative, on average, but is also more ideologically narrow, whereas those that did not support the firing are more conservative, but also drawn from a wider ideological span. This finding suggests that ideology is a substantial factor for individuals that supported the firing. Whereas support for Paterno may have a less pronounced ideological dimension, those supporting his firing may focus more narrowly on the issue of child abuse and the responsibility of those in leadership to protect vulnerable citizens. Given that ideology is the only difference we could identify among participants’ opinions prior to the start of the experiment, we next examined whether there were differences between participants who changed their opinion and those that did not in both the treatment and control conditions.

* entries indicate significant t-tests, p < 0.05.

† Difference in proportions test used for Male. These analyses have a smaller overall sample size due to removal of neutral pre-test votes.

Tables ​ Tables4 4 and ​ and5 5 provide a sense of how demographic and psychological characteristics differ between participants who changed their opinion and those who did not. Table 4 includes both treatment and control participants, whereas Table 5 focuses solely on the treatment group. We found evidence both supporting and refuting our hypotheses presented above. There were consistent significant differences ( p < 0.05) in conservatism and conscientiousness. Namely, participants who changed their opinion are less conservative and less conscientious. Given the reported relationships between these two traits, this finding makes sense. Additionally, when all subjects are pooled ( Table 4 ), there is also a significant difference in neuroticism, with opinion changers registering higher on this scale. Both suggest that political and psychological traits may play a role in the mean shift demonstrated above. There were no differences based on the number of confederates. Meaning, participants were no more or less effected by social pressures from greater (4) or fewer (2) opponents in the discussion environment. These results demonstrate that individual differences exist across individuals that change their opinion and those that do not. Additional research will be required to both confirm and expand upon these findings. What we do find, however, is in line with expectations derived from past research and points to useful areas of future inquiry.

† Difference in proportions test used for Male.

† Difference in proportions test used for Male. Smaller overall sample size due to using only treatment condition participants.

All participants were debriefed upon completion of the discussion and informed to all aspects of the study. Participants were asked during the debriefing how they felt about being the only dissenting voice. Forty-seven percent of the treatment group participants freely offered that they felt pressured or intimidated. Twenty-nine percent also freely said that they felt like they had to dig in and defend their position during the discussion. This included six people that ultimately changed their minds. One said, “I’m not getting any support in this room. Alright I’ll defend my own position.” Another said, “I feel extra pressure to explain myself.” For some, their defensiveness continued into the debriefing. In particular, some students that did not change their opinion continued defending themselves when talking one-on-one with the experimenter, even after it was explained no matter which position they took, they would face opposition. This demonstrates that some participants are put on the defensive when faced with a unified opposition. Of those that expressed feeling defensive, some dug-in deeply and did not budge at all, while others opened up to the influence of their peers as the discussion progressed. This behavior comports the foundational work of Asch [ 1 , 2 ] and Milgram [ 86 ] and strongly suggests that our participants indeed experienced social pressure in the treatment condition, but differs in that it highlights the variance in how individual’s react to such pressure.

Limitations

We wish to call attention to two specific limitations of this study that are discussed above and in the supplementary materials, but warrant further mention. The first limitation is the inclusion of a meaningful, relative to the overall sample size, non-randomized pilot of the treatment condition. While this had no substantive effect on the results, it is important to recognize and we discuss this in more detail in the S3 File . Second, Fig 1 makes apparent that we use two similar, but slightly different scales for opinion throughout the study. Namely, pre-test opinion is measured on a five-point Likert scale and the remaining opinion measures are dichotomous (yes/no), with an additional strength question for the control group. Our primary analyses, however, rely on the comparison of the two yes/no answers in the treatment group; the verbal designation of yes/no at the beginning of the discussion section and the yes/no in the post discussion ballot. We further discuss this in the S5 File .

Finally, to some the small sample size of the study may be a limitation, especially those concerned about a replication crisis in Social Psychology [ 87 ]. We would respond, however, that the intensive nature of this study in terms of researcher hours and treatment condition makes it difficult to scale-up. Thus, a multi-site replication is likely the best approach to assessing the veracity of these findings [ 88 , 89 ]. We encourage such replication and have provided all materials necessary on the corresponding author’s Dataverse ( http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YVCPDT ). Additional lessons relevant to replication work and laboratory experiments in political science can be found in Mallinson (2018) [ 90 ].

Conclusions

While researchers have examined the roles of social influence (public compliance) and new information (private acceptance) on opinion change, the two are less often examined concurrently and the explicit causal arrows are more often assumed than tested through an experiment. Furthermore, social conformity is a complex concept to measure through surveys or interviews alone. Live interaction provides an optimal means to understand social pressures. Our experiment was designed specifically to further unpack the causal mechanisms underlying opinion change and test whether a person’s values and identity are subject to social pressure. Furthermore, the selection of the topic of study, the firing of an important symbol of Penn State, also allowed us to explicate the extent to which information and social pressure challenge a person’s deeply held values and identity. We find that while information has an important role in changing people’s opinions on a highly salient topic that is attached to a group identity, the social delivery of that information plays a large and independent role. Most individuals that changed their opinion did so out of some combination of the two forces, but there were people who only changed their opinion overtly in order to gain social acceptance as well as those who did not want to give the appearance of changing their mind, but still wanted to be right.

These findings have important implications for research on social and political behavior. They reinforce the understanding that citizens and elites cannot be simply viewed as rational utility maximizers independent of group dynamics. Yet, at the same time, the desire to be right and information remain critical components of opinion change. Furthermore, there are important individual differences such as ideology, self-esteem, and personality that appear to have a role in conformity. Exposure to politics and political discussion are fundamentally social, and therefore behavior is conditioned on the combination of the information one receives, and the social influence of the person or group providing that information interacting with one’s disposition. All should be considered when examining any inter-personal, social or political outcome. Be it a deliberative setting like a jury or a town hall meeting or informal gatherings of citizens, or political elites for that matter, changes in behavior are not simply due to rational information-driven updating, and even when they are, that updating may be pushed by the social forces that we experience in our interactions with other humans in variegated ways dependent upon the characteristics of the individual (for example, see [ 91 ]). This was the case for simple and objective stimuli, like Asch’s lines, and it is also the case in our context-laden experiment that focuses on the complexities of personal identity and opinion. That is, the conformity of social and political values relies on the same psychological mechanisms underlying general conformity.

Beyond theoretical and empirical importance for the study of social and political behavior, these findings also hold normative importance for democratic society. The normative implications are perhaps best exemplified by the organizational and personal turmoil that followed the revelation of child abuse by priests in the Catholic Church. Politics forms important aspects of the social and personal identities of elites and citizens, more so today than ever before [ 92 , 93 ]. People include their political party, positions on particular issues (e.g., environmentalism), and membership in political, religious, social and academic organizations, among other things, as key aspects of their identities. Our experiment helps us better understand how individuals behave when part of that identity is challenged.

That being said, no design is perfect, and this experiment only unpacks part of the causal mechanism. Like the early work on social conformity, it serves as a foundation for future studies to extend upon and further explicate the causal mechanism. For example, an extension on this design, such as controlling variation in the type and number of confederates [ 44 , 94 ], could help us better understand the nature and amount of pressure necessary to induce conformity across a variety of individual characteristics. For example, a potentially fruitful avenue of extension would be to provide the participant with one supportive confederate who verbally changes their opinion during the discussion. Having support reduces conformity pressure, but deviation by that support should increase it. Additionally, while we identify individuals whose behavior was prompted by either social pressure or information, the largest group responded to a combination of the two. Further parsing out the interaction between information, persuasion, pressure and the complexity of human dynamics will require an even more complex research design on a larger scale. The numerous extensions of Asch’s original experiment demonstrate the wealth of potential extensions of this design that can help unpack this black box. Doing so requires an incremental approach that will be time and resource intensive. This study provides the foundation for those next steps.

Supporting information

Acknowledgments.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2013 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois, and the April 2014 Center for American Political Responsiveness Brown Bag in State College, Pennsylvania. We would like to thank the editor, the anonymous reviewer, Ralf Kurvers, Rose McDermott, and conference attendees for their helpful comments and suggestions on this manuscript. We are also grateful to Ralf Kurvers for providing Fig 1 . We would like to thank our research assistants, Ronald Festa, Emilly Flynn, Christina Grier, Christopher Ojeda, Kimberly Seufer, and Matthew Wilson, that helped make this experimental protocol a success.

Funding Statement

This project was supported by a $1,000 internal grant from the Penn State Department of Political Science (awarded to DJM). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Data Availability

What Is Conformity? Definition, Types, Psychology Research

Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

Conformity is a type of social influence involving a change in belief or behavior in order to fit in with a group.

This change is in response to real (involving the physical presence of others) or imagined (involving the pressure of social norms/expectations) group pressure.

Conformity can also be simply defined as “ yielding to group pressures ” (Crutchfield, 1955).  Group pressure may take different forms, for example bullying, persuasion, teasing, criticism, etc.  Conformity is also known as majority influence (or group pressure).

The term conformity is often used to indicate an agreement to the majority position, brought about either by a desire to ‘ fit in ’ or be liked (normative) or because of a desire to be correct (informational), or simply to conform to a social role (identification).

Jenness (1932) was the first psychologist to study conformity.  His experiment was an ambiguous situation involving a glass bottle filled with beans.

He asked participants individually to estimate how many beans the bottle contained.  Jenness then put the group in a room with the bottle and asked them to provide a group estimate through discussion.

Participants were then asked to estimate the number on their own again to find whether their initial estimates had altered based on the influence of the majority.

Jenness then interviewed the participants individually again and asked if they would like to change their original estimates or stay with the group’s estimate.  Almost all changed their individual guesses to be closer to the group estimate.

However, perhaps the most famous conformity experiment was by Solomon Asch (1951) and his line judgment experiment.

Types of Conformity

Kelman (1958) distinguished between three different types of conformity:

Compliance (or group acceptance)

This occurs “when an individual accepts influence because he hopes to achieve a favorable reaction from another person or group. He adopts the induced behavior because….he expects to gain specific rewards or approval and avoid specific punishment or disapproval by conformity” (Kelman, 1958, p. 53).

In other words, conforming to the majority (publicly) in spite of not really agreeing with them (privately). This is seen in Asch’s line experiment .

Compliance stops when there are no group pressures to conform and is, therefore, a temporary behavior change.

Internalization (genuine acceptance of group norms)

This occurs “when an individual accepts influence because the content of the induced behavior – the ideas and actions of which it is composed – is intrinsically rewarding . He adopts the induced behavior because it is congruent [consistent] with his value system” (Kelman, 1958, p. 53).

Internalization always involves public and private conformity. A person publicly changes their behavior to fit in with the group while also agreeing with them privately.

This is the deepest level of conformity, where the beliefs of the group become part of the individual’s own belief system. This means the change in behavior is permanent. This is seen in Sherif’s autokinetic experiment.

This is most likely to occur when the majority has greater knowledge and members of the minority have little knowledge to challenge the majority’s position.

Identification (or group membership)

This occurs “when an individual accepts influence because he wants to establish or maintain a satisfying self-defining relationship to another person or group” (Kelman, 1958, p. 53).

Individuals conform to the expectations of a social role, e.g., nurses and police officers.

It is similar to compliance as there does not have to be a change in private opinion. A good example is Zimbardo’s Prison Study .

Ingratiational

This is when a person conforms to impress or gain favor/acceptance from other people.

It is similar to normative influence but is motivated by the need for social rewards rather than the threat of rejection, i.e., group pressure does not enter the decision to conform.

Why Do People Conform?

Deutsch and Gerrard (1955) identified two reasons why people conform :

Normative Conformity

• Yielding to group pressure because a person wants to fit in with the group. E.g., Asch Line Study.
• Conforming because the person is scared of being rejected by the group.
• This type of conformity usually involves compliance – where a person publicly accepts the views of a group but privately rejects them.

Informational Conformity

• This usually occurs when a person lacks knowledge and looks to the group for guidance.
• Or when a person is in an ambiguous (i.e., unclear) situation and socially compares their behavior with the group. E.g., Sherif’s Study.
• This type of conformity usually involves internalization – where a person accepts the views of the groups and adopts them as an individual.

Conformity Examples

Sherif (1935) autokinetic effect experiment.

Aim : Sherif (1935) conducted an experiment with the aim of demonstrating that people conform to group norms when they are put in an ambiguous (i.e., unclear) situation.

Method : Sherif used a lab experiment to study conformity.  He used the autokinetic effect – this is where a small spot of light (projected onto a screen) in a dark room will appear to move even though it is still (i.e., it is a visual illusion).

It was discovered that when participants were individually tested, their estimates of how far the light moved varied considerably (e.g., from 20cm to 80cm).

The participants were then tested in groups of three.  Sherif manipulated the composition of the group by putting together two people whose estimate of the light movement when alone was very similar and one person whose estimate was very different.  Each person in the group had to say aloud how far they thought the light had moved.

Results : Sherif found that over numerous estimates (trials) of the movement of light, the group converged to a common estimate.  The person whose estimate of movement was greatly different from the other two in the group conformed to the view of the other two.

Sherif said that this showed that people would always tend to conform.  Rather than make individual judgments, they tend to come to a group agreement.

Conclusion : The results show that when in an ambiguous situation (such as the autokinetic effect), a person will look to others (who know more / better) for guidance (i.e., adopt the group norm).  They want to do the right thing but may lack the appropriate information.  Observing others can provide this information.  This is known as informational conformity.

Non Conformity

Not everyone conforms to social pressure.  Indeed, there are many factors that contribute to an individual’s desire to remain independent of the group.

For example, Smith and Bond (1998) discovered cultural differences in conformity between western and eastern countries.  People from Western cultures (such as America and the UK) are more likely to be individualistic and don’t want to be seen as being the same as everyone else.

This means that they value being independent and self-sufficient (the individual is more important than the group) and, as such, are more likely to participate in non-conformity.

In contrast, eastern cultures (such as Asian countries) are more likely to value the needs of the family and other social groups before their own.  They are known as collectivist cultures and are more likely to conform.

Asch, S. E. (1951). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments. In H. Guetzkow (Ed.), Groups, leadership and men . Pittsburg, PA: Carnegie Press.

Crutchfield, R. (1955). Conformity and Character. American Psychologist , 10, 191-198.

Deutsch, M., & Gerard, H. B. (1955). A study of normative and informational social influences upon individual judgment . The journal of abnormal and social psychology, 51(3) , 629.

Jenness, A. (1932). The role of discussion in changing opinion regarding a matter of fact.  The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology , 27, 279-296.

Kelman, H. C. (1958). Compliance, identification, and internalization: three processes of attitude change . Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2, 51–60.

Mann, L (1969). Social Psychology . New York: Wiley.

Sherif, M. (1935). A study of some social factors in perception. Archives of Psychology , 27(187) .

Smith, P. B., & Bond, M. H. (1993). Social Psychology Across Cultures: Analysis and Perspectives . Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Reference Library

Collections

• See what's new
• All Resources
• Student Resources
• Assessment Resources
• Teaching Resources
• CPD Courses
• Livestreams

Study notes, videos, interactive activities and more!

Psychology news, insights and enrichment

Currated collections of free resources

Browse resources by topic

• All Psychology Resources

Resource Selections

Currated lists of resources

Study Notes

Conformity to Social Roles as Investigated by Zimbardo

Last updated 22 Mar 2021

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share by Email

Zimbardo (1973) conducted an extremely controversial study on conformity to social roles, called the Stanford Prison Experiment.

His aim was to examine whether people would conform to the social roles of a prison guard or prisoner, when placed in a mock prison environment. Furthermore, he also wanted to examine whether the behaviour displayed in prisons was due to internal dispositional factors, the people themselves, or external situational factors, the environment and conditions of the prison.

Zimbardo’s sample consisted of 21 male university students who volunteered in response to a newspaper advert. The participants were selected on the basis of their physical and mental stability and were each paid $15 a day to take part. The participants were randomly assigned to one of two social roles, prisoners or guards.

Zimbardo wanted to make the experience as realistic as possible, turning the basement of Stanford University into a mock prison. Furthermore, the ‘prisoners’ were arrested by real local police and fingerprinted, stripped and given a numbered smocked to wear, with chains placed around their ankles. The guards were given uniforms, dark reflective sunglasses, handcuffs and a truncheon. The guards were instructed to run the prison without using physical violence. The experiment was set to run for two weeks.

Zimbardo found that both the prisoners and guards quickly identified with their social roles. Within days the prisoners rebelled, but this was quickly crushed by the guards, who then grew increasingly abusive towards the prisoners. The guards dehumanised the prisoners, waking them during the night and forcing them to clean toilets with their bare hands; the prisoners became increasingly submissive, identifying further with their subordinate role.

Five of the prisoners were released from the experiment early, because of their adverse reactions to the physical and mental torment, for example, crying and extreme anxiety. Although the experiment was set to run for two weeks, it was terminated after just six days, when fellow postgraduate student Christina Maslach convinced Zimbardo that conditions in his experiment were inhumane. [Maslach later became Zimbardo’s wife].

Zimbardo concluded that people quickly conform to social roles, even when the role goes against their moral principles. Furthermore, he concluded that situational factors were largely responsible for the behaviour found, as none of the participants had ever demonstrated these behaviours previously.

Evaluation of Zimbardo

A recent replication of the Stanford Prison Experiment, carried out by Reicher and Haslam (2006), contradicts the findings of Zimbardo.

Reicher and Haslam replicated Zimbardo’s research by randomly assigning 15 men to the role of prisoner or guard. In this replication, the participants did not conform to their social roles automatically. For example, the guards did not identify with their status and refused to impose their authority; the prisoners identified as a group to challenge the guard’s authority, which resulted in a shift of power and a collapse of the prison system. These results clearly contradict the findings of Zimbardo and suggest that conformity to social roles may not automatic, as Zimbardo originally implied.

Furthermore, individual differences and personality also determine the extent to which a person conforms to social roles. In Zimbardo’s original experiment the behaviour of the guards varied dramatically, from extremely sadistic behaviour to a few good guards who helped the prisoners. This suggests that situational factors are not the only cause of conformity to social roles and dispositional factors also play a role.

Zimbardo’s experiment has been heavily criticised for breaking many ethical guidelines, in particular, protection from harm. Five of the prisoners left the experiment early because of their adverse reactions to the physical and mental torment. Furthermore, some of the guards reported feelings of anxiety and guilt, as a result of their actions during the Stanford Prison Experiment. Although Zimbardo followed the ethical guidelines of Stanford University and debriefed his participants afterwards, he acknowledged that the study should have been stopped earlier.

• Social roles
• Protection from harm

You might also like

Ethics and psychology, conformity - asch (1951), explanations for obedience - milgram (1963), research methods - ethics.

Quizzes & Activities

Guess Who: The Psychology Version

14th June 2017

Social Influence: MCQ Revision Test 1 for AQA A Level Psychology

Topic Videos

Ethical Guidelines in Psychology - Classroom Posters or Student Handout Set

Poster / Student Handout

Social Influence: Conformity to Social Roles as Investigated by Zimbardo | AQA A-Level Psychology

Our subjects.

• › Criminology
• › Economics
• › Geography
• › Health & Social Care
• › Psychology
• › Sociology
• › Teaching & learning resources
• › Student revision workshops
• › Online student courses
• › CPD for teachers
• › Livestreams
• › Teaching jobs

Boston House, 214 High Street, Boston Spa, West Yorkshire, LS23 6AD Tel: 01937 848885

• › Contact us
• › Terms of use
• › Privacy & cookies

© 2002-2024 Tutor2u Limited. Company Reg no: 04489574. VAT reg no 816865400.

• Media Center

What is Conformity?

Conformity describes the tendency to align one's beliefs or behaviors with the norms of a group. This social influence can result from a desire for acceptance, fear of rejection, or the belief that the group is better informed.

The Basic Idea

Your best friends invite you to a music festival with their favorite artists. After looking through the lineup, you realize you are not familiar with the artists playing. You proceed to listen to their songs, and can’t help but notice you aren’t a fan of this genre of music. Despite your concerns, you convince yourself it’s not bad. In fact, you tell yourself, “it’s pretty good!” You don’t want to be left out. Ultimately, you conform and buy a ticket and join your friends at the festival.

Conformity  refers to an individual aligning their behavior, perception, or opinion with those of another person or  group . 1  An individual may consciously or unconsciously act in a certain way due to influence from others. We have a natural tendency to unconsciously mirror the behaviors of those we interact with, such as language, gestures, and talking speed. 2  Researchers say that mimicking individuals subconsciously do can increase our connection to those we interact with, allowing interactions to flow more effortlessly. 3

There are two main explanations provided by social psychology for conformity 1 :

• Informational conformity  refers to an individual aligning with the view of others as a result of an assumption that others hold knowledge about a situation or topic.
• Normative conformity  refers to an individual giving in to the expectations or opinions of others, such as friends or co-workers, in an effort to be liked or accepted.

Part of the prevalence of conformity in human behavior can be explained by  reinforcement learning . 1  Being liked or accepted by a certain group is, in itself, a reward.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. – Henry David Thoreau in his 1854 book, Walden

Informational Conformity:  A type of conformity in which an individual looking to acquire correct information looks to others they perceive as knowledgeable and aligns their behaviors and opinions with them.

Normative Conformity:  A type of conformity where an individual aligns their perspective and behavior with others in order to be accepted, potentially due to a fear of rejection.

Muzafer Sherif, a Turkish-American social psychologist, was an early contributor to the idea of conformity. Sherif designed an experiment which involved  participants being placed in a dark room, where they would stare at a dot of light. Despite the dot never moving, due to an illusion known as the autokinetic effect it would appear to shift. Participants were asked to estimate the amount  the light moved. They shared their estimates out loud. Repeated trials found that each group of three participants converged towards an estimate. 4  Sherif’s results, published in 1935, highlighted the way that different groups converged towards their respective estimates, which occurred naturally without any discussion or prompts.

When the groups returned one week later to perform the same test individually, they repeated their groups’ converged estimates. Sherif concluded the participants had adopted their respective groups’ way of thinking. 4  This experiment provided early evidence on the social effects of individuals’ perceptions.

Building on the significance of Sherif’s 1935 study, Solomon Asch designed a modified version of Sherif’s experiment. Asch, a Polish-American social psychologist, argued Sherif’s experiment had a key problem: researchers could not be absolutely sure the participants had conformed, especially when there was no correct answer to Sherif’s ambiguous experiment. 5

The line judgement task in Solomon Asch’s 1951 experiment.

Asch proceeded to design his now-famous line experiment. Participants were shown a target line, and then asked to choose one of three lines which most closely resembled the target. When participants performed the task individually, they chose the correct answer almost all the time. However, when placed in a room of actors, who were told beforehand to choose an incorrect answer, roughly 75% of participants conformed at least once by choosing a clearly incorrect answer. Only an approximate 25% of participants never conformed. 6

When asked, most participants who conformed said that even though they did not believe they were selecting the correct response, they did so out of fear of being ridiculed. Some conforming participants believed they were choosing the correct response. 6

Following these experiments, a 1958 publication by Harvard Professor of Social Ethics, Herbert Kelman, formally described three main types of conformity: 7

• Compliance:  A type of public conformity which involves keeping one’s initial beliefs, but not disclosing them to others due to the fear of rejection or the pursuit for approval.
• Identification: Involves conforming to an individual one looks up to, such as a family member or a celebrity. This can be a result of attraction, and Kelman describes identification as a deeper version of conformity than compliance.
• Internalization: Adopting beliefs and perceptions publicly and privately. This is the deepest type of conformity and has long term effects.

Kelman’s articulation of three distinct types of conformity were highly influential in social psychology. Social psychology research today has streamlined Kelman’s ideas into the two types of conformity, informational and normative, explained above.

Muzafer Sherif

A Turkish-American social psychologist whose work was important in developing modern social psychology. Sherif was an early contributor to the idea of conformity with his 1935 publication, A Study of Some Social Factors in Perception , involving an autokinetic experiment which provided evidence for the behavior of conformity in humans. 4

Solomon Asch

Born in Warsaw, the Polish-American social psychologist contributed to literature on conformity by developing a renowned experiment involving a line judgement task. Based on Muzafer Sherif’s 1935 publication, Asch was able to further provide evidence for the effects of conformity on human behavior. 6

Herbert Kelman

An American Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University. Kelman is renowned for his work on international and intercommunal conflict resolution, specifically on the subject of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 8 Kelman influenced the modern interpretation of conformity by formally articulating three types of conformity in his 1958 publication, Compliance, Identification, and Internalization Three Processes of Attitude Change .

Consequences

Knowledge of conformity can be applied by marketing managers to design effective promotions and advertisement campaigns. Themes of normative conformity can be used to better target a young audience, who tend to display a desire to be accepted. A promotion targeting this group may take advantage of referrals to induce normative conformity. 9

Similarly, knowledge of conformity can be applied to choose the appropriate source for an advertising message. If an informational conformity response is desired by marketing managers, they can design a promotion to ensure the message is delivered by a source that the target audience perceives to be credible. 9

Controversies

Some individuals may say conformity is undesirable, as it prevents individuals from expressing themselves. However, conformity is not inherently positive or negative. Returning your shopping cart, not picking your nose in public, and acting respectful at a funeral can all be considered acts of conformity. On the road, respecting lane etiquette is an act of conformity that contributes to a society with fewer driving accidents.

Nevertheless, conformity to social pressure in a group setting can also have adverse effects which lead to  groupthink . When people prioritize cohesion and agreement in a group, decisions may be reached without critical evaluation of the consequences. Though there are many other factors that contribute to groupthink, normative conformity can cause groupthink if individuals are afraid their ideas would be rejected. Informational conformity can also cause groupthink when individuals who falsely perceive group members to be more intelligent and thus conform to their ideas without the necessary critical evaluation. 13

Another point of controversy around conformity is whether its prevalence is that much more common than the prevalence of deviance. Some researchers argue  deviance is as prevalent as conformity and suggest the appearance of deviance appearance is minimized. 10  Though Solomon Asch’s line judgement task is considered as a classic piece of evidence supporting conformity, an often overlooked finding is the frequency in which a lone participant continued telling the truth in the midst of incorrect responses by the research actors. Researchers argue Asch’s  publication, considered a classic example of evidence that supports conformity, should also be used to support the idea that individuals often do not conform. 11

There are important factors which can influence an individual’s desire to not give in to social pressures. Though oversimplified, cultural patterns can explain why some individuals prefer not to conform. Individualistic cultures tend to prefer being different from the group. This culture values independence and self-sufficiency, prioritizing the needs of themselves over those of the group. In contrast,  collectivist  cultures are generally more likely to conform as this culture prioritizes the needs of family and friends before their own. 12

Conforming to a government’s COVID-19 recommendations.

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals were overwhelmed with information from public health officials, politicians, news outlets, and social media. During this time, we could see that the public could be influenced by informational conformity. Trusted and popular politicians, in addition to credible public health services, were constantly updating recommendations and restrictions. At the same time, the public could also be influenced by normative conformity, with pressure from their family and friends to respect or defy certain behaviors, such as downplaying the dangers of the virus. 14

Some individuals perceived differences between the guidance of government officials and the opinions of their social group. When individuals notice that a significant number of people are not respecting certain regulations, it can negatively affect the level of trust in government officials and other credible sources. This can result in the dangerous undermining of critical institutions’ validity. 14

Related TDL Content

Social Norms:  Why do we follow the behavior of others? Social norms can range from general rules to specific customs, such as the Western custom of shaking hands with somebody when you meet them for the first time. This TDL piece explores the way social norms can influence our behavior around others.

Three Thought Patterns That Let Advertisers Influence You on Social Media:  This piece explores how modern advertising uses informational and normative conformity to influence our behavior and provides tips on how we can resist these “mind games.”

Social Proof:  How “smart,” or how “casual” is the smart casual dress code for tonight’s company dinner? Do you ever ask your closest colleagues what they will be wearing to an event? Attempting to conform to the behavior we believe fits the situation is a phenomenon known as social proof. Read this article to learn more about the power of this phenomenon and how it can be applied in public health responses and e-commerce.

• Stallen, M., & Sanfey, A. G. (2015). The neuroscience of social conformity: implications for fundamental and applied research.  Frontiers in Neuroscience ,  9 .  https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2015.00337
• Burger, J. (2019, June 28).  3 conformity and obedience – Introduction to psychology . OPENPRESS.USASK.CA.  https://openpress.usask.ca/introductiontopsychology/chapter/conformity-and-obedience/
• Chartrand, T. L., & Bargh, J. A. (1999). The chameleon effect: The perception–behavior link and social interaction.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology ,  76 (6), 893-910.  https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.76.6.893
• Sherif, M. (1935). A study of some social factors in perception.  Archives of Psychology (Columbia University), 187,
• Mcleod, S. (2018, December 28).  Asch conformity experiment . Simply Psychology.  https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html
• Asch, S. E. (1951). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments. In H. Guetzkow (Ed.),  Groups, leadership and men; research in human relations  (pp. 177–190). Carnegie Press.
• Kelman, H. C. (1958). Compliance, identification, and internalization three processes of attitude change.  Journal of Conflict Resolution ,  2 (1), 51–60.  https://doi.org/10.1177/002200275800200106
• Herbert C. Kelman . (n.d.). Scholars at Harvard.  https://scholar.harvard.edu/hckelman/home
• Lascu, D., & Zinkhan, G. (1999). Consumer conformity: Review and applications for marketing theory and practice.  Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice ,  7 (3), 1-12.  https://doi.org/10.1080/10696679.1999.11501836
• Hodges, B. H. (2014). Rethinking conformity and imitation: divergence, convergence, and social understanding.  Frontiers in Psychology ,  5 , 726–726.  https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00726
• Hodges, B. H., & Geyer, A. L. (2006). A nonconformist account of the Asch experiments: Values, pragmatics, and moral dilemmas.  Personality and Social Psychology Review ,  10 (1), 2-19.  https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr1001_1
• Hofstede, G. (2001).  Culture’s consequences : comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and organizations across nations  (2nd ed.). Sage Publications.
• Group behavior . (n.d.). Lumen Learning.  https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wmopen-psychology/chapter/conformity-compliance-and-obedience/#:~:text=Conformity%20to%20group%20pressures%20can,inhibiting%20performance%20on%20difficult%20tasks
• Packer, D. J., Ungson, N. D., & Marsh, J. K. (2021). Conformity and reactions to deviance in the time of COVID-19.  Group Processes & Intergroup Relations ,  24 (2), 311-317.  https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430220981419

Case studies

From insight to impact: our success stories, is there a problem we can help with, about the author.

Joshua was a former content creator with a passion for behavioral science. He previously created content for The Decision Lab, and his insights continue to be valuable to our readers.

We are the leading applied research & innovation consultancy

Our insights are leveraged by the most ambitious organizations.

I was blown away with their application and translation of behavioral science into practice. They took a very complex ecosystem and created a series of interventions using an innovative mix of the latest research and creative client co-creation. I was so impressed at the final product they created, which was hugely comprehensive despite the large scope of the client being of the world's most far-reaching and best known consumer brands. I'm excited to see what we can create together in the future.

Heather McKee

BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST

GLOBAL COFFEEHOUSE CHAIN PROJECT

OUR CLIENT SUCCESS

Annual revenue increase.

By launching a behavioral science practice at the core of the organization, we helped one of the largest insurers in North America realize $30M increase in annual revenue .

Increase in Monthly Users

By redesigning North America's first national digital platform for mental health, we achieved a 52% lift in monthly users and an 83% improvement on clinical assessment.

Reduction In Design Time

By designing a new process and getting buy-in from the C-Suite team, we helped one of the largest smartphone manufacturers in the world reduce software design time by 75% .

Reduction in Client Drop-Off

By implementing targeted nudges based on proactive interventions, we reduced drop-off rates for 450,000 clients belonging to USA's oldest debt consolidation organizations by 46%

Mental Models

Pain of Paying

Inductive Reasoning

Eager to learn about how behavioral science can help your organization?

Get new behavioral science insights in your inbox every month..

• Bipolar Disorder
• Therapy Center
• When To See a Therapist
• Types of Therapy
• Best Online Therapy
• Best Couples Therapy
• Managing Stress
• Sleep and Dreaming
• Understanding Emotions
• Self-Improvement
• Healthy Relationships
• Student Resources
• Personality Types
• Sweepstakes
• Guided Meditations
• Verywell Mind Insights
• 2024 Verywell Mind 25
• Mental Health in the Classroom
• Editorial Process
• Meet Our Review Board
• Crisis Support

How to Test Conformity With Your Own Psychology Experiment

Plus, Questions to Spark Conformity Experiment Ideas

skynesher / Getty Images

• Famous Experiments
• Example Experiment
• Experiment Ideas
• Additional Tips

Conformity involves adopting certain attitudes or behaviors to fit in with a particular group of people. Conformity experiments can be interesting project ideas for a psychology class, in addition to just being fun to perform.

Here we share some conformity experiments that have sought to better understand how people conform . These can be used as inspiration when developing our own experiments. We also provide a few questions that can help us come up with even more conformity experiment ideas.

Famous Conformity Experiments

One of the most well-known series of conformity experiments was conducted by psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s. Known as the Asch conformity experiments , these studies demonstrated the impact of social pressure on individual behavior.  

Participants in these studies were told that they were in a vision experiment and asked to look at three lines of different lengths to determine which was the longest. They were then placed with a group that they thought included others in the study. In reality, the others were actually in on the experiment.

After a few trials where everyone stated the correct answer, the subjects who were in on the experiment began choosing an incorrect response. When surrounded by people citing an incorrect answer, 75% of the true study subjects also gave an incorrect response to at least one of the line-length questions.

Other Conformity Experiments

Another popular conformity experiment was performed on the TV show Candid Camera. It involved a group of people on an elevator who all stood facing the rear of the elevator. Inevitably, everyone else who got on ended up also facing the rear so as not to stand out from the rest.

One young man even turned repeatedly to every side, along with the rest of the group, and took off his hat when the others did.

Other conformity experiments that have been performed include:

• Having a group of people stare up at a building
• Picketing with blank signs and pamphlets for no specific cause
• When one student leaves a classroom, the teacher has everyone else stand up when the student returns and sits down

A Conformity Experiment Example

Imagine that a student is in a math class and the instructor asks a basic math question. What is 8 x 4? The student knows that the correct answer is 32. However, when the teacher begins asking other students in the room for the answer, each one says that it is 27. How does the student respond?

This is a classic example of a conformity experiment in action. When the teacher finally gets to the student, does the student trust their own math skills and provide the correct answer or do they go along with the rest of the group and say that the answer is 27—even when they know that this is an incorrect response?

For some, the desire to fit in and belong is so strong that they will provide an answer that they know is incorrect. This helps them avoid being considered an "outsider" to others in the group.

Conformity Experiment Ideas

One way to envision our own experiment is to consider some of the conformity experiments that have been performed in the past. It can also be helpful to consider a few questions we could answer in our own psychology experiment.

Here are some questions that may spark a few conformity experiment ideas:

• How does group size impact conformity? Try the experiment with different numbers of helpers to see how many other people must be present before a person starts conforming to the group.
• What effect does age have on conformity? Try the experiment with participants in different age groups to see if the results differ.
• What's the impact of gender on conformity ? Experiment to see if a participant is more likely to conform if other participants are of the same gender. What are the results if no other participants share their gender?
• How does the situation influence conformity? Are people more likely to conform in certain settings, such as a classroom, than they are in more natural, everyday settings? Run trials in various settings to see if there is a difference.

Additional Conformity Experiment Tips

Performing a psychology experiment for class can be a bit intimidating. Before beginning, we should always talk with the instructor about our experiment ideas to be sure that we have permission to carry out our project. In some cases, we may have to submit our idea for review beforehand to receive permission to experiment with human participants.

Conducting conformity experiments is a great way to learn more about the impacts that groups can have on individuals. Playing around with certain variables can widen our understanding of how far people will go to fit in, making them good conformity experiment ideas to try.

Kim D, Hommel B. Social cognition 2.0: Toward mechanistic theorizing . Front Psychol . 2019;10:2643. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02643

Sowden S, Koletsi S, Lymberopoulos E, Militaru E, Catmur C, Bird G. Quantifying compliance and acceptance through public and private social conformity . Conscious Cogn . 2018;65:359-367. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2018.08.009

Howard J. Bandwagon effect and authority bias . In: Cognitive Errors and Diagnostic Mistakes . 2018:21-56. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-93224-8_3

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."