User:Jackdawgirl/Conformity

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Conformity is the tendency to change our perceptions, opinions, or behaviors in ways that are consistent with group norms. Norms are implicit, specific rules shared by a group of individuals on how they should behave. People may be susceptible to conform to group norms because they want to gain acceptance from their group.

The process of changing our behaviors to match the responses of others can be conscious or not. People have an intrinsic tendency to unconsciously imitate other’s behaviors such as gesture, language, talking speed, and other actions of the people they interact with.

Except for people's intrinsic tendency to imitate others, there are two main reasons for conformity: informational influence and normative influence. People display conformity in response to informational influence when they believe the group is better informed, or in response to normative influence when they are afraid of the consequences of rejection. People are more susceptible to normative influence when the majority is clearly wrong because they want to fit in with the group, and people are more susceptible to informational influence when they are unsure. A meta-analysis of 125 Asch-type conformity wrote that normative influence is likely to occur when people make direct contact with the majority while informational influence is likely to occur when people make indirect contact with the majority.

According to Herbert Kelman, there are three types of conformity: 1) compliance(which is public conformity and it is motivated by the need for approval or the fear of being disapproval; 2) identification (which is a deeper type of conformism than compliance); 3) internalization(which is to conform both publicly and privately).

Major factors that influence the degree of conformity include culture, gender, age, size of the group, situational factors, and different stimuli. In some cases, minority influence, a special case of informational influence, can resist the pressure to conform and influence the majority to accept the minority's belief or behaviors.

Size of the group
Although conformity pressures generally increase as the size of the majority increases, Asch's experiment in 1951 stated that increasing the size of the group will have no additional impact beyond a majority of size three. Brown and Byrne’s 1997 study described a possible explanation that people may suspect collusion when the majority exceeds three or four. Gerard's 1968 study reported a linear relationship between the group size and conformity when the group size ranges from two to seven people. According to Latane's 1981 study, the number of the majority is one factor that influences the degree of conformity, and there are other factors like strength and immediacy.