essay about conformity and deviance

Chapter 6 - Conformity and Deviance

THIS CHAPTER WILL DISCUSS:

1. How "good" conformity occurs when people privately accept their group's beliefs. 2. How "bad" conformity occurs when people voices what their group wants them to. 3. How "good" deviance occurs when people contribute new ideas to their group. 4. How "bad" deviance occurs when people either rebel against or refuse to participate in their group. 5. How groups can pressure their members to either conform or deviate. 6. How and when deviants can persuade the group majority.

INTRODUCTION

What do the words "conformity" and "deviance" mean to most people? If we took a survey and asked a group of people if the term "conformist" has positive or negative connotations, most of them would probably answer that it has negative connotations. Their response to the term "deviant" would probably be the same. Both "conformity" and "deviance" seem to have negative connotations in our society.

Why do people associate negative stereotypes with these terms? For instance, the word "conformist" perhaps conjures in their minds the image of a stereotypic "corporate man." They can see him wearing his brown suit and never questioning his superiors. In contrast, their minds may jump to another extreme when they hear the term "deviant." They may imagine a sociopathic criminal who never gives a second thought about the pain of victims, for

example . These connotations and images are unfair generalizations.

For our discussion, we need to look at the terms "conformity" and "deviance" in a new light. They are important concepts in small-group research. The popular beliefs about them, with their unfair stereotypes, have little to do with the ways in which the two concepts apply to groups.

Definitions

The issue of conformity versus deviance is very important in small-group research. It becomes relevant whenever a person must choose between going along or not going along with a group. A group member in such a situation faces two or more viable options, or courses of action. This predicament can come about in two ways. First, it may be that general social acceptance supports one of the options. For example, in a group of doctors, it may be socially acceptable for each person to use the title "Doctor." If one of the medical professionals does not wish to use the title, he or she may feel social pressures that conflict with this personal wish. Second, the group member might face a voting majority. He or she must decide between the action the voters support and another action. For instance, a majority of the doctors in the group could vote that all members must use the formal title.

A person conforms if he or she chooses a course of action that a majority favors or that is socially acceptable. In contrast, an individual deviates if he or she chooses an action that is not socially acceptable or that a majority does not favor. Clearly, there are countless situations when a person faces a majority opinion. For example, every time you perform the simple action of dressing in the morning you face a group of people who, as a majority, dress a certain way. Will you dress as they do, for instance in jeans and a T-shirt, or will you dress in another style if you prefer to be different? As you can see, any action that a person takes in such a circumstance is necessarily either conformity or deviance.

A person can conform to or deviate from many behaviors. For example, he or she may conform to a group standard of honesty and integrity. Is such a conformist bad? Analogously, he or she could deviate from a group whose ideal is thievery and corruption. This would probably be a good deviate. Thus, neither conformity nor deviance is intrinsically good or bad. The popular beliefs are unfair.

However, scientists have differentiated between the ways in which people conform or deviate, asking why a person behaves as he or she does. In contrast to the action, the reason behind the action may be either good or bad.

For example, conforming to a group ideal of honesty and integrity not out of belief in the ideal, but only to go along with the group, probably is not good. Researchers have labeled this kind of undesirable conformity compliance . It occurs when someone conforms in behavior alone. The member who complies simply does whatever he or she thinks the group wants him or her to do. It is usually, but not always, bad for the group.

A second type of conformity, in contrast, occurs when a person conforms in beliefs as well as in behaviors. This is called private acceptance . It is usually, but not always, good for the group. For instance, a good conformist in a group that wishes its members to be honest is someone who truly believes in honesty and all for which it stands. This person is honest in all situations, not just to please the group. Experimenters have made similar distinctions between good and bad forms of deviant behavior.

The Structural Perspective

In this chapter we will study the concepts of conformity and deviance from the structural perspective. As we discussed in Chapter 1, scientists who use the structural perspective believe that there is a process by which expectations of how behaviors "will be" in groups turn into evaluations of how those behaviors "should be." The evaluations are group norms. For example, Jan may tend to speak up first during the first few times a group meets. The group comes to expect that she will do so at each meeting. As time goes on, the group may develop a norm that Jan always talks first when the members get together. They could finally come to say that Jan talking first is the way it should be.

The concept of norms is very important to the study of conformity and deviance. Norms are the socially acceptable behaviors in a group. It is in relation to them that people either conform or deviate. For instance, a group has the norm that Jan always talks first. When the other group members choose to wait for Jan to speak first, they conform. If one day Harold says something before Jan, Harold has deviated from the group norm.

Before we begin our examination of conformity and deviance, we need to discuss some important points about norms.

Groups can establish norms concerning almost any behavior, as long as they consider the behavior important. However, all norms are not created equal. They have different qualities, such as whether the group itself created the norm, or how much the group accepts the norm. Here is an example. At Good Old State University , it has long been normative to dress in the "international student uniform," which consists of clothing such as blue jeans, tennis or running shoes, sweatshirts, T-shirts, and the like. At West Point , on the other hand, it is normative to dress in a very different kind of uniform, the cadet uniform.

These "dress" norms may have qualities that vary greatly. We can classify them and all other norms according to different criteria. For instance, we can group them according to their degree of formality versus informality. Another criterion is the extent to which they are imposed upon the group from outside or from within the group itself. Scientists have found that formal norms tend to come from an outside source. We can see this at work in the example of

the formal West Point uniform. In contrast, informal norms tend to emerge, as in the "international student uniform," from the group itself.

A further criterion is the degree of permissible deviation. The "dress" norm at West Point has a much lower degree of permissible deviation than the one at Good Old State U. Norms can also vary in degree of group acceptance. We can assume that the students at Good Old State U., with some exceptions, accept their dress norm more than the students at West Point . Most West Point students probably do not wear their uniforms while on vacation, for example. One last important point to remember about norms is that they can apply to group members in different ways. Some norms may apply to all members; other norms are relevant only to people taking specific roles in the group.

As we begin our discussion, we need to point out that there will be some ambiguity in this chapter. You may find yourself wondering at times if we are examining our topic in relation to how a group does things or in relation to the group's outcome . You can intuitively see that norms apply to both behaviors. Groups create norms to direct their members' actions in the group, and they also approve norms that relate to specific policy proposals they consider. For example, a group develops norms that apply to how it runs its meetings. Beth always calls the meeting to order, Rob usually makes a joke to break the ice, the group votes on important topics, and so on. These norms relate to how the group does its job. The group might also, for instance, decide that all the members must wear green shirts to the meetings and that all must agree with a certain political philosophy. Such norms apply to the group's outcome .

In short, there is a distinction between how the group makes decisions and what the decisions are. However, this distinction is not very important from the structural perspective. For this reason, we will not specify when we are describing norms that apply to how a group works and when we are looking at norms regarding the outcome of a group. This ambiguity does not affect our discussion.

Why Conform?

Why do people conform to group standards? First and foremost, group members must conform to make decisions. Conformity occurs when members choose the course of action that the majority favors. For instance, a group may have a norm that requires group consensus before it can adopt a course of action. A group consensus exists if every member of the group is willing to accept a proposal. Consensus does not imply that every member of the group really likes the proposal; it does imply that they all feel they can live with the proposal. Every person in the group must eventually conform to some decision, or the group remains stalemated.

Another group might have a norm that a voting majority will dictate what the group does. In this case, only a majority of the members must conform to an option. However, all group members need to conform to the idea that "majority rule" is the accepted procedure. Hence, group members in any kind of group must conform in some way before the group can successfully reach any decision. Without conformity, the group will stand still. We can take this idea a step further. Members must conform to some operating procedure before the group can perform any task, including the task of making a decision.

We can see why conformity is essential before a group can reach a decision. For example, three people might come together in a school lunchroom. They consider themselves a group and have met to plan a school dance. However, the three people are not willing to agree on how the group should operate. They sit at their table and argue over whether the group should vote on topics or whether they should select a leader and allow that person to have a majority of the power. Without solving this problem, the group members try to decide if they should write a list of tasks, but they cannot make a decision because they do not know whether they should vote on it. As you can see, the group is unable to accomplish anything because the members will not conform in any way.

Motivational Reasons

The same motivational reasons that people have for joining groups in the first place can also cause people to conform. Their reasons for conforming are:

1. To gain acceptance from the other group members. 2. To achieve goals that the group intends to reach. 3. To achieve personal goals that they can reach through group membership (for example, impressing another member to whom they are attracted). 4. To enjoy taking part in group activities and wanting to ensure the group's continuation.

Any of these reasons can lead people to conform with a group.

There is an additional motivational reason that could lead to conformity. People may conform because the group succeeds in persuading or pressuring them to do so. We will discuss this possibility further in the next section.

Social Comparison Theory

Some researchers have proposed that people also conform as a result of a psychological need to evaluate themselves. The theory is that people want to know whether their beliefs and opinions are what they should be. Festinger (1954) described this as a process of conformity for the sake of correctness. Researchers call his hypothesis "social comparison theory."

According to Festinger , humans have a need to be "correct." The result of this is that people want to evaluate their beliefs, periodically, against standards in order to judge themselves. There are different kinds of standards. In the case of a belief about "physical reality," the criteria are absolute. For example, if we want to know whether we should think that an object is breakable, we only need to hit it with a hammer to find out what we should believe.

In contrast, the standards concerning beliefs about "social reality" are relative. Festinger divides beliefs about social reality into two categories. The first includes "beliefs about abilities," and the second involves "opinions." In both of these categories, we need to find other people who can serve as standards against which we can judge ourselves. An important point is that these people cannot be too divergent from us. If they are, our comparisons with them will be meaningless. For instance, a high-school basketball player who wishes to make a self-evaluation of his abilities as a player would be foolish to use either Michael Jordan as a standard or, at the other extreme, a three-year-old who is trying to dribble. As another example, a moderate Democrat wants to judge herself regarding an opinion. She should not use either a member of the Socialist Workers Party or a person from the Libertarian Party as a criterion.

Festinger's theory also maintains that people will attempt to change their abilities and opinions if they are not satisfied with their self-evaluation. However, the reactions to opinions and abilities differ because people cannot react to the two categories of beliefs in the same way. People can rank abilities on a scale from "good" to "bad." A basketball player can know, for instance, if he is doing well according to the number of points he scores. It is clear that a person must move toward the "good" direction on the ranking scale in order to improve.

People react to opinions differently. Instead of rating their opinions on a scale of "good" to "bad," they rate from "correct" to "incorrect." They then change their opinions to be closer to the "correct" end of the scale. For the Democrat to "improve" her opinions, she must change them until they are closer to the opinions of other members of the Democratic Party. She does so because she considers the opinions of other members of the Democratic Party correct.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory Social comparison theory has been very influential in the field of small-group research. However, it is not a satisfactory explanation for conformity. The weakness in the theory is that the link between a need to evaluate oneself and a tendency to change oneself is not clear. Why should a negative self-evaluation lead someone to change and conform? Perhaps a person is satisfied with his or her lot, whether good or bad.

Festinger saw this weakness in the theory. He offered one explanation for why a person would change in reaction to a negative self-evaluation of abilities. Festinger felt that there is a cultural value for self-improvement in our society. This, he said, is the link between judgment and change when abilities are involved.

However, social comparison theory still could not explain why people would change their opinions in order to conform. Festinger created a new theory to help explain why this might happen. In 1957 he proposed the theory called "cognitive dissonance." Cognitive dissonance theory maintains that people are not so much influenced by a need to be correct as they are influenced by a need to be consistent.

Festinger hypothesized that two beliefs are dissonant if one of them implies the opposite of the other. For example, a person may say, "I like my group," and also, "I disagree with my group." These are likely to be dissonant beliefs if the person also has a third idea that "I should agree with groups that I like." Festinger did not discuss the concept of this third idea, but it is necessary to make his theory work. Without the third statement, the other two may never cause a conflict for the person.

The implications of cognitive dissonance become more interesting if one of the "belief" statements involves an actual behavior. For example, an individual may have three opinions about a group. One of these opinions involves a behavior. He or she might say, "I don't like the group," and "I don't like the task," but also, "I helped the group with the task." There are two possible outcomes in this case.

The first outcome is that the person experiences dissonance and must change something to be consistent. The third statement above involves the idea that the person agreed to do something. This is relatively impervious to change because it is about an actual behavior. Thus, the person can only really change the first two statements. He or she should come to like the group and/or the task more than he or she does. The theory is unable to predict for certain which of the two opinions will most likely change. This inability is a weakness of the dissonance hypothesis.

The second possible outcome when a behavior statement is part of the equation is that the person will not experience dissonance and will not need to change beliefs. This can happen because he or she may come to believe that the act of compliance is a result of pressure from the group. The group, and not the person, is responsible for the conforming action. If this occurs, the fact that the person complied is irrelevant to his or her beliefs. There is no need to change opinions.

For example, Heidi agrees to paint a house with a group. After doing so, she realizes that she does not like the group, and she does not like to paint. She may feel that she has agreed to be part of the group and is herself responsible for joining it. If she feels this way, Heidi probably will experience some internal conflict. In that case, she needs to decide either that she does not really mind the group or that she likes painting. Or Heidi may tell the group that she wants to quit painting, but the group pressures her and says that she must continue. In such a case, Heidi probably feels no dissonance; and she does not feel a need to change her beliefs. She can continue to paint, feeling inside that she does not like what she is doing or the group around her.

Thus, dissonance is a factor only when there is inconsistency between a person's beliefs and a behavior for which the person feels personally responsible. If someone does not feel responsible for a conforming action, there is no internal conflict. We can find similar conclusions regarding responsibility for actions within attribution theory, which was described in Chapter 3. This similarity is no accident, as Bem (1972) has shown.

Kiesler and DeSalvo study. Kiesler and DeSalvo performed a study in 1967 to explore the idea that a feeling of personal responsibility is necessary before someone will experience dissonance. In their study, the researchers assigned women to task groups. They also led these women to believe that they disagreed with the rest of their group members regarding which tasks the group should perform. There were two possible tasks. The experimenters further "gently" induced half of the participants to perform the "disapproved" task, while the other half merely "knew" of the disagreement but did not act on it. Lastly, they led the participants to believe that they would either like or dislike the group.

For example, Mary and Sue come to the experiment. The researchers tell Mary that the best task to do is Task Alpha. However, they also tell her that the group will want to do Task Beta instead. They further tell Mary that she can feel free to go ahead and pursue Task Alpha when the group meets and that she will like the other group members. Sue, on the other hand, hears that Task Alpha is the best, but the researchers do not comment on whether she should work on Task Alpha or Task Beta. Sue hears that she will dislike her group. Kiesler and DeSalvo placed their participants in conditions similar to the ones we have described for Sue and Mary.

Results showed that there were differences between the participants who simply "knew" about the disapproved task and the subjects who were "gently" induced to perform the disapproved action. Those who merely "knew" of their disagreement with the group came to see less difference between the two tasks if they liked the other members, rather than if they disliked the group. The participants started to agree with their groups. They liked the task they had originally preferred less and liked the task the group preferred more.

In contrast, participants who complied with the "gentle" inducements came to see less difference between the tasks when they disliked the group, as opposed to when they liked it. This outcome fits cognitive dissonance theory. When a person dislikes the group, he or she must come to like the task to alleviate the internal conflict that results. As we have seen before, performing a duty and feeling personally responsible is very difficult if a person dislikes both the group and the task. It is best if the person can come to like either the group or the group's task.

As we can see, the study results agreed with cognitive dissonance theory. The less a group pressures a person to comply with the group, the more "inside" pressure a person will feel to accept the beliefs that compliant behavior would imply.

For example, Matt belongs to a group that voluntarily helps clean inner-city parks and playgrounds. When Matt helps clean, his compliant behavior implies certain beliefs about the value of cleaning the parks. In order not to experience dissonance, Matt is likely to come to believe that there is value in his task. However, the amount of pressure that Matt feels from the group affects how much he personally urges himself to believe that cleaning is valuable. For instance, he may belong to a group with a carefree leader who lets people work at their own pace. In such a group, Matt will probably feel "internal pressure" to like the task of improving the inner-city areas. In contrast, Matt might be in a group with a leader who starts to pressure group members, demanding compliance with the leader's rules. In this group, Matt will probably feel less compelled to believe personally in the project.

Reactance theory. Brehm extended this notion in 1966 in his reactance theory. He claimed that people need to feel as if they have freedom to control their behavior. If a group threatens this freedom, individuals will be aroused to protect it. Thus, extreme pressure from a group can backfire and lead to increased deviance. Matt, for instance, may even begin to dislike the very work he volunteered to do, cleaning parks, if his group becomes too pressure-filled.

Compliance Versus Private Acceptance

In the previous section we summarized some reasons that people conform to their groups. However, in our discussion, we have not formally divided these into the reasons behind compliance versus the causes that foster private acceptance. It may be impossible to make a clear division between the causes. It is true that, as one of their tasks, some theories definitely attempt to explain why private acceptance can occur. For instance, this is the case for the social comparison, dissonance, and reactance theories. It is also true that a factor such as agreeing with a group only to impress a member is unquestionably a reason that leads to compliance. However, the other reasons that we have mentioned, such as conforming to reach a decision, could cause either private acceptance or compliance.

There are further complications regarding this matter. What starts as compliance may end up as private acceptance. The theory of cognitive dissonance predicts this, and the experiment by Kiesler and DeSalvo revealed the process at work. Thus, it is not always possible to distinguish between the reasons that lead to private acceptance and those that cause compliance.

Nevertheless, researchers have done some studies that relate specifically to compliance or to private acceptance.

The person conducting the study asks which of the lines on the right is the same length as the "standard" on the left . The first person in the line answers, "A." The second also says, "A," and the others follow with the same answer. When your turn comes you say, "A," and think about how obvious the answer is.

Everyone answers, "B." You again think about how simple the task is.

The researcher begins to go down the line again, asking the participants for answers. The first person says, "A." You are surprised, but you decide that someone was bound to make an error sometime. The second person answers, "A." You start to become uneasy. The third person also says, "A," as does the fourth. You cannot believe what you are hearing, but now the fifth and sixth participants answer, "A." It is suddenly your turn. What do you say?

This situation is the prototype for a series of studies performed by Asch (1951, 1956). Researchers have interpreted his experiments as being relevant to compliance. Unknown to the real participant, the other eight "participants" in the line were confederates working with the researcher. Asch instructed the confederates to unanimously give the wrong answer during 12 of the 18 trials. He intended their answers to be so obviously wrong that the real participants could not fail to be amazed at the discrepancy between what they saw and what they heard. Scientists have made the assumption that if the real participant in Asch's study conformed with the incorrect confederates, the conformity was compliance, not private acceptance. This assumption requires some further analysis.

Numeric results. First, let us examine the numeric results of Asch's experiment. On the average, 3.84 (or 32 percent) of the 12 experimental trials resulted in conformity. We can compare this outcome with the results from control groups. In the control groups, participants could see what others did, but they did not verbalize their own choices. Hence, there was no pressure to conform. These participants erred an average of only .08 times, or .67 percent. Thus, it seems that the high level of conformity in the experimental trials was due to group pressure. The pressure successfully led the test participants to give an opinion that they did not really share.

However, this overall conformity result is misleading. It masks the great individual differences among the participants. Out of 123 participants, 29 did not ever conform with their group, 33 conformed on eight or more trials, and the remaining 61 participants went along with their groups only on occasion. Only 26.8 percent conformed at a high rate. As we can see, we must keep these individual results in mind as we examine the assumption that Asch's experiment shows compliance at work.

Postexperimental interview results. Next, let us look at the results of postexperimental interviews with the participants. These are crucial to our analysis of Asch's study. Participants who never conformed reported that they had not conformed for one of two reasons. Some did not conform because they were confident that their choices were right, and they were confident even though they acknowledged that they had been deviant in the face of unanimous agreement among the confederates. Others who had not conformed claimed that they had concentrated totally on the demands of the task, and they had not really noticed what the confederates said.

As for the conformists, a small percentage of them claimed to actually have seen the wrong line as a correct match. If these participants were telling the truth, we must conclude that private acceptance was at work in Asch's study. These participants privately accepted the belief of the majority opinion. They were not simply complying with the group. About half of the rest of the conformists claimed that they had seen the lines correctly but that when they heard the majority choice, they decided that they must have been wrong. They then went along with the group. Whether this is compliance or private acceptance is debatable. However, the remaining conformists clearly complied. They said that they thought their choice was correct but that they had gone along with the group anyway.

Thus, as we can see, we cannot assume that Asch's experiment revealed solely elements concerning compliance. It appears that perhaps both types of conformity, compliance and private acceptance, were at work in his study. Nevertheless, Asch's work reveals a great deal about compliance. He also performed variations on his original test that yielded further findings. In addition, other researchers have been able to build on Asch's work.

Variations. Asch compared his original findings with the results of some variations on his first test procedure. Some examples of his experiments, along with their results, are:

1. A test with two "real" participants instead of one. If one of the two did not immediately comply, the other knew that he or she had an ally. This circumstance lowered the conformity rate to 10.4 percent.

2. A study that had one confederate who always answered correctly. The real participant now always had an ally. This decreased the conformity rate further, to 5.5 percent. We can conclude from this test that one ally is enough to markedly decrease conformity when someone faces an overwhelming majority.

3. An experiment in which a confederate answered correctly at the beginning and then soon "deserted" to the majority. This situation did not help the real participant's courage. The conformity rate was 28.5 percent for these groups, which was barely less than when the participant had no ally at all.

4. A study that had a confederate who stopped conforming and started to say the right answer, thereby joining the real participant. This was quite helpful for the participant and lowered conformity rates to 8.7 percent.

Asch also varied the number of confederates facing a lone test participant. He did this to discover whether conformity would increase as the size of the opposing majority grew. As you recall, the control groups had participants who conformed at the rate of only .67 percent. The results when Asch increased the majority size to various levels were:

As the numbers show, there is a high percentage of conformity when a lone dissenter faces a unified majority of only three people. It appears that this small group size is sufficient to cause a conformity rate that is close to maximum potential. Increasing the number of confederates beyond three does not seem to raise conformity levels significantly.

Gerard study. More than a decade after these original experiments, Gerard (1965) examined the plight of the lone dissenter. He applied the tenets of cognitive dissonance theory to the results from Asch's study. As Gerard pointed out, the naive participant is faced with two unpleasant choices in Asch's experiment. He or she can conform, in opposition to his or her true impressions, or he or she can dissent in the face of possible ridicule and embarrassment. Both choices lead to dissonance.

We can see how conformity would cause a state of dissonance in Asch's experiment. The compliant participant has three internal statements that reveal how the internal conflict occurs. He or she is thinking, for instance, "I saw that line C was closest to the standard," "I said that line A was closest to the standard," and "Line A and line C cannot both be closest to the standard."

Gerard hypothesized that a compliant participant could lower his or her internal dissonance as the experiment continued. The participant could do so by

1. "Seeing" the same way as the group. This is what a small majority claimed to have done in Asch's study.

2. Deciding that what they see is wrong. Many participants did this.

3. Attributing the responsibility for what they say to the group. In this way, they feel that the group pressured them to say the wrong thing and that they can comply with a clear conscience. Quite a few of Asch's participants relieved their dissonance in this way.

It is similarly true that deviation, as well as conformity, leads to a state of dissonance. The participant feels that, "I said that line C was closest to the standard," "The group said that line A was closest," and "I am a member of the group." A person can lower this feeling of dissonance by psychologically disassociating from the group. A person could do this by telling himself or herself something like, "I know I am a member of this group, but I don't care whether the group likes me. I will continue to say the truth."

Gerard saw these conditions at work in Asch's experiments. Gerard took these findings and hypothesized that a participant's first choice of behavior is important. The person can choose to deviate or to conform on the first trial. Whichever action the person chooses, his or her cognitions will probably change so that internal dissonance will decrease in subsequent trials.

For example, Joe feels pressured by his group of friends to help them steal a car. Internally, Joe does not believe that he should help them. Joe needs to decide what he will do the first time his friends ask him to steal. Let us say that, as a first example, Joe does not go along with his friends. To have internal harmony, Joe dissociates himself from the group and decides that these particular friends are not very important to him. As time goes by and as his friends pressure him to steal other things, the likelihood is that Joe will continue to refuse. He can do this because the group does not mean very much to him anymore. On the other hand, if Joe steals a car the first time, it is likely that he will continue to do so. He will probably tell himself that the group is right and that stealing is not so bad, in order to lower his internal dissonance.

As you recall, there were consistencies in individual participants' behavior over trials during Asch's study. These results supported Gerard's hypothesis.

What is interesting about the dissonance interpretation of Asch's study is how it relates to an idea we discussed earlier. As we showed, a member will continue to disbelieve a group's opinion if he or she blames the group for his or her act of compliance. If, for instance, Joe is forced to go with his friends and steal the car, Joe will probably not come to believe that stealing is all right. This is similar to the third response that we noted above for people who comply with a group. In fact, a person who feels this way may come to dislike the group and deviate more.

However, once the compliant member comes to blame himself or herself for compliance, the stage is set for the person to begin to privately accept the group's decision. If this happens, in all likelihood the person will like the group more. This is the method by which "brainwashing" can occur. For instance, if Joe's group taunts him by saying that he is just like them or he would not have had them for friends in the first place, Joe may begin to feel personally responsible for having friends who ask him to steal. He may begin to believe his group and start to think that stealing is all right. If this happens, Joe's group has successfully "brainwashed" him.

Private acceptance can occur in other ways also. The following experiment shows this.

Private Acceptance

Sherif study. Imagine the following circumstances: You have again consented to participate in an experiment that you think is about perception. This time the experimenter promises you that no confederates will pressure you to do anything. The researcher takes you into a dark room, where you are alone. Suddenly, a point of light appears before you. It seems to move erratically for a few seconds, and then it disappears. The experimenter asks you to report how far the light appeared to move.

There is a problem, however. You are not sure how big the room is. Nor do you know how far the light was from you. In other words, you have no frame of reference against which you can compare the light's movement. How can you make your judgment when you have no frame of reference or basis that you can use to evaluate the light?

This is the prototype procedure for a series of studies that Sherif performed in 1935. In reality, the light did not move at all. What occurred was a physiological phenomenon that scientists call an " autokinetic effect." The phenomenon is a tendency for lights to appear to move when there are no points of reference for the eye to use to "tie them down."

Subjective standards. Sherif's first studies showed that his participants quickly established subjective standards that they could use as points of reference. They would then judge the amount of apparent movement against these "standards." How could they do this? The participants would often use their first judgment and the movement that they saw in it as their standard for comparison. They would then use the immediately subsequent judgments in order to estimate the range of possible movement for the light.

In Sherif's study, there was a wide range of standards that the participants created. The smallest standard for the range of movement for the light was about one inch. By contrast, the largest standard was about 7 inches. Once an individual established a subjective standard, he or she continued to use that standard in subsequent experimental sessions.

A group "norm" for judgment. Sherif's next concern was to discover what would occur if individuals performed the task in groups. In the groups, the participants announced their estimates, one by one, in one another's presence. We can hypothesize two possible results for this study. As you recall, the light does not actually move. Instead, the movement that someone observes is actually a result of his or her own unique visual system. Thus, one possible result for the study could be that each participant would "see" very different amounts of movement. If this happened, each person would have a personal standard for judgment, and the other group members would not influence this standard.

A second possibility could be that each person, having no standard to begin with, would instead look to other group members for an idea of how to judge the movement. The individual judgments would then start to influence one another. This would result in a group standard that all members would adopt.

Sherif asked some participants to begin the study by performing one series of judgments alone. He then asked them to work in groups of two or three and do three more series of judgments, doing each series on a different day. Some of the groups were made up of participants who had created very diverse subjective standards during their individual judgments. When these people came together in groups, they showed marked convergence of their standards during the very first series of evaluations. Their standards continued to converge during their second and third series of trials together. However, their ideas of criteria never completely converged. This implies that their original, individual standards still had some effect as they worked together. Nevertheless, it was also clear that the group had created a norm for judgment.

Sherif asked a second sample of participants to make three series of judgments in groups and then to do one series alone. In this case, the group members established a very close convergence of their individual standards almost immediately. Their ideas converged more so than at any time for the previous groups. After convergence, the group norm for judgment averaged about three to four inches. Further, the groups retained their initial norms throughout the other two group sessions. In the individual trials, the participants further continued to use the same group norms for judgment. This occurred even when the individual trials occurred as much as six months after the group sessions. Divergence among the participants' judgments did begin to occur during the end of the individual series. It would be interesting to discover how much more divergence from the group norm would have occurred if the participants had performed more individual sessions.

Sherif's conclusions. Sherif argued quite convincingly that his results are an example of private acceptance and not an example of compliance. First, Sherif showed that the only standard for judgment in his study was "social reality." This was unlike Asch's study. In Asch's experiment, the perceptual difference between the standard and the line that the confederates "chose" was objectively clear. It was so clear that more than 99 percent of the time the control groups made correct judgments. In Sherif's study, on the other hand, the standard for judgment came only from the "reality" that the group created. It was not objective. In fact, we can liken Sherif's experiment to an accuracy task, such as the one we described in Chapter 2 when we examined Gordon's work. For Gordon's task, the average of the participants' judgments was the best answer. If we make such a comparison, the participants' "strategy" of convergence would be optimal in Sherif's study. Second, Sherif's participants continued to use the group standard in subsequent individual sessions. This implies that they actually believed in the group's opinion.

Much later, in 1961, Sherif conducted further research. In these studies, the participants "accidentally" overheard another participant's judgment while they waited to make their own. The participants never met each other. Even so, the judgments of the participants approximated the ones that they had overheard. It is unlikely that people would merely be complying in such a circumstance. There was no group pressure for the participants to conform to the standard that they had heard.

We can further clarify the differences between the Asch and Sherif studies by comparing the demands that the studies made on the participants. In the Asch studies, the perceptual task was clear enough that the participants should have been certain of the correct answers. Of course, the unified response of the confederates was bound to make the participants less certain. However, despite this fact, the participants found Asch's perceptual task very clear. The test was so unambiguous that most of the participants rarely questioned their perception. They either stuck to their guns a majority of the time, or they complied to save face, not because they mistrusted their senses.

In the Sherif studies, the perceptual task was so vague that most participants did not have much confidence in their judgments. Research on other topics has shown what happens when people are uncertain about their judgments or decisions. They react by looking elsewhere for information that could help them. In Sherif's experiment, the only place the participants could go for additional information was to one another. In fact, the people in Sherif's experiment should have had more confidence in the group's standard for judgment. It was natural that they looked to the group for help. This led to the participants' private acceptance of the group standard. In contrast, the only participants in the Asch study who came to trust the group judgment more than their own were those who privately accepted the wrong line as correct.

Thus far, we have considered conformity an individual process. We have shown that individuals often place themselves under great pressure to conform when they face a disagreeing majority. This internal pressure may lead people to conform merely in their behavior because they desire to impress a group or belong to it. This kind of conformity is compliance. The personal pressure may instead lead people to conform in attitude also. This private acceptance could occur because people desire to maintain consistency or to lower uncertainty about their cognitions. Whether a person submits to this pressure is an individual decision.

However, we must not overlook the fact that normal group settings are unlike the Asch and Sherif studies. A group can add to this internal pressure by putting a great deal of overt pressure on dissenters to make them conform or, in some cases, to continue to deviate. Now we will move on to a general discussion of deviance. As part of this examination, we will describe a study concerning the forms that group pressure can take.

Why Deviate?

As we said before, the first and foremost reason people conform is that group members must do so to make decisions. The foremost reason for deviance in groups relates to this idea. People deviate so that the group can make good decisions. It is unlikely that a group's first proposal is the best that it can possibly make. However, the group cannot make better proposals if members are unwilling to question the first suggestion.

No matter how many members support a given proposal, deviants should speak up. They should attempt to point out the weaknesses of the proposal and the comparative strengths of alternative solutions. When this happens, at the very least, the advocates of a given proposal will need to defend their position. In turn, this defense will have the positive result of giving the group a greater understanding of the proposal and its implications, even if nothing else comes of the deviant's viewpoint. In addition, the criticism from the deviants may lead to improvements in the plan, or, in some cases, it may persuade the majority to explore other possibilities before they accept the given proposal.

Even if a group unanimously supports an idea, it is to the group's advantage to have a member play "devil's advocate." A devil's advocate is not really a deviant. It is a person who may not disagree with the group consensus but who does not think that the agreed-upon proposal has undergone enough examination. In such a role, a person will voice criticism and point out possible weaknesses that he or she may not even truly feel are problems. The devil's advocate does this to ensure that the proposal has undergone a stiff evaluation before the group approves it.

Deviance can lead to conflict within groups. We can distinguish between two types of group conflict: constructive conflict and destructive conflict. Constructive conflict occurs when group members carefully weigh the strengths and weaknesses of proposals. Deviants and devil's advocates can contribute to constructive conflict by challenging any consensus that forms around one of the proposals. Constructive conflict prevents groups from prematurely adopting any proposal. It increases the number of options that groups consider and ensures that the strengths and weaknesses of each are adequately discussed. Constructive conflict can also heighten group members' interest and involvement in the group's discussion. To participate fully in constructive conflict, group members must be dedicated to choosing the proposal that is best for the entire group.

In contrast, destructive conflict occurs when members do not have the best interest of the group in mind. The group is diverted from thoughtfully analyzing all its options. For example, power struggles or personality disputes among group members can disrupt deliberation. In these cases, members attempt to "win out" over one another rather than reach a mutually acceptable consensus. Destructive conflict can even occur when members want to make the best decision for everybody but disagree about how to do so. In this circumstance, discussion can bog down in endless debate about what the group ought to be doing.

Engaging in constructive conflict is to the group's advantage if members want to make a high-quality decision, although it may come at the expense of group satisfaction. A study by Wall, Galanes , and Love (1987) supports this claim. The researchers asked 24 four- to seven-member student groups to develop a list of five topics for workshops for new students and to rank-order the five for importance. The researchers studied the interaction of these groups and counted as conflict any disagreement among three or more people that lasted for more than two statements. They also rated each disagreement as constructive or destructive conflict. The quality of the groups' work was judged to be best for groups that generally had constructive conflict, became worse for groups the more they had destructive conflict, and was worst for groups with no conflict. The "constructive" groups, however, tended to have more conflict than the "destructive" groups, and the more conflict groups had, the less satisfied their members were with their experience. Thus, the groups with constructive conflict did the best work but were least satisfied, the groups with no conflict did the worst work but were most satisfied, and the groups with destructive conflict were intermediate on both variables.

Good and Bad Deviance

At the beginning of this chapter, we differentiated between types of conformity that were usually bad versus those that were usually good. We called the former "compliance" and the latter "private acceptance." Based on some work by Merton (1957), we can make similar distinctions regarding deviant behavior. Merton's hypothesis rests on how a group member reacts to the group's goal and the group's means for reaching this goal. If a group member accepts both the goal and the means, the person has conformed . What Merton called conformity corresponds to what we have called private acceptance. When a member accepts the group's goal but rejects its means for reaching it, that is known as innovation . It is undoubtedly, in most cases, good for the group. This is an example of the kind of constructive deviance that we have described so far in this section. For example, Judy is in a group that decorates rooms for parties. If she agrees with the group goal, to decorate, and also believes in the way the group decorates, always with pink colors, Judy conforms. On the other hand, Judy may one day say that she thinks the group should use other colors, even though she still likes the group goal of decorating. In that case, Judy is being innovative.

On the other hand, a group member can reject the group's goal but accept its means for reaching it. This is ritualism . In other words, the member "goes through the motions." Merton considers this a form of deviance, although it approximates what we have called compliance. Finally, members may reject both group goals and means. One way they can do this is by dropping out entirely, which Merton calls retreatism . Another way to substitute new, personal goals, as well as the means to reach them. This is rebellion . For instance, Judy could decide that she does not like decorating, but because she needs a job and does not mind the group, she continues decorating rooms. Judy behaves ritually, going through the work without really thinking about what ideas lie behind it. Finally, she may decide that she no longer can follow the group at all. She retreats, and leaves it entirely. On the other hand, if Judy decides that she likes her group but does not like the business of decorating rooms, then she could rebel. She might ask the group if they would like to go into other work, such as preparing gourmet food for the parties.

It is retreatism and rebellion that the group usually considers bad deviance. However, we need to be careful not to misinterpret this judgment. If a group member sincerely believes that a group's goals are wrong, he or she should either get out or rebel. This is a healthy reaction. However, the retreating or rebellious member must expect that the group will view him or her negatively. This is how we should interpret the idea that retreatism and rebellion are bad behaviors. They are unwelcome from the standpoint of the group, which loses members or becomes very disrupted when they occur.

Group Pressure

Deviants should not be surprised if the group puts unmistakable constraints on them to conform. Scientists have researched the pressure that groups apply to innovative and rebellious deviants. The results have shown that this persuasive force is quite predictable in its amount and type. Schachter performed a classic experiment (1951) that explored this issue.

Group Pressure Toward Conformity

Schachter was concerned with the extent to which groups direct communication toward dissenters. He concentrated his research this way because he worked under a particular assumption. The assumption was that groups intend for their communication to change a deviate's opinions. Thus, communication is equal to pressure from the group. The reason for this is that groups desire to change a dissenter's ideas so that they are consistent with those of the majority. Schachter believed that the amount of communication that a group directs toward a dissenter is a result of two factors: internal group pressure and dependence of the group on the deviant member.

Internal Group Pressure

The first factor is the extent to which the group feels its own internal pressure to change the dissenter's opinion. In other words, how important is it to the group to change the person's ideas? This kind of pressure should rise as the amount of disagreement that the group perceives it has with the person increases. Interestingly, Schachter hypothesized this as a curvilinear relationship. Pressure and disagreement do not exactly go hand in hand. Instead, Schachter felt that pressure increases more slowly as disagreement becomes stronger.

For example, Mark joins a tennis group. The group is very formal and runs its own tournaments. Mark starts to wear street shoes when he plays. The group tries to pressure him to wear tennis shoes instead. Next, Mark begins to argue with line judges. He disrupts the normal tranquillity of the games. The group feels more strongly that it needs to bring Mark "back in line." Soon, however, Mark is not playing full games, and he often leaves in a huff. When this higher level of disagreement is reached, the group still thinks it should pressure Mark to conform, but the feelings of the group are not much stronger than when Mark started to argue in the first place. The group is beginning to wonder if it is worth the effort to make Mark conform.

The group's internal pressure to change a dissenter's opinion also usually rises as the cohesiveness of the group and the importance of the task to the group increase. For instance, if the tennis group really enjoys being together and they think of Mark as a group member, they will fight harder to make him conform to their ideal. Also, if the group feels that playing tennis in a "formal" way is very important, they will work harder to keep Mark in line.

Dependence of the Group

The second factor regarding how much a group will communicate persuasively to a dissenter is the degree to which the group feels that it depends upon the deviant member. Schachter theorized that as disagreement increases, a group should feel less dependent upon a dissenter's input. In effect, the group rejects the member. For example, if Mark starts to miss meets entirely and swears continually at judges, the group may tell him that he can no longer play tennis with them. The level of disagreement has become so high that the group no longer wants to tolerate Mark.

Again, Schachter saw this as a curvilinear relationship with dependence decreasing at a faster pace as disagreement becomes worse. In addition, high levels of cohesiveness and devotion to the task mean that the group's dependence on a deviant who creates many problems will decrease. For example, it may be that Mark's group enjoys being together and playing formal tennis very much. In this case, if Mark becomes disagreeable to the point where he endangers these group enjoyments, it is likely that the group will depend on Mark less and less.

We can predict the result of these offsetting forces. As we have noted, the amount of pressure that a group feels toward persuading a dissenter will increase along with the perceived disagreement. As disagreement and felt pressure increase, communication toward the dissenter attempting to persuade him or her to conform will also increase. However, this will happen only until the group reaches the point where it begins to depend less on the dissenter. When this happens, the decrease in the group's feeling of dependence will compensate for its internal pressure. Thereafter, communication will decrease if the perceived disagreement continues to rise. Increasing levels of pressure will be offset by decreasing dependence levels.

For example, Mark's group will communicate with him, trying to persuade him to conform, only until they see him deviate so much that they feel the group can no longer depend on him. When this happens, the group will not bother trying to communicate with Mark anymore. Figure 6.1 illustrates the relationship between the forces.

Schachter also assumed that continued group interaction will lead a group to become more aware of disagreement when a significant degree of deviation exists than the group might otherwise have been. Thus, when a group increases the time it spends interacting, we can expect a similar rise in perceived disagreement. This causes communication to the dissenter first to increase and then decrease over the course of a group meeting.

Schachter's Methodology

Schachter informed his study participants that they were assigned to one of four "clubs." In the clubs, they would study the topics of "case study," "editorials," "movies," or "radio." The "case study" and "movie" clubs consisted of participants who had expressed interest in those topics. Schachter hoped that this manipulation would lead to high group cohesiveness. In contrast, the "editorial" and "radio" clubs had participants who were uninterested. Schachter expected these groups to be low in cohesion. Data showed that these manipulations did affect cohesiveness, as they were intended to do.

Between 8 and 10 participants showed up for the first meeting of each club. During this first meeting, Schachter asked the club members to help on another project that he was doing. He gave them the case study of "Johnny Rocco." Johnny was a juvenile delinquent, guilty of a minor crime. Their task was to decide on a policy for dealing with him. Should they send him for help and counseling or put him in jail? The groups had 45 minutes to decide Johnny's fate. After the discussion, the researcher told the members to nominate one another for positions on committees. The committees had varying degrees of importance to the club. Finally, the club members rated the degree to which they wished one another to remain in the club. This ended the meeting and the experiment.

What was going on? First, Schachter chose the Johnny Rocco case because it was relevant to the "case study" and "editorial" clubs but not to the"movie " and "radio" groups. He thus created a second type of manipulation for the study. Table 6.1 shows the conditions in the groups to which the manipulation led.

The different conditions allowed Schachter to test his hypothesis regarding the ways in which relevance and cohesiveness can affect groups. He wanted to see if they affect whether a group feels "internal" pressure to have members conform. This was the first reason Schachter set up the experiment the way that he did.

Second, three "members" of each club were actually confederates. They had assigned roles to play during the discussion. One confederate was the deviant. He or she was to argue at all times for the alternative that the majority of the participants most strongly opposed. In most cases, this meant that the deviant argued for Johnny Rocco to serve a long jail sentence, while the participants argued for Johnny to get counseling. A second confederate played the role of the norm. This person was to verbally support the alternative that the group accepted. The third confederate was the slider. He or she was to begin by deviating but then move toward agreeing with the group's viewpoint as discussion continued.

Schachter's Results

One answer that Schachter sought to discover was how the real participants felt about the confederates at the end of the meetings. He did so by analyzing the committee nominations that the participants made, as well as their feelings concerning the confederates. As one would expect, the real participants saw the deviant as a less desirable group member than either the norm or the slider. In the highly cohesive groups, this discrepancy was particularly marked. The groups nominated the deviant for the lowly "correspondence" committee more often than chance would allow. Similarly, members wanted the deviant in the prestigious "executive" committee less often than chance would predict. In contrast, the groups nominated the norm and the slider confederates equally often for all committees. Clearly, other group members looked unfavorably on the deviant.

Schachter also wanted to see how much communication the groups directed toward the norm, the slider, and the deviant. To do so, he measured the amount of communication that the participants directed to the confederates during four time periods in the meeting. This allowed him to observe whether any changes occurred as the meetings progressed.

The results were only partly consistent with expectations. The total amount of communication that the group directed toward the deviant was highest for the "case study" clubs, which had the highest cohesiveness and relevance levels. This was what Schachter expected. However, the low-cohesive and low-relevancy "radio" clubs had the second highest amount of communication. This was not what Schachter predicted. He thought that these groups would have the least communication toward the deviant out of all four conditions.

Further, the amount of communication toward the dissenter became greater over time in most cases. Schachter had predicted that the amount of communication toward the deviant would increase for a while but then begin to decrease as the group members lost their willingness to tolerate the deviant. Only the high-cohesive and high-relevancy groups fit in with this theory.

These results suggest that Schachter was correct in some of his assumptions but not all. It is true that increased amounts of time interacting led to increased perceptions of disagreement. This, in turn, caused a higher level of pressure to change the deviant. However, the offsetting tendencies--to reject the deviant when the disagreement became very strong--occurred only in the special condition of a highly cohesive group that is performing a relevant task.

Finally, the communication that the group directed toward the other confederates--the norm and slider members--occurred as Schachter expected. The group directed very little communication toward the norm throughout the meeting. The amount of communication from the group toward the slider approximated the level it used toward the deviant during the beginning of the meeting. By the end of the meeting, however, the persuasive communication toward the slider decreased until it was similar to the amount that the norm member received.

Refining Schachter's Interpretations

Later research has refined the knowledge that scientists gained from Schachter's experiment. First, it is quite clear now that, with tasks that require a group to reach a consensus, the amount of communication that a group directs toward a deviant rises along with disagreements. Scientists have found that as the level of disagreement between the deviant and the group increases, so too does the communication.

Second, studies have shown that the type of communication that members direct toward a deviant changes over time. At the beginning, the group attempts to persuade the deviant to privately accept the group's opinion. The group does so by placing ever more attention upon the deviant. Group members accomplish this by focusing more and more remarks at the deviant, by talking about him or her, and by facing and directing their eye gaze at the deviant. This is a most uncomfortable experience for people who play the role of the dissenter both in experiments and in real groups. This situation changes, however, as time passes and the group comes to feel pressured to complete the task. The group members shift their arguments toward the deviant. They appeal to him or her to comply so that the group can claim a consensus and finish its task. A group member, in essence, might say to the dissenter, "Please, just go along with us so that we can do our job."

Ultimately, as time pressure continues to increase for the members, the group often begins to ignore the deviant. This is what Schachter predicted would happen. When the group gives up hope of persuading the dissenter to conform, the members turn away from the deviant and direct their entire attention toward one another. Scientists have called this "symbolic exclusion." The group acts as if the deviating member were not there. In some cases, actual exclusion occurs when the other members ask the dissenter to leave the group.

Finally, Schachter's research revealed evidence that the group will look on the deviant badly and treat him or her roughly if he or she deviates more strongly than the other group members will tolerate. Studies by scientists who replicated and extended Schachter's work also support this result. The finding implies that groups do not want dissenters unless they regard the dissenters as innovative.

However, other evidence has shown that this conclusion is not necessarily the case. As we will show in the following discussion, the functional perspective maintains that rebellious or retreating deviants can play useful roles in groups.

The Functional Perspective

According to Dentler and Erikson (1959), we should not take the fact that groups react negatively to deviant members to mean that those members cannot serve a positive function in the group. Through their research and theorizing, Dentler and Erikson intended to show that there could be value in rebellion or retreat from a functional standpoint. They felt that the presence of rebellion or retreatism can be good for a group, even if it is perhaps not necessary for a group's existence. They outlined their claims in the following three hypotheses:

1. Groups tend to induce, sustain, and permit deviant behaviors. With this idea, Dentler and Erikson did not mean to say that groups cause deviancy. What they meant is that, if the potential exists for deviant behavior on the part of a member, the group tends to channel it to its advantage. It does this rather than attempting to eliminate the deviancy.

2. Deviant behavior functions to help groups maintain a healthy emotional climate. The specific maintenance advantages that a rebellious member can bring to a group include the following:

a. Many things can lead to a buildup of tensions and hostility among group members. These things include task-oriented disagreements, pressure from outside the group, and dislike among the members. A group can use a retreating or rebellious member as the target for the expression of these problematic emotions. In essence, the members use the deviant as a scapegoat. This allows them to drain their emotions onto the deviant and return to the task at hand.

b. What a group considers to be conforming behavior is actually a range of behaviors. At one end of the range is behavior that is totally consistent with existing norms. At the other end is action that deviates from these norms just enough for the group to consider it intolerable. When a deviant goes beyond the boundary between approved and disapproved behavior, he or she is, in effect, informing the group about its own norms. In this way, the members discover the boundary between approved and disapproved behavior. For example, Sam works with a group that paints houses. One day he thins the paint more than he should to save money. When he does so, the group reacts by realizing that his behavior is outside the group's norm. Sam helps the group know the limits of its norms regarding shoddy workmanship. Also, when the group members punish a dissenter, they find out how much power the group has over member behavior and the types of punishment that the group can mete out to deviants.

c. The deviant serves as a basis for comparison that the group can use. The members can look at their own abilities, contributions to the group, and rewards from group participation in comparison with how the deviant member behaves. This idea is consistent with social comparison theory. The members see the deviant's performance and resulting punishment. As they do so, they can positively evaluate themselves and the rewards that they get from group membership. This will increase personal satisfaction for conforming group members.

d. The deviant supplies a group with a problem that the group needs to solve. The members can unite against this problem as they try to do something about it. They will attempt to bring about conformity in the deviant. Their attempt can serve as a "rallying point" for coordinated group activity. Thus, the presence of a dissenter allows the members to express and nurture group cohesion.

3. Groups resist trends toward the alienation of deviant members. Contrary to Schachter's proposal, this claim is supported by the finding that it is rare that group activity will totally exclude deviant members. Of course, constant deviance can begin to endanger a group's cohesiveness. Instead, the group must strive to maintain the deviance to a level just a bit over the boundary between approved and disapproved behavior. In this way, the members can continue to take advantage of the presence of the deviant. When there is too much conformity, the group loses the advantages that deviance can bring to it. When there is too much deviance, on the other hand, the group cannot function if the deviant continues to be present.

Conclusion: Good and Bad Conformity and Deviance

In conclusion, it appears that our natural tendency to evaluate both conformity and deviance as negative behaviors is a mistake. These behaviors are not inherently bad. In fact, they describe situations that we all face during all our lives. Any time a group member faces a choice between a popular option and an unpopular one, he or she must either conform or deviate.

We can say, however, that there are good and bad types of both conformity and deviance, as long as we note the exceptions to these judgments. Conformity is usually good for a group when all members privately accept the majority choice. The exception to this hypothesis is when members privately accept an option that the group has not properly evaluated. Such unquestioning acceptance can lead to a disastrous decision. In contrast, it is usually bad for a group when members conform to the majority choice against their better judgment. Exceptions exist to this rule also, such as during emergencies when the group best serves its function by acting on any decision it can reach.

Deviance can be healthy for groups as well. Deviance is most often good for groups when the deviants are innovative. However, again, the exception to this is that emergencies often require compliance. It is bad for a group if a member retreats or rebels, except when that group's goals need revision. Also, if Dentler and Erikson are correct, the group can often reap benefits from "controlled rebellion."

MINORITY INFLUENCE

Thus far in this chapter, we have largely ignored one possible outcome of the situation in which a group majority faces one or two deviants. Although group deviants can change the opinions of the group majority, we should not expect this to happen often. As we discussed in Chapter 2, research using mock juries suggests that majority opinion wins out about 90 percent of the time. People with minority viewpoints usually feel great pressure to conform with the majority, and normally they comply or come to privately accept the majority view. This is the expected tendency. However, we should not forget that, at times, the minority can also successfully exert persuasive forces upon the majority. In the mock jury research minorities were successful persuaders about 5 percent of the time.

Moscovici et al. Study

Moscovici , Lage , and Naffrechoux (1969) showed the potential of a minority over a majority. Their study was an imaginative reworking of the Asch procedure. In the Moscovici et al. experiment, the group's minority, rather than the majority, were confederates.

In the study, six-member groups participated in an experiment in "color perception." The experimenters showed the groups a series of 36 slides and asked them to judge the color of each. All slides were blue. However, in one condition, two confederates incorrectly claimed that every slide was green. The researchers were interested to see how often the four real participants in each group said "green." The results showed that 32 percent of the real participants said "green" at least once. Out of the total responses, 8.42 percent were "green."

Moscovici et al. crafted a second test condition in which the confederates were not consistent in their responses. They would say "green" for only 24 out of the 36 blue slides. In this condition, the "green" responses from the real participants dropped to only 1.25 percent. Thus we can conclude that the minority had a slight, immediate effect on the majority if the minority gave consistent responses.

LongTerm Effects of Minorities

The researchers next separated the participants from the groups. When they were alone, the experimenters asked each person to judge the color of a series of ambiguous blue-green slides. The people tended to say that the slides were green, and they particularly did this when they had been in groups where the confederates were consistent. Thus, it appears that the consistent minority had not only a slight immediate effect but also a significant long-term effect on the judgments of the participants. The consistent minority was able to make "green" a reasonable judgment in an ambiguous situation.

Differences Between Minority and Majority Influence

Moscovici and others have used this experiment and subsequent studies as a basis for further investigations. They have found that it is true that majorities have a greater influence on members than minorities. However, the researchers have also determined that minority influence does occur. In addition, they have discovered that the types of influences that minorities and majorities have are different.

The influences that a majority has often lead to compliance. For instance, members of a minority often join with the majority because they want the majority to look favorably upon them and accept them. They may also believe that the majority must be correct simply by virtue of being the majority. These actions tend not to be the result of a careful consideration of the issues at hand. Thus conformity with the majority is often mere compliance.

In contrast, minority influence tends to lead to private acceptance. This only takes place when the minority is consistent and displays confidence in the accuracy of its views. Under these circumstances, the minority can persuade the majority to examine the relevant issues more closely than it had previously. If this takes place, it becomes possible to change opinions. Researchers have found, however, that it usually takes some time for the changes to occur. Sometimes they appear in subsequent decisions.

Maass and Clark Study

A study by Maass and Clark (1983) supported these claims. In their experiment, uncommitted participants read summaries of imaginary five-person group discussions on gay rights. The summaries stated that a majority of four supposedly defended one side of the issue and that a minority of one member defended a contrasting viewpoint. The researchers then asked the participants to express their own attitudes toward gay rights. They told half the participants that the group would learn of the participants' attitudes. People from this half changed their opinions to become more consistent with the group majority.

In contrast, the experimenters told the other half of the participants that their attitudes would remain secret. These people's beliefs moved toward those of the one deviant. In other words, majority influence led to compliance; minority influence led to private acceptance. When the participant had to go public with their opinions, they appeared to conform with the majority. This behavior was compliance. However, their private attitudes tended to conform with the minority.

Nemeth and Wachtler Study

In an essay published in 1986, Nemeth described another difference between majority and minority influence. In her view, majorities induce group members to focus all their attention on the position that the majority itself supports. In contrast, minorities stimulate the group to seriously consider other positions, ones that the majority does not support.

When a minority is present, it leads group members to think harder about their decision. Not only can this kind of thinking lead group members to examine more closely both the majority and the minority positions, it can also stimulate the members to propose new positions. Thus, even when the group does not adopt the minority position, the presence of a minority in a group can help improve its decision making.

Study methodology. Nemeth and Wachtler (1983) performed a study that supported these ideas. The researchers placed people in six-member groups that consisted of confederates and participants. "Majority" groups included two participants and four confederates. "Minority" groups had four participants and two confederates.

Nemeth and Wachtler utilized another imaginative reworking of Asch's study. They showed the groups eight slides. Each slide included a "standard" figure and six "comparison" figures. As it was in the Asch study, each participant's task was to find the standard figure within as many of the comparison figures as possible. The researchers called on the participants in the order in which they were sitting and told them to name out loud each comparison figure that they thought contained the standard.

Figure 6.2 shows an example of a slide that the researchers used in the study:

As you can see, judging one of the comparison figures, the one marked U, as correct was easy. The others, however, were much harder to judge.

In half the groups, the confederates chose two correct answers. They chose U and then one of the more difficult, but correct, figures such as R. In the other groups, however, the confederates chose one correct answer and one wrong one. They chose U and then an incorrect figure, such as O. Whatever their answers, the confederates might be the majority or the minority in the group.

Thus, groups had either majorities or minorities of confederates, and in each group these minorities or majorities argued for either a correct answer or an incorrect one.

Study results. Nemeth and Wachtler found that the participants were more likely to follow the confederates when the confederates made up the majority in their groups rather than the minority. This was true whether the confederates gave right or wrong answers. In other words, the participants were more likely to choose both R (a correct answer) and O (an incorrect answer) if a confederate majority had chosen them than if a confederate minority had done so.

The results were interesting, however, with the participants in groups that had a minority of confederates. These participants were more likely to give other correct answers than were those in the groups with a majority of confederates. The other correct answers were the ones that they found on their own, apart from the answers that the confederates gave. In other words, the participants who were in groups with a minority of confederates were relatively more likely to discover that E and I were also correct answers. Thus the presence of a minority opinion as opposed to a majority opinion was more likely to stimulate the participants to search for other correct answers.

Further, participants in groups with a minority of confederates were not more likely to choose incorrect answers, such as A, than those in groups with a majority of confederates. This finding implies that the participants in groups with a "minority" opinion were not merely voicing different answers when their turns came to speak. Instead, they were more actively searching for correct answers than the participants in the "majority" groups.

As we have argued throughout this chapter, if a group is to make high-quality decisions, it must encourage the expression of minority opinions and examine the value of alternative viewpoints. Nemeth's work is only one more piece of evidence supporting the importance of this practice.

Trout, Maass , and Kenrick Study

Nemeth's work has shown that the presence of a minority opinion leads group members to put more effort into their individual thinking about the group task. This thinking, however, may not lead to an increase in how much group members agree with the minority opinion. Instead, it may cause the opposite. If the minority argues against something that is important to a group member, the member may think harder to find reasons that the minority opinion is wrong. This, in turn, makes the member believe even more strongly in his or her original opinion.

Trout, Maass , and Kenrick (1992) performed a study that is relevant to this issue. Students read arguments in support of comprehensive final exams for all graduating seniors. The arguments proposed two starting dates. In one case, the exams would start in one year, thereby making the issue relevant to the students' own graduations. In the other case, the exams were to start in nine years, making the issue irrelevant to their own graduations.

Further, the researchers presented the arguments as if they were either the viewpoint of the majority of students on campus or of the minority. They then asked the participants to rate their opinions about the issue, and to write down any thoughts.

The overall results were consistent with Nemeth's theory. The "minority" opinion stimulated thought. The participants who believed that they read an argument based on what the minority of students wanted wrote down more thoughts than those who believed that they read something based on majority opinion.

Further data showed interesting results for whether the participants' opinions and the content of their writing were for or against the argument. Those who read the "majority" argument wrote an equal number of thoughts both for and against it. In addition, their opinions tended to be slightly in favor of the proposed plan they read. The results for those who read the "minority" argument, however, depended on how relevant the issue was to them. When the issue was not relevant to their own graduation, the findings for the participants who read the "minority" opinion were consistent with earlier studies. These participants wrote thoughts that were more likely to be for the proposal than against it. Also, their opinions tended to be clearly in favor of the plan. Thus, when the issue was not personally relevant, the argument that supposedly represented the minority of students was more likely to persuade the participants than the argument that supposedly came from the ''majority."

When the issue was relevant to the participants' own graduation, however, the findings were very different. After reading a "minority" argument, these participants wrote thoughts that were more likely to be against the proposal than for it. In addition, the "minority" arguments did not change their opinions. Thus, when the issue was personally relevant, the argument that they found most persuasive was the one that supposedly represented the majority of students, not the minority. The "minority" opinion did lead them to think harder about the proposal, but the thoughts were negative.

In a group setting, the majority of the group often favors one particular course of action when the group faces two or more possibilities. When this happens, group members can choose either to conform with the group or to deviate from the majority. Neither choice is inherently good or bad. A person's judgment about the value of conformity or deviance should depend on the reasons a member behaves in this way. For example, a group member may conform simply to do what the group wants. We call this compliance. Compliance is usually bad for the group in the sense that the group is not getting the full benefit of hearing and evaluating opposing views. However, there are times, such as in emergencies, when quick compliance is necessary.

A member might instead conform because he or she sincerely agrees with the group majority. We call this type of conformity private acceptance. It is usually good for a group. However, quick acceptance of a course of action without proper evaluation can be disastrous.

The distinction between compliance and private acceptance is somewhat murky at times. This happens because people who begin by complying tend to come eventually to privately accept the majority view.

Overall, conformity is necessary for a group to reach a decision. However, a group requires deviance to reach a good decision. Without deviance, members will accept the group's first proposal without proper evaluation.

As with conformity, there are good and bad forms of deviance. Innovation occurs when members propose alternative ways of reaching the group's goal. It is generally good for the group. The exception is a situation that requires quick action. Retreatism takes place when members drop out of the group. Rebellion happens when a person disagrees with the group's goal. Both are usually bad for the group. However, there are times when a group's goal may indeed be wrong.

Groups apply pressure upon deviants to make the deviants conform. This pressure may begin as subtle attempts to persuade the deviant to privately accept the majority view. However, it can escalate to direct efforts to gain compliance. These efforts can even reach the level of threats or exclusion from the group. Some theorists believe that groups also apply pressure on certain members to rebel. They do this because rebellious members serve some positive functions for the group.

Finally, group members holding a minority viewpoint can influence members in the majority. The type of influence that minorities can exert, however, is different from the kind that majorities usually exert. Group members who move their opinions toward the majority are often merely complying with the majority. In contrast, the influence of minorities tends to lead members toward a public acceptance of the minority point of view. Further, the presence of a minority helps stimulate group members to think deeply about issues. This often leads members to present new proposals and come to higher quality decisions than they would have if the minority viewpoint had not been present. Overall, however, group majorities tend to have greater influence over members than group minorities do.

Deviance and Conformity in Modern Society Essay

Introduction.

People are social animals and usually like to be associated with a group. All societies in time develop some accepted behaviours, norms that they use to determine those or the expected behaviours, while deviance means to abide by the expected behaviours in the society. Neither conformity nor deviance is regarded, as good or bad it only depends on the best thing is to distinguish behavior from the reason. This is because those behaviors society beliefs are the expected of any of its member changes to be the ones that that are supposed to be abided by and means of evaluation.

The main drive for people to conform is the desire to be a desirable person in the society, group pressure whereby the society puts pressure on its members to conform and abide by the accepted societal behaviors. In addition, people conform to be pragmatic for motivational reasons like enjoyment and personal goals. Conformity may be bad in the sense that an individual conforms only in terms of behavior but fails to conform internally in terms of his beliefs. A good type of conformity is one that an individual incorporates both beliefs and behaviors.

There are three perspectives that have been used to explain deviance which try to explain conformity among which are social comparison theory, cognitive Dissonance theory and reactance theory. Social comparison theory states that people usually compare themselves in terms of their beliefs and values with the expected in the society, opinions and images e.g. behaviors portrayed by others, a good example is with the youths who compare themselves mostly with. Cognitive dissonance theory indicates that people usually have a liking to reduce feeling dissonance which by is brought about by failing to abide by social norms and thus result to conforming. Finally, the reactance theory implies that when an individual is not willing o face the consequences of deviating from the societal norms will result in conformity.

It is sometimes argued that at times people usually deviate from the accepted norms to induce the group to make better decisions. Thus, deviance usually results to conflicts in a given group, which can either be constructive if it leads to better changes in the group and has the best interest of the group at heart. Moreover, deviance may bring about destructive conflict when the members of the group have selfish motives as power struggles and opt to be deviant to bring about disharmony in the group or society.

The functional perspective as applied to explain that deviance as earlier stated is both good and bad and always to maintain a system of order in the society. The functionalist states that deviance results in more cohesion in society. This is especially when deviant behaviors are publicly reported it results in more conformity among the people as they are reminded about the social norms and accepted behaviors. Strain theory views that deviance results when there exists a gap between the societal objectives and means to achieve them.

Deviance according to strain theory can be classified into ritualism, retreatism, rebellion, innovation. Ritualism is the state whereby does not accept the society’s objective but agrees with means of achieving the objective or the rituals involved in the process. Innovation refers to the scenario where an individual is in agreement with the society’s goal but devises means to achieve it. Retreatism is the case where a member of a group disagrees with both the objectives and ways of achieving them but does not substitute them like the case of rebellion. The conflict theory says that deviance results from social inequality and power. Thus people due to the inequality in the society from deviance they feel they have no equal right like any other member and have to do whatever they can to attain their personal goals without considering their behaviors in conformity with the society-accepted norms.

Labeling theory states that society has created deviance through its act of terming specific groups of people, as being deviant, this act enables one to understand how deviance is relative. There, are also other theories that try to explain about deviance. Control theories provide that people become deviant since they have not developed strong ties with other members of the society in terms of attachment , commitment and involvement. It says that when these social bonds become weak they result to deviance or crimes. On the other hand learning theories have it that an individual learns behaviors from his allies, hence if one is a friend of deviants he tends to be a deviant.

It is important to note that the static view of deviance and conformity is wrong. Secondly, since the majority of people are usually those who are deviant it is important if the society is to continue in its quest to grow and develop, it will have to integrate their views. Society should not rule out the views of the minority since they are the type of innovative deviance new modes to attain societal goals may be known and applied.

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• Reactance, Frequency Response, and Resonant Circuits
• Researching of Deviance and Social Control
• Socialization Theories and Whistleblowers
• Solving Problems of Criminal Justice
• Adaptations to Anomie. Theories of Crime
• Concept of Restaurant Tipping Behavior
• Criminological Theories Evaluation
• The Origin of Cognitive Dissonance
• Police Deviance
• Cognitive Dissonance and Its Reduction
• Social Research by Parsons and Merton
• Journals on Rich, Bourdieu and Foucault: Locating Bodies and Their Relation
• “Seeking Like a State” by James Scott
• The Main Argument in “Peace Cultures” by Elise Boulding
• The Era of Legalized Gambling

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7.2 Explaining Deviance

Learning objective.

• State the major arguments and assumptions of the various sociological explanations of deviance.

If we want to reduce violent crime and other serious deviance, we must first understand why it occurs. Many sociological theories of deviance exist, and together they offer a more complete understanding of deviance than any one theory offers by itself. Together they help answer the questions posed earlier: why rates of deviance differ within social categories and across locations, why some behaviors are more likely than others to be considered deviant, and why some kinds of people are more likely than others to be considered deviant and to be punished for deviant behavior. As a whole, sociological explanations highlight the importance of the social environment and of social interaction for deviance and the commision of crime. As such, they have important implications for how to reduce these behaviors. Consistent with this book’s public sociology theme, a discussion of several such crime-reduction strategies concludes this chapter.

We now turn to the major sociological explanations of crime and deviance. A summary of these explanations appears in Table 7.1 “Theory Snapshot: Summary of Sociological Explanations of Deviance and Crime” .

Table 7.1 Theory Snapshot: Summary of Sociological Explanations of Deviance and Crime

Functionalist Explanations

Several explanations may be grouped under the functionalist perspective in sociology, as they all share this perspective’s central view on the importance of various aspects of society for social stability and other social needs.

Émile Durkheim: The Functions of Deviance

As noted earlier, Émile Durkheim said deviance is normal, but he did not stop there. In a surprising and still controversial twist, he also argued that deviance serves several important functions for society.

First, Durkheim said, deviance clarifies social norms and increases conformity. This happens because the discovery and punishment of deviance reminds people of the norms and reinforces the consequences of violating them. If your class were taking an exam and a student was caught cheating, the rest of the class would be instantly reminded of the rules about cheating and the punishment for it, and as a result they would be less likely to cheat.

A second function of deviance is that it strengthens social bonds among the people reacting to the deviant. An example comes from the classic story The Ox-Bow Incident (Clark, 1940), in which three innocent men are accused of cattle rustling and are eventually lynched. The mob that does the lynching is very united in its frenzy against the men, and, at least at that moment, the bonds among the individuals in the mob are extremely strong.

A final function of deviance, said Durkheim, is that it can help lead to positive social change. Although some of the greatest figures in history—Socrates, Jesus, Joan of Arc, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. to name just a few—were considered the worst kind of deviants in their time, we now honor them for their commitment and sacrifice.

Émile Durkheim wrote that deviance can lead to positive social change. Many Southerners had strong negative feelings about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement, but history now honors him for his commitment and sacrifice.

U.S. Library of Congress – public domain.

Sociologist Herbert Gans (1996) pointed to an additional function of deviance: deviance creates jobs for the segments of society—police, prison guards, criminology professors, and so forth—whose main focus is to deal with deviants in some manner. If deviance and crime did not exist, hundreds of thousands of law-abiding people in the United States would be out of work!

Although deviance can have all of these functions, many forms of it can certainly be quite harmful, as the story of the mugged voter that began this chapter reminds us. Violent crime and property crime in the United States victimize millions of people and households each year, while crime by corporations has effects that are even more harmful, as we discuss later. Drug use, prostitution, and other “victimless” crimes may involve willing participants, but these participants often cause themselves and others much harm. Although deviance according to Durkheim is inevitable and normal and serves important functions, that certainly does not mean the United States and other nations should be happy to have high rates of serious deviance. The sociological theories we discuss point to certain aspects of the social environment, broadly defined, that contribute to deviance and crime and that should be the focus of efforts to reduce these behaviors.

Social Ecology: Neighborhood and Community Characteristics

An important sociological approach, begun in the late 1800s and early 1900s by sociologists at the University of Chicago, stresses that certain social and physical characteristics of urban neighborhoods raise the odds that people growing up and living in these neighborhoods will commit deviance and crime. This line of thought is now called the social ecology approach (Mears, Wang, Hay, & Bales, 2008). Many criminogenic (crime-causing) neighborhood characteristics have been identified, including high rates of poverty, population density, dilapidated housing, residential mobility, and single-parent households. All of these problems are thought to contribute to social disorganization , or weakened social bonds and social institutions, that make it difficult to socialize children properly and to monitor suspicious behavior (Mears, Wang, Hay, & Bales, 2008; Sampson, 2006).

Sociology Making a Difference

Improving Neighborhood Conditions Helps Reduce Crime Rates

One of the sociological theories of crime discussed in the text is the social ecology approach. To review, this approach attributes high rates of deviance and crime to the neighborhood’s social and physical characteristics, including poverty, high population density, dilapidated housing, and high population turnover. These problems create social disorganization that weakens the neighborhood’s social institutions and impairs effective child socialization.

Much empirical evidence supports social ecology’s view about negative neighborhood conditions and crime rates and suggests that efforts to improve these conditions will lower crime rates. Some of the most persuasive evidence comes from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (directed by sociologist Robert J. Sampson), in which more than 6,000 children, ranging in age from birth to 18, and their parents and other caretakers were studied over a 7-year period. The social and physical characteristics of the dozens of neighborhoods in which the subjects lived were measured to permit assessment of these characteristics’ effects on the probability of delinquency. A number of studies using data from this project confirm the general assumptions of the social ecology approach. In particular, delinquency is higher in neighborhoods with lower levels of “collective efficacy,” that is, in neighborhoods with lower levels of community supervision of adolescent behavior.

The many studies from the Chicago project and data in several other cities show that neighborhood conditions greatly affect the extent of delinquency in urban neighborhoods. This body of research in turn suggests that strategies and programs that improve the social and physical conditions of urban neighborhoods may well help decrease the high rates of crime and delinquency that are so often found there. (Bellair & McNulty, 2009; Sampson, 2006)

Strain Theory

Failure to achieve the American dream lies at the heart of Robert Merton’s (1938) famous strain theory (also called anomie theory). Recall from Chapter 1 “Sociology and the Sociological Perspective” that Durkheim attributed high rates of suicide to anomie, or normlessness, that occurs in times when social norms are unclear or weak. Adapting this concept, Merton wanted to explain why poor people have higher deviance rates than the nonpoor. He reasoned that the United States values economic success above all else and also has norms that specify the approved means, working, for achieving economic success. Because the poor often cannot achieve the American dream of success through the conventional means of working, they experience a gap between the goal of economic success and the means of working. This gap, which Merton likened to Durkheim’s anomie because of the resulting lack of clarity over norms, leads to strain or frustration. To reduce their frustration, some poor people resort to several adaptations, including deviance, depending on whether they accept or reject the goal of economic success and the means of working. Table 7.2 “Merton’s Anomie Theory” presents the logical adaptations of the poor to the strain they experience. Let’s review these briefly.

Table 7.2 Merton’s Anomie Theory

Despite their strain, most poor people continue to accept the goal of economic success and continue to believe they should work to make money. In other words, they continue to be good, law-abiding citizens. They conform to society’s norms and values, and, not surprisingly, Merton calls their adaptation conformity .

Faced with strain, some poor people continue to value economic success but come up with new means of achieving it. They rob people or banks, commit fraud, or use other illegal means of acquiring money or property. Merton calls this adaptation innovation .

Other poor people continue to work at a job without much hope of greatly improving their lot in life. They go to work day after day as a habit. Merton calls this third adaptation ritualism . This adaptation does not involve deviant behavior but is a logical response to the strain poor people experience.

One of Robert Merton’s adaptations in his strain theory is retreatism, in which poor people abandon society’s goal of economic success and reject its means of employment to reach this goal. Many of today’s homeless people might be considered retreatists under Merton’s typology.

Franco Folini – Homeless woman with dogs – CC BY-SA 2.0.

In Merton’s fourth adaptation, retreatism , some poor people withdraw from society by becoming hobos or vagrants or by becoming addicted to alcohol, heroin, or other drugs. Their response to the strain they feel is to reject both the goal of economic success and the means of working.

Merton’s fifth and final adaptation is rebellion . Here poor people not only reject the goal of success and the means of working but work actively to bring about a new society with a new value system. These people are the radicals and revolutionaries of their time. Because Merton developed his strain theory in the aftermath of the Great Depression, in which the labor and socialist movements had been quite active, it is not surprising that he thought of rebellion as a logical adaptation of the poor to their lack of economic success.

Although Merton’s theory has been popular over the years, it has some limitations. Perhaps most important, it overlooks deviance such as fraud by the middle and upper classes and also fails to explain murder, rape, and other crimes that usually are not done for economic reasons. It also does not explain why some poor people choose one adaptation over another.

Merton’s strain theory stimulated other explanations of deviance that built on his concept of strain. Differential opportunity theory , developed by Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin (1960), tried to explain why the poor choose one or the other of Merton’s adaptations. Whereas Merton stressed that the poor have differential access to legitimate means (working), Cloward and Ohlin stressed that they have differential access to illegitimate means . For example, some live in neighborhoods where organized crime is dominant and will get involved in such crime; others live in neighborhoods rampant with drug use and will start using drugs themselves.

In a more recent formulation, two sociologists, Steven F. Messner and Richard Rosenfeld (2007), expanded Merton’s view by arguing that in the United States crime arises from several of our most important values, including an overemphasis on economic success, individualism, and competition. These values produce crime by making many Americans, rich or poor, feel they never have enough money and by prompting them to help themselves even at other people’s expense. Crime in the United States, then, arises ironically from the country’s most basic values.

In yet another extension of Merton’s theory, Robert Agnew (2007) reasoned that adolescents experience various kinds of strain in addition to the economic type addressed by Merton. A romantic relationship may end, a family member may die, or students may be taunted or bullied at school. Repeated strain-inducing incidents such as these produce anger, frustration, and other negative emotions, and these emotions in turn prompt delinquency and drug use.

Deviant Subcultures

Some sociologists stress that poverty and other community conditions give rise to certain subcultures through which adolescents acquire values that promote deviant behavior. One of the first to make this point was Albert K. Cohen (1955), whose status frustration theory says that lower-class boys do poorly in school because schools emphasize middle-class values. School failure reduces their status and self-esteem, which the boys try to counter by joining juvenile gangs. In these groups, a different value system prevails, and boys can regain status and self-esteem by engaging in delinquency. Cohen had nothing to say about girls, as he assumed they cared little about how well they did in school, placing more importance on marriage and family instead, and hence would remain nondelinquent even if they did not do well. Scholars later criticized his disregard for girls and assumptions about them.

Another sociologist, Walter Miller (1958), said poor boys become delinquent because they live amid a lower-class subculture that includes several focal concerns , or values, that help lead to delinquency. These focal concerns include a taste for trouble, toughness, cleverness, and excitement. If boys grow up in a subculture with these values, they are more likely to break the law. Their deviance is a result of their socialization. Critics said Miller exaggerated the differences between the value systems in poor inner-city neighborhoods and wealthier, middle-class communities (Akers & Sellers, 2008).

A very popular subcultural explanation is the so-called subculture of violence thesis, first advanced by Marvin Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti (1967). In some inner-city areas, they said, a subculture of violence promotes a violent response to insults and other problems, which people in middle-class areas would probably ignore. The subculture of violence, they continued, arises partly from the need of lower-class males to “prove” their masculinity in view of their economic failure. Quantitative research to test their theory has failed to show that the urban poor are more likely than other groups to approve of violence (Cao, Adams, & Jensen, 1997). On the other hand, recent ethnographic (qualitative) research suggests that large segments of the urban poor do adopt a “code” of toughness and violence to promote respect (Anderson, 1999). As this conflicting evidence illustrates, the subculture of violence view remains controversial and merits further scrutiny.

Social Control Theory

Travis Hirschi (1969) argued that human nature is basically selfish and thus wondered why people do not commit deviance. His answer, which is now called social control theory (also known as social bonding theory ), was that their bonds to conventional social institutions such as the family and the school keep them from violating social norms. Hirschi’s basic perspective reflects Durkheim’s view that strong social norms reduce deviance such as suicide.

Hirschi outlined four types of bonds to conventional social institutions: attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief.

• Attachment refers to how much we feel loyal to these institutions and care about the opinions of people in them, such as our parents and teachers. The more attached we are to our families and schools, the less likely we are to be deviant.
• Commitment refers to how much we value our participation in conventional activities such as getting a good education. The more committed we are to these activities and the more time and energy we have invested in them, the less deviant we will be.
• Involvement refers to the amount of time we spend in conventional activities. The more time we spend, the less opportunity we have to be deviant.
• Belief refers to our acceptance of society’s norms. The more we believe in these norms, the less we deviate.

Travis Hirschi’s social control theory stresses the importance of bonds to social institutions for preventing deviance. His theory emphasized the importance of attachment to one’s family in this regard.

More Good Foundation – Mormon Family Dinner – CC BY-NC 2.0.

Hirschi’s theory has been very popular. Many studies find that youths with weaker bonds to their parents and schools are more likely to be deviant. But the theory has its critics (Akers & Sellers, 2008). One problem centers on the chicken-and-egg question of causal order. For example, many studies support social control theory by finding that delinquent youths often have worse relationships with their parents than do nondelinquent youths. Is that because the bad relationships prompt the youths to be delinquent, as Hirschi thought? Or is it because the youths’ delinquency worsens their relationship with their parents? Despite these questions, Hirschi’s social control theory continues to influence our understanding of deviance. To the extent it is correct, it suggests several strategies for preventing crime, including programs designed to improve parenting and relations between parents and children (Welsh & Farrington, 2007).

Conflict and Feminist Explanations

Explanations of crime rooted in the conflict perspective reflect its general view that society is a struggle between the “haves” at the top of society with social, economic, and political power and the “have-nots” at the bottom. Accordingly, they assume that those with power pass laws and otherwise use the legal system to secure their position at the top of society and to keep the powerless on the bottom (Bohm & Vogel, 2011). The poor and minorities are more likely because of their poverty and race to be arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. These explanations also blame street crime by the poor on the economic deprivation and inequality in which they live rather than on any moral failings of the poor.

Some conflict explanations also say that capitalism helps create street crime by the poor. An early proponent of this view was Dutch criminologist Willem Bonger (1916), who said that capitalism as an economic system involves competition for profit. This competition leads to an emphasis in a capitalist society’s culture on egoism , or self-seeking behavior, and greed . Because profit becomes so important, people in a capitalist society are more likely than those in noncapitalist ones to break the law for profit and other gains, even if their behavior hurts others.

Not surprisingly, conflict explanations have sparked much controversy (Akers & Sellers, 2008). Many scholars dismiss them for painting an overly critical picture of the United States and ignoring the excesses of noncapitalistic nations, while others say the theories overstate the degree of inequality in the legal system. In assessing the debate over conflict explanations, a fair conclusion is that their view on discrimination by the legal system applies more to victimless crime (discussed in a later section) than to conventional crime, where it is difficult to argue that laws against such things as murder and robbery reflect the needs of the powerful. However, much evidence supports the conflict assertion that the poor and minorities face disadvantages in the legal system (Reiman & Leighton, 2010). Simply put, the poor cannot afford good attorneys, private investigators, and the other advantages that money brings in court. As just one example, if someone much poorer than O. J. Simpson, the former football player and media celebrity, had been arrested, as he was in 1994, for viciously murdering two people, the defendant would almost certainly have been found guilty. Simpson was able to afford a defense costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and won a jury acquittal in his criminal trial (Barkan, 1996). Also in accordance with conflict theory’s views, corporate executives, among the most powerful members of society, often break the law without fear of imprisonment, as we shall see in our discussion of white-collar crime later in this chapter. Finally, many studies support conflict theory’s view that the roots of crimes by poor people lie in social inequality and economic deprivation (Barkan, 2009).

Feminist Perspectives

Feminist perspectives on crime and criminal justice also fall into the broad rubric of conflict explanations and have burgeoned in the last two decades. Much of this work concerns rape and sexual assault, intimate partner violence, and other crimes against women that were largely neglected until feminists began writing about them in the 1970s (Griffin, 1971). Their views have since influenced public and official attitudes about rape and domestic violence, which used to be thought as something that girls and women brought on themselves. The feminist approach instead places the blame for these crimes squarely on society’s inequality against women and antiquated views about relations between the sexes (Renzetti, 2011).

Another focus of feminist work is gender and legal processing. Are women better or worse off than men when it comes to the chances of being arrested and punished? After many studies in the last two decades, the best answer is that we are not sure (Belknap, 2007). Women are treated a little more harshly than men for minor crimes and a little less harshly for serious crimes, but the gender effect in general is weak.

A third focus concerns the gender difference in serious crime, as women and girls are much less likely than men and boys to engage in violence and to commit serious property crimes such as burglary and motor vehicle theft. Most sociologists attribute this difference to gender socialization. Simply put, socialization into the male gender role, or masculinity, leads to values such as competitiveness and behavioral patterns such as spending more time away from home that all promote deviance. Conversely, despite whatever disadvantages it may have, socialization into the female gender role, or femininity, promotes values such as gentleness and behavior patterns such as spending more time at home that help limit deviance (Chesney-Lind & Pasko, 2004). Noting that males commit so much crime, Kathleen Daly and Meda Chesney-Lind (1988, p. 527) wrote,

A large price is paid for structures of male domination and for the very qualities that drive men to be successful, to control others, and to wield uncompromising power.…Gender differences in crime suggest that crime may not be so normal after all. Such differences challenge us to see that in the lives of women, men have a great deal more to learn.

Gender socialization helps explain why females commit less serious crime than males. Boys are raised to be competitive and aggressive, while girls are raised to be more gentle and nurturing.

Philippe Put – Fight – CC BY 2.0.

Two decades later, that challenge still remains.

Symbolic Interactionist Explanations

Because symbolic interactionism focuses on the means people gain from their social interaction, symbolic interactionist explanations attribute deviance to various aspects of the social interaction and social processes that normal individuals experience. These explanations help us understand why some people are more likely than others living in the same kinds of social environments. Several such explanations exist.

Differential Association Theory

One popular set of explanations, often called learning theories , emphasizes that deviance is learned from interacting with other people who believe it is OK to commit deviance and who often commit deviance themselves. Deviance, then, arises from normal socialization processes. The most influential such explanation is Edwin H. Sutherland’s (1947) differential association theory , which says that criminal behavior is learned by interacting with close friends and family members. These individuals teach us not only how to commit various crimes but also the values, motives, and rationalizations that we need to adopt in order to justify breaking the law. The earlier in our life that we associate with deviant individuals and the more often we do so, the more likely we become deviant ourselves. In this way, a normal social process, socialization, can lead normal people to commit deviance.

Sutherland’s theory of differential association was one of the most influential sociological theories ever. Over the years much research has documented the importance of adolescents’ peer relationships for their entrance into the world of drugs and delinquency (Akers & Sellers, 2008). However, some critics say that not all deviance results from the influences of deviant peers. Still, differential association theory and the larger category of learning theories it represents remain a valuable approach to understanding deviance and crime.

Labeling Theory

If we arrest and imprison someone, we hope they will be “scared straight,” or deterred from committing a crime again. Labeling theory assumes precisely the opposite: it says that labeling someone deviant increases the chances that the labeled person will continue to commit deviance. According to labeling theory, this happens because the labeled person ends up with a deviant self-image that leads to even more deviance. Deviance is the result of being labeled (Bohm & Vogel, 2011).

This effect is reinforced by how society treats someone who has been labeled. Research shows that job applicants with a criminal record are much less likely than those without a record to be hired (Pager, 2009). Suppose you had a criminal record and had seen the error of your ways but were rejected by several potential employers. Do you think you might be just a little frustrated? If your unemployment continues, might you think about committing a crime again? Meanwhile, you want to meet some law-abiding friends, so you go to a singles bar. You start talking with someone who interests you, and in response to this person’s question, you say you are between jobs. When your companion asks about your last job, you reply that you were in prison for armed robbery. How do you think your companion will react after hearing this? As this scenario suggests, being labeled deviant can make it difficult to avoid a continued life of deviance.

Labeling theory also asks whether some people and behaviors are indeed more likely than others to acquire a deviant label. In particular, it asserts that nonlegal factors such as appearance, race, and social class affect how often official labeling occurs.

Labeling theory assumes that someone who is labeled deviant will be more likely to commit deviance as a result. One problem that ex-prisoners face after being released back into society is that potential employers do not want to hire them. This fact makes it more likely that they will commit new offenses.

Victor – Handcuffs – CC BY 2.0.

William Chambliss’s (1973) classic analysis of the “Saints” and the “Roughnecks” is an excellent example of this argument. The Saints were eight male high-school students from middle-class backgrounds who were very delinquent, while the Roughnecks were six male students in the same high school who were also very delinquent but who came from poor, working-class families. Although the Saints’ behavior was arguably more harmful than the Roughnecks’, their actions were considered harmless pranks, and they were never arrested. After graduating from high school, they went on to college and graduate and professional school and ended up in respectable careers. In contrast, the Roughnecks were widely viewed as troublemakers and often got into trouble for their behavior. As adults they either ended up in low-paying jobs or went to prison.

Labeling theory’s views on the effects of being labeled and on the importance of nonlegal factors for official labeling remain controversial. Nonetheless, the theory has greatly influenced the study of deviance and crime in the last few decades and promises to do so for many years to come.

Key Takeaways

• Both biological and psychological explanations assume that deviance stems from problems arising inside the individual.
• Sociological explanations attribute deviance to various aspects of the social environment.
• Several functionalist explanations exist. Durkheim highlighted the functions that deviance serves for society. Merton’s strain theory assumed that deviance among the poor results from their inability to achieve the economic success so valued in American society. Other explanations highlight the role played by the social and physical characteristics of urban neighborhoods, of deviant subcultures, and of weak bonds to social institutions.
• Conflict explanations assume that the wealthy and powerful use the legal system to protect their own interests and to keep the poor and racial minorities subservient. Feminist perspectives highlight the importance of gender inequality for crimes against women and of male socialization for the gender difference in criminality.
• Interactionist explanations highlight the importance of social interaction in the commitment of deviance and in reactions to deviance. Labeling theory assumes that the labeling process helps ensure that someone will continue to commit deviance, and it also assumes that some people are more likely than others to be labeled deviant because of their appearance, race, social class, and other characteristics.

For Your Review

• In what important way do biological and psychological explanations differ from sociological explanations?
• What are any two functions of deviance according to Durkheim?
• What are any two criminogenic social or physical characteristics of urban neighborhoods?
• What are any two assumptions of feminist perspectives on deviance and crime?
• According to labeling theory, what happens when someone is labeled as a deviant?

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Psychology Discussion

Group, conformity and deviance | essay | collective behaviour | psychology.

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In this essay we will discuss about the basics of group, conformity and deviance.

1. Essay on Groups:

The basic social environment is the group. Each individual is a member of many groups like the family group, the school group, the -work group, the social club group etc. Within each group the indivi­dual assumes a “position” such as the child, the parent, the student, the teacher etc. Each of these positions in the group has an associated set of behaviours, attitudes and beliefs expected of an individual who occupies the position. Such a set of expectations is called a role.

A group is a collection of individuals who are in a cooperative interdependent relationship with one another. The term interdependent not only implies that there is “interaction” between the individuals, but also that the members share some common norms with regard to certain behaviours, attitudes and beliefs and that there must be a system of interlocking “roles” such that each member has certain expectations regarding how others behave towards him and how he ought to behave towards others in the group.

Properties of Group:

1. Structure:

Thus an important property of the group is that there is a group structure. The group structure is a differentiation of roles and role relationships within a group. There is a high degree of structure in a group that is highly organised, in which each member’s role and function is specified as in a football team.

Group structure also in­volves a hierarchy of status and role relationships; further it involves -specific channels of communication and specific persons in the hierarchy who are responsible for decision-making which determine the way in which the activities of the group are to be conducted and the goals to be attained by the group. Thus, a group not only has a structure but it has also a goal, a purpose towards which it is striving.

All these characteristics are to be found not only in the football team but also in the street corner gang. A street corner gang has its leaders and sub-leaders who have high status in the hierarchy. Each member of the sub-group has certain specified channels of com­munication. Only those in leadership position have the decision­ making authority.

It is clear that all these characteristics are also to be found, though in a more complicated manner, in the formal groups like the military group or an industrial concern or the government.

2. Cohesiveness:

Another important property of a group is its cohesiveness. Cohesive­ness is the strength of the forces that keep the group together. Cohe­siveness literally means sticking together. If a group is highly cohesive it remains in fact even when it is faced by many adverse circumstances. For example, the family will be a well-knit group if the husband and wife-love and respect each other and if there is mutual love between the parents and children.

Even if there is temporary separation, even if there is illness or such other misfortunes, the group will function with great cohesion. On the other hand, if the relationship between the parents is not satisfactory, all the individuals may be nominally living together but there will be continual conflicts and lack of discipline. Nothing gets done at the appropriate time on the appropriate occasion. Hostile sub-groups may be formed within the family.

The father and son may join up against the mother and daughter or the father and daughter may join up against the mother and son. They are unable to undertake any activity as a group. Finally, the group may break up in a divorce court. The husband and wife may have bitter quarrels and seek separation.

Or, worse still, the husband may kill the wife or the wife may poison the husband or the son may kill the father and so on. It is a familiar fact that such cases are tried in the courts and reports are published in the papers. Also the novelists, short story writers and dramatists portray these events in art creations and films are based on stories like these.

Thus, the group may be united and highly cohesive or it may break down and go to pieces, as it were. This is true not only of the family but also of all kinds of groups right up to the level of nations. The events of 1947 broke up India into two nations, India and Pakistan.

The events of 1971 broke up Pakistan into two further nations, namely Pakistan and Bangladesh. In the same way, there have been such disruptions within the country also. For example in 1947, the former state of the Punjab was broken up into two states, West Punjab, becoming a part of Pakistan, and East Punjab, becoming a part of India.

Since then East Punjab has been divided into three other states, namely, the Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. Due to various reasons the members of the state felt that they could not live together in one state. They had to divide and get out. This is so in a joint family also. A highly cohesive joint family may divide up into a number of nuclear families depending on the number of sons in the family either as a result of bitter conflicts or as a result of mutual misunderstandings. Thus group cohesiveness may be the strongest link which binds together many sub-groups or it may be so weak that all the sub-groups fall apart.

There are many motives which promote group cohesiveness like the need for affiliation, achieving group goals, and need for power and status. But it must be borne in mind that these very factors may destroy the cohesiveness of the group. The desire of the father in the joint family to have power and status and the way in which he loves the members of the family may promote cohesiveness. But the desire of the sons and daughters-in-law to have power and status may lead to a break-up of the joint family.

Sharing some Common Interest:

When we consider the characteristics of the persons who are members of one group and try to distinguish them from the characteristics of those who are not the members of that group it will be seen that the members of the group share some common interest. The common interest may relate to maintaining a home or getting a job done or worshipping in the same church or pursuing some sport etc. They may also have similar attitudes, hold similar beliefs and behave in similar ways.

Persons with common interests join together to attain the goal or goals common to them. In their interactions they develop the attitudes, beliefs and ways of behaving which are similar to one another. Thus, sharing common attitudes and beliefs presupposes communication; it presupposes that the members of the group express their ideas. Such communications provide support for the attitude that is shared, parti­cularly when they are held by the important persons in the group, who are occupying important positions in it.

Such sharing of common interests and common attitudes and beliefs promote cohesion or group solidarity. When there is cohesion it will be possible for the members to mobilize themselves quickly and effec­tively for some collective action.

As noted above group cohesiveness promotes greater cooperation among the members, because they have a shared goal or a group goal. When any member of the group attains the goal, the whole group rejoices, as for example, when some member of the school gets recognition by winning the trophy in games or elocution competition or music competition etc., the whole school rejoices.

The basis of attraction to the group may lie in the interaction itself. The members feel rewarded by the interaction with other members. It is possible that the needs of the various members are complemen­tary. So interaction becomes mutually satisfactory. The members may be attracted to the group because each member finds the group activities to be inherently rewarding like, for instance, those who join the group for recreation or for a hobby.

A third source of attraction may be because the membership is a means to achieve some other ends; for example, becoming a member of the local Rotary Club may be a means to enhance one’s status in the society. Or it may be that they join the group to get their own interests advanced like the membership of farmers association or chamber of commerce and industry, trade union, and so on.

Cohesiveness of the Caste Group etc.:

The above discussion of the factors operating to promote group cohesiveness is based on the func­tioning of voluntary groups which are formed on the basis of indivi­dual choice. We must now discuss the factors which promote group cohesiveness in the “non-voluntary” groups, that is, the groups with members born into it as the caste groups, the creedal groups, the linguistic group, the regional groups and so on.

Caste membership is not a matter of choice; similarly belonging to a particular religious or language group is not a matter of choice. It is these groups which operate very significantly in Indian society.

It will be readily seen that caste membership or community mem­bership, particularly in the minority communities, provide a sense of security to the individuals. Further there are very strong attempts made to influence members within the groups.

In fact, in the villages even today there is powerful threat to ex­communicate the deviant members. Excommunication in the village makes life impossible since there are very close interrelationships. It is true that these threats do not operate strongly in the urban castes and communities. But there is no doubt that the social influences are strong even in the urban groups.

The important feature is that the members of the caste or community are closely related to one another. Further, these caste and community groups have clearly demonstrated their success in facilitating goal achievement. On the basis of caste or community membership one can easily succeed in bringing immense to help one to achieve success in many areas of life. Generally, if a member of the caste or community group is holding an important position in some governmental or non-governmental organization, it is easy to get jobs in that organization for the mem­bers of that caste or community.

It is to eliminate these influences that in the recent decades Public Service Commissions have been set up and they conduct examinations to select candidates in an impersonal manner. But there are always agitations to see that members from the important castes and communities are selected as the members of these commissions.

Another significant recent phenomenon is that caste and community membership helps in one’s success in elections to the legislatures; it also helps in gaining office as a minister. Finally, there is no doubt that the caste and community membership satisfies the needs for interpersonal relationships; they provide the individual with emotional support, approval, prestige, etc.

The members of the particular caste and community get precedence in marriage celebra­tions, etc. It must also be pointed that in the twentieth century each caste and community has been organizing an association to promote the education of the poorer members of the group. Some associations have also started banks and cooperative societies to give financial help when necessary.

Thus, the various groups like caste and community continue to have a strong hold on the members inspite of the fact that the Indian society has adopted secular, democratic institutions. They continue to have a strong hold because they are highly cohesive groups which fulfill the affiliative needs as well as other needs of the members.

Results of Experimental Studies :

Among the techniques used experimentally in order to vary the attractiveness of the group are:

(a) Prestige of the group,

(b) Attractiveness of the group activities, and

(c) Attractiveness of the members of the group.

Back (1951) showed that in the more cohesive groups there were stronger attempts at influencing one another than in the less cohesive groups. It was also found that the deviant members of the highly cohesive groups changed their opinions more frequently in order to conform to the group than the deviant members of the low cohesive groups. Another result found was that highly cohesive groups rejected deviant members significantly more than did the less cohesive groups.

All these findings have been replicated by a variety of studies. So it looks as if cohesiveness is a major determinant of the expression and acceptance of influence. It was also found that the members of a highly cohesive group feel more secure and more at ease in group activities than are members of the less cohesive groups. The members who are highly attracted to the group are more likely to take on responsibilities, to participate in the meetings and to persist in working toward the different group goals.

Many studies have been made to determine why some groups are more highly attractive and others are relatively less attractive to their members; in other words, attempts have been made to study the con­ditions which affect the cohesion of groups.

Cartwright and Zanders (1968) have shown that a number of studies have demonstrated that the attractiveness of a group will vary with its promised or proven success in facilitating goal achievement. The studies have shown that highly cohesive groups satisfy the needs for interpersonal relations like approval, support, prestige etc.

3. The Group Norms:

The group norms give some regularity to the social events and the- social interactions. They may be formally legalized or may be quite informal. They may be very general or highly specific. The norms des­cribe a situation or set of circumstances in which the regularity applies; they include specifications as to what people think, feel or do in that situation.

The Nature of Group Norms:

A group norm exists when the members- of the group share favourable attitudes toward such a regularity they agree that the regularity should be regarded as a “rule” that applies to specified persons in the specified situations. A group norm may be looked upon as shared acceptance of a rule.

As a result there will be an expectation with some degree of certainty that the given person will perceive, think, feel or act in that particular manner in that situation. For example, it can be expected with certainty that a vegetarian will not eat meat, fish etc.

It can be generally expected that an Indian young man or young woman will not think of marriage unit the parents make the necessary arrangements to choose a spouse, fix the date and time and take steps to celebrate the event after inviting all the relatives and friends. Similarly one can expect the bus, train or plane to depart at the time specified in the time table; so one will make all efforts to reach the bus stand or railway station or airport well in time to catch the transport.

The child enrolled in the school will be anxious to reach the school by the time the first bell rings; he will feel restless and may even become hostile to the parents if satisfactory arrangements are not made for him to leave the house in order to enable him to reach the school in time. Similarly there are rules regarding the use of words and formu­lation of the sentence according to the rules of grammar. Thus, the social norms influence our attitudes, speech, actions etc.

The very existence of a formulated rule suggests that the occurrence of the prescribed behaviour depends on the application of ‘sanctions’; the sanction may be positive in the sense of a reward when the behaviour occurs or negative, punishment when the behaviour fails to occur. The very fact of acceptance of the rule also implies the accep­tance of the “legitimacy” or the “propriety” of the sanctions.

If such acceptance of the rule and the legitimacy of the sanctions are not there, then, it is obvious that the group norm cannot function. On the other hand, when the acceptance of the group norms is there, it may be expected to be self-enforcing; there will not be any necessity for the sanctions to be applied by any outside agency; they will be applied by the person himself; he will feel glad if his behaviour is in conformity and he will feel bad if it is not in conformity with the social norm.

Sherif (1935) demonstrated experimentally how the perceptual norms can operate. He made use of the fact that a stationary pin-point of light appears to be moving, if observed under laboratory conditions; in a dark room the position of a small light is highly ambiguous.

In the first part of the experiment the subject was made to report the extent of the apparent movement of the light after some trials he well settle down to some uniform perception of, say, between two to three inches or six to eight inches and so on. Next, two or three persons were made to observe the spot of light in a group situation. Each subject announced his own judgment regarding the extent of the movement of the light.

It was found that whether the subjects had previously had an occasion to develop their own norms or not, they tended to gradually develop a “group norm.” In other words, though as single individuals each person had his own individual norm, when they were put in a group they tended to give up the individual norms and agree on a group norm; this was not based on any discussion.

It was purely perceptual. In the group situation all the individuals gradually came to agree on the extent of the movement of the spot of light. Thus, through sharing experiences a norm can develop; the judgments of each member of the group influences the other members of the group so that the group norm emerged.

Cognitive norms refer to beliefs about objects, issues, etc. The traffic rules, the rules of group games, etc., illustrate the operation of cognitive norms. They refer, not to physical reality like the perceptual norms, but to social reality. Here sharing of experiences is very important.

There is another set of norms which may be called the evaluative norms; that, is about the goodness or desirability of objects etc.

Finally, there are, what may be termed, behavioural norms. Asch (1951) brought together several groups of college students and asked each group to match the length of a given line with one of three clearly unequal lines. Each person spoke out his judgment aloud. All the members of the group except one person had received previous instruction to give a wrong judgment.

One individual thus found him­self in a situation where all the others contradicted his perceptual judgment. Among fifty such “critical” subjects there was a marked shift towards the majority responses. But control subjects did not show any such change.

However, even among the critical subjects only one third of them changed to fall in line with the majority but the remain­ing two-thirds stuck to their perception. Another interesting result was that while some of the subjects remained independent of the majority opinion, some were almost always influenced to conform to the majority against their own perception.

The Functions of Group Norms:

A group norm can endure only if it is advantageous to the group as a whole and to a considerable number of members.

As noted above, one of the chief functions of the group norm is to provide stability and orderliness to the group. It is obvious that if there is no group norm the members will behave each in his own way and the group life will become chaotic and unpredictable. There can­not be any cooperative ventures.

Another function of the group norm is to facilitate interaction between the members. Interaction can occur if there is some sharing of experie­nces; this presupposes the existence of some perceptual and cognitive norms—some mutually recognized ways of looking at the world around and some beliefs regarding the phenomena in the world around.

Unless there are shared norms about symbols and their referents there cannot be any successful communication. Learning to speak, read and write and the use of speech in communicating information, thought, etc., between two or more persons is possible only when the rules concerning symbols, grammar and syntax are already existing before they take a meal. Many items of food are common throughout India. All of them drink their coffee or tea with milk and sugar.

In other countries people do not invariably use milk and sugar. No Indian can ever eat his rice or chapati without a curry or pickle. Indian curries and Indian pickles are famous dishes in the world. Several sweet pre­parations are common throughout the country. No Indian feast is complete without ‘pan’.

There are also striking similarities in institu­tions. For example, the norm with respect to marriage throughout the country, among all the caste, creed and language groups is “arranged marriage;” the young men and women, however highly educated and modernized they may be, wait for the parents to arrange the marriage.

They fully participate in the traditional mode of marriage. Another typical thing is the eager participation in marriage festivities. All the relatives and friends, in fact the whole population of the village, will participate with great zest.

It is a well-known fact that many thousands of families are ruined every year by the debts they incur to celebrate marriages. Even when there is acute food scarcity there will be grand feasts. These commonalities prevail in the midst of many diversities in the sub-cultures which constitute Indian Society.

2. Essay on Conformity:

Social conformity facilitates social interactions. Members of the society are able to assume that others will behave in certain ways; this makes life much simpler. Conformity allows society to operate smoothly; people can interpret correctly what others are doing and can communicate easily. Thus, behaving in the same way as those around us do is highly adaptive.

Similarity among the members of a culture is due to similar back­grounds, experience and learning. All children learn to do the same things in the same or similar ways. When they grow up, as adults they behave in similar ways, because that is the way they learned to behave.

Allan (1965) has defined conformity operationally as “a change in the behaviour of a person due to group influence resulting in the in­creased congruence between the individual and the group.” Krech et al (1962) assert that the essence of conformity is the yielding to group, pressures. They also proceed to assert that conformity implies a conflict there is conflict between the forces in the individual which tend to lead him to value, believe and act in one way, while the pressures emanating from the society or group tend to lead him to believe and act in another way.

When an individual has to express his opinion regard­ing some issue, when his conviction is at variance with the expressed judgment of the other members of the group, he is placed in a conflict situation. He may express his own deviant judgment and remain inde­pendent of the group consensus or he may conform by announcing his agreement with the group judgment.

Thus, conformity arises in response to group pressure. The response may be merely verbal or it may take the form of overt action as when some students on strike pelt stones at the policemen or at the bus, the others also join them in pelting stones.

The conformity may be true conformity when the individual agrees with the group both inwardly and outwardly, that is, when conviction and action agree; or it may be an expedient conformity where the indi­vidual may agree outwardly but remains in disagreement inwardly.

Kelman (1958) called such expedient conformity as compliance. Thus conformity as well as compliance indicates that the individual has yielded to group pressure; in conformity there is agreement with the group, both inwardly and outwardly, in conviction as well as in action; in compliance there is only agreement in action or expression but not in conviction.

Krech et al (1962) also make a distinction between two kinds of resistance to group pressure. In independence of judgment or action, the individual merely expresses his opinion which is at variance with the group pressure and leaves it at that.

But in counterformity he acti­vely opposes the group; he is negativistic and hostile; thus he widens the gap between himself and the group; he repudiates the group judg­ment and action. It may be said that Lohia, the socialist leader, was a counterformist in politics and Naiker, the DMK leader, was a counterformist in religion.

The Motivational and Emotional Processes Involved in Conformity :

What are the cognitive, motivational and emotional processes invol­ved in conformity? In the group pressure situation the individual experiences cognitive dissonance. There is a discrepancy between his own private judgment and that of the group. He may resolve this dissonance by conforming or by being independent.

When he “blames” himself for the discrepancy he may resolve the conflict by conforming. If he blames the group he may resolve the conflict by independence. Experimental studies have shown that there is a third way; the indi­vidual may neither blame himself nor the group but recognize that the different judgments may be equally correct; this will lead ultimately to conformity by the recognition that there are many sides to a problem.

With respect to motivation, an individual may conform, remain independent, or counter form depending upon what satisfies his urgent wants. The wants served by conformity are the wants for accep­tance and prestige or for avoidance of rejection by the group. Some­times conformity may serve as a means to some ulterior end.

The organizational “yes man” conforms in order to gain some advantage. On the other hand, an individual may choose to be independent because that gives greater satisfaction to him as an autonomous, self- reliant person. It may also be for some ulterior end; a politician may believe that he may gain the votes of the electorate by taking an un­popular stand.

The counterformist may gratify his aggressive wants by his behaviour; or it may be because he is in conformity with another group; for example, the adolescent may reject his family’s opinion because he wants to conform to his peer group. Finally, as regards the emotional aspect, group pressure tends to arouse in an individual either fear or aggressiveness.

He may feel that resisting group pressure may lead to punishment or some deprivation; he is likely to develop anxiety. Under such circumstances conformity may be an easy way out of the situation. On the other hand, the heightened emotion may lead to resistance to the pressure and make him independent or counterformist.

It is obvious that in collective behaviour the pressures for conformity are very high. This is why in a riotous mob as well as in a panic mob there is a great deal of conformity. All the persons in the group become aggressive and pelt stones at the policemen or the buses; or all of them may rush to get out of a cinema building on fire.

Consequences of Conflict in Groups:

There may arise conflict within the group or between groups. Such conflicts may be destructive and dysfunctional. But conflicts could also be productive and serve a useful function.

When social conflicts result in violence, it is necessary to reduce the conflict. When differences of opinion arise the members of the group may resort to violence in order to resolve the conflict. But each society has its own norms to prevent violent modes of resolving conflicts. When such attempts fails legal procedures may be resorted to resolve the conflicts.

A group or society can exist only if people control their aggressive feelings. No group can survive if the members start hitting other people, breaking windows etc., whenever they feel like it. This is why every society places strong restraints on such expressions. Dollard et al (1939) asserted that aggressive behaviour always pre­supposes the existence of frustration.

In general, it may be said that frustration, annoyance and attack will tend to make people feel aggres­sive. This feeling of aggressiveness leads to aggressive behaviour. When circumstances make it impossible to behave aggressively towards a person or a group which is powerful or is of high status, etc., there may be “displacement of aggression,” when the aggression is expressed against a substitute.

For example, the frustrated and aggressive majo­rity, instead of attacking the government may start attacking a mino­rity group. The farmers with their grievances may attack the Harijans within their reach. Once violent aggression starts it tends to perpetuate itself.

The group of students on strike may become so violent that they may burn the classroom and destroy the library or the laboratory. There will be occasion to deal with this problem in detail when we are considering the problems of prejudice and collective behaviour.

When there is an intergroup conflict there is a tendency to distort and to exaggerate the characteristics of the other group. Groups will be perceived as good-bad. One’s own group is good and the other group is bad. As a result motives will be attributed to the other group.

A benevolent act may not necessarily be perceived with trust and a conciliatory act may be viewed with suspicion; it will be assumed that there must be some ulterior motive behind the benevolent or concilia­tory act. Another consequence of conflict is the restriction of com­munication; groups between which there is less and less communication tend to become more and more distant from each other.

This leads to an increase in the divergence of the respective group norms, which in its turn further intensifies the hostilities. If one goes through the news­paper reports of labour-management conflict or student-university con­flict or communal conflict one can see these principles being illustrated clearly.

Village factions form an illustration of group conflict which hinder common action by the village people to improve the conditions of life in the village. Factions are hostile and aggressive groups which are constantly quarrelling with each other. The factors which bind the members of a faction and enable it to function as a cohesive unit are the intense kinship ties and the economic, social and ceremonial rela­tionships between the faction members.

These factors not only make the faction operate as a cohesive unit, they also offer a considerable degree of social, economic and physical security to the members. Sometimes the factions operate not only in one village but across a group of villages. Lewis and Dhillon (1954) in their study of village leaders in the Delhi area found that there were no village-wide leaders but only leaders of small groups known as dhars.

It was found that these factions are generally known by the names of their leaders and that some of them have long history. Generally the factions are orga­nized along caste lines. The Jat factions were by far the most powerful and dominated the political life of the village. The faction is primarily a kinship unit and the membership is not on individual basis but on family basis.

All factions operate as cohesive units on ceremonial occasions as well as with respect to litigations and elections. Members of hostile factions will not attend each other’s ceremonial celebrations. In panchayat meetings the representatives of factions will take hostile positions.

However, direct attacks in public are rare; nor do the mem­bers cease talking to one another. Generally the neutral groups have friendly relations with the hostile factions and have the greatest in­fluence in the village. The hostile factions, however, unite for some common action such as building of village wells, repair of canals etc.; they also try to present an appearance of unity to the outside people.

According to the investigators, one of the fundamental causes of faction is the insecurity of village life with its scarcity of land and limited resources. New factions generally arise as a result of quarrels over inheritance of lands, over house sites, irrigation rights; they also arise out of quarrels regarding sexual offences and murders. The main feature is that caste and kinship form the core of village social orga­nization.

Similar forces were found to operate in a South Indian village also in a study by Dhillon (1955), though the caste factor was absent and the mutual hostility between the groups was not great. However, kinship is the primary determinant; families having a common great- grand-father are almost always in the same faction.

Another determi­nant is the past history of interpersonal and intergroup relationships, culminating in major disputes taken to the panchayat or the courts. Though the majority of the people belong to the Vokkaliga caste, the village is divided into two hostile groups. Within a faction, families in the higher socio-economic groups are the most influential and furnish most of the leaders.

Resolution of Conflicts:

Economic factors are quite powerful in giving rise to group conflicts. The individuals who are frustrated by a sense of deprivation are likely to choose the groups which are looked upon as inferior or bad as the targets on whom they can displace their aggressiveness.

Intergroup conflicts increase when the prices are rising and when there is an increase in unemployment. Thus, all the prog­rammes aimed at the reduction of general level of deprivation within a society would be helpful to reduce group tensions.

Another way to reduce group conflict is to develop programmes which change group norms through joint participation. There is a conflict when there are two sets of group norms. The programme must take into account these two sets. The norms of each group include ways of perceiving, feeling, thinking and acting in relation to the other group.

This implies that attempts should be made to change the norms of each group toward the other group. Sherif et al (1961) set up a summer camp with two groups of boys each of which not only deve­loped its own norms but also hostility toward the other group.

In the first six days each group, made up of boys of eleven years of age, who were all strangers to one another, were made to live in their own camp without any contact with the other camp. Within those six days each group developed its own structure so that each member had a recog­nized status.

In the next six days the two groups were brought into contact with each other through competitive activities. Also situations were devised so that each group not only felt frustrated but looked upon the other group as causing the trouble. Each group looked upon the other as bad and unfair.

In the next six days the experimenters tried to integrate the two groups through setting up super-ordinate goals so that both the groups had to cooperate to reach the new goal. For ex­ample, the common water supply was blocked by placing two large boulders and the experimenters blamed a third group for this.

A plan was announced to repair the damage by hard work of both the groups together. Sociogram tests were given at the end of stage two as well as stage three. It was found that the joint participation programme led each group to modify its norms regarding the other.

While 63 per cent of the ratings of the other group were unfavourable at the end of the second stage, 78 per cent of the ratings were favourable at the end of the third stage. Thus, joint participation to achieve superordinate goals was found to be experimentally effective in reducing intergroup conflict.

Though Indian history is replete with illustrations in which war was adopted as the means of settling disputes, there has also been a traditional acceptance of conciliation as a means of resolving conflicts. One aspect of the traditional Indian outlook is to look upon all views as being partial and to find out the area in which there are no great disagreements.

The village “panchayat” tried to settle disputes by as­certaining the views of the disputants and then giving an award that was respected by the citizens of the whole village. Because of the pressure of all the members of the village, and because of the trust in the impartiality of the members of the panchayat, the disputants accepted the award and settled the dispute and lived in harmony.

Yet another traditional method is dharna in which the man with grievance fasted at the door of the person who was responsible for the injury. This would inevitably attract the attention of all the villagers and the panchayat would intercede to settle the dispute.

According to Bose (1962) Gandhiji developed his technique of satyagraha by a restatement of these traditional methods. A satyagrahi is one who tries to vindicate his view of truth by self-suffering instead of by inflicting suffering upon others. Such self-suffering, it was believed by Gandhiji, would chasten him and help him to recognize the truth in the opponent’s view.

His belief was that the adoption of satyagraha never led to the defeat of one view by the other, or by the imposition of one view over the other but to the recognition of a common view to which both the contending parties could truthfully subscribe.

Group Dynamics:

Group dynamics is a field of inquiry with the aim of advancing knowledge about the nature of groups, the laws of their development and their interrelations with individuals, and other groups. It is based on empirical research. Human beings whether at home, in the school, at work, or at play, function in small groups of five, ten, fifteen or twenty members.

The aim of group dynamics is to study the psycho­logical and social forces associated with groups. The term gained con­siderable popularity since World War II. It was during the thirties that empirical studies started regarding group life. Earlier the discus­sions regarding the way groups are formed and how they function were based on speculation and on insight.

The student of group dynamics is not satisfied with mere description of the properties of groups or the events associated with groups. He is interested in finding out the general principles of group life and group activities. Some of the problems studied refer to the changes in the group when there is a change in individual members.

For example, what are the changes in the home life when one parent dies? What are the changes in the office or factory when a new manager takes charge? What are the changes in the government when a new party comes into power? What are the changes in a group which will affect its productivity? If the cohesiveness of the group is raised or lowered what are the effects on the other features of the group func­tioning? In the earlier sections we have referred to some of these problems.

The basic problems studied in group dynamics are the change, resis­tance to change, social pressure etc. They refer to the psychological and social forces which operate on the group. Considerable interest has been taken in these studies since they have very important practical utility.

Everyone tries to improve the functioning of the groups and to provide satisfaction to the members of the group. As a result many professional persons receive special training and become specialists in labour-management relations, public health education, marriage coun­seling, social group work etc.

The origination of group dynamics as a distinct specialty is asso­ciated with Kurt Lewin (1890-1947). He popularized the term, and made significant contribution to both research and theory in group dynamics. Reference may be made to some significant studies started by Lewin and his associates.

Lewin et al (1947) conducted a series of studies to find out the in­fluence of group decision on attitude change. During World War II there was meat shortage in USA. A change in food habits was neces­sary. The women had an aversion to use some meats like heart, kidney etc. Six groups of women varying in size from 13 to 17 were taken up for study.

In three of the groups the lecture approach was used to persuade them to change over to the less familiar meats. The lecture emphasized the vitamin and mineral value of the meats; recipes were also distributed. The other three groups were made to discuss the problem. The women discussed the obstacles they would be likely to encounter in making the change. The same recipes were presented after the discussion.

At the end of the meeting the members were asked to indicate by a show of hands those who were willing to try one of the meats within the next week. Follow-up study showed that while only three per cent of the women who heard the lecture used these meats in the following week, as high as 32 per cent of those who had participated in group discussion and group decision had used them.

A crucial factor in such studies is the recognition by the parti­cipants that other people who participated in the discussion were like themselves and found the new information persuasive. This recognition that others have decided to change made them agree to accept the change. It also reinforced the acceptance. Thus group pressures help in attitude change and support it.

Lippit and White (1943) tried to create and describe the “social atmosphere” in children’s clubs and to record the effects of varied social atmosphere on group life and individual behaviour. They created three kinds of social atmosphere: democratic, authoritarian and laissez- faire.

In the authoritarian group all determination of policy was by the leader; the steps were dictated by the leader by stages so that the future steps were largely uncertain to the group; the leader determined the task and the companions; the leader tended to be “personal” in his praise and criticism of the work of each member; he remained aloof from active group participation.

The democratic leader left all policies to group discussion and group decision; the group itself sketched the stages of work and the members were free to work with whomever they chose; the leader was “objective” in his praise and criticism and tried to be a regular member of the group in spirit without doing too much of work.

In the laissez-faire group there was complete freedom for the group and the individuals with minimum leader parti­cipation; he merely supplied the materials and offered to supply infor­mation when necessary; there was no attempt by him to appraise or regulate the course of events.

The leaders were shifted from group to group every six weeks and each leader changed his style of leadership to suit the atmosphere of the group. All the groups met in the same place and did the same activities with similar materials. The results showed that the laissez-faire group was less organized, less efficient and definitely less satisfied than the democratic group.

On the other hand, the democratic group was more efficient than authoritarian group. The democratic group achieved both the social goals and work goals, while the authoritarian group achieved only the work goal and the laissez- faire group achieved (if anything) only the social goals.

Another finding was that autocracy can create much hostility and aggression, it also created much discontent; there was greater dependence and less individuality. On the other hand, there were more “group-mindedness” and more friendliness in the democratic atmosphere.

In the classic discussions of social and political philosophy there are two opposite views of the relation of man to society. According to one view man is imperfect and social organization is required to make him work and to make him control his aggressive, selfish and exploitative tendencies.

According to the other view man is intrinsically good and it is the state, the organization or the group which inhibits and corrupts the individual; demanding blind conformity they encourage mediocrity and generate regressive dependency.

According to Cartwright and Zander (1968) the basic assumptions held by most group dynamists are:

(1) Groups are inevitable; even the most extreme individualists like the Beatniks form into groups with their own norms;

(2) Groups mobilize powerful forces that produce effects of utmost importance to individuals; a person’s sense of identity is shaped by the group to which he belongs closely and it is the group which determines the level of his aspiration and self-esteem;

(3) Groups can produce both good and bad consequences; they are both cons­tructive and destructive of the groups as well as the individual members; and

(4) It is by the correct understanding of group dynamics, based on empirical studies, that it is possible to deliberately enhance the constructive aspects of group life.

3. Essay on Deviancy :

It was shown that some persons do not conform to the group norms. An attempt will now be made to discuss the problems connected with deviancy and to indicate the characteristics of some deviant groups in Indian society.

Freedman and Doob (1968) define a deviant as a person who is different from the rest of the members of the group to which he be­longs. Deviancy consists in behaving in a way different from the norms of the group. The members of the group feel that he is different from them and the deviant himself feels that he is different from the other members of the group. It is this feeling of being a deviant which in­fluences his behaviour.

By their experimental studies Freedman and Doob have shown that the deviants try to avoid mistreatment by others and also that they try to minimize their feelings of deviancy by associating with other deviants, who are like themselves rather than like the non-deviants.

They explain this behaviour of the deviant on the basis of the theory of “social comparison” of Festinger (1954). Accord­ing to the theory of social comparison individuals have a need to com­pare themselves with others and they do so with people who are similar 72 Elements of Social Psychology to themselves.

The reason for this preference is that comparing oneself with someone who is quite different does not provide the information sought; the person wants to evaluate his abilities, values, emotions, achievements, etc., so that he gains self-confidence.

Therefore the theory of social comparison predicts that people tend to affiliate them­selves with others who are similar to them. A number of studies have supported this prediction. It also holds good for the deviants.

Thus, it looks as if two motives lead the deviants to seek the company of other deviants- (a) the fear of rejection by the non-deviants and (b) the need for social comparison and affiliation. Juvenile delinquents associate themselves not only with other delinquents but also with the youth who smoke, drink alcohol, visit prostitutes etc.

A group rarely chooses someone who holds deviant views as leader. Schachter (1951) set up groups to discuss a variety of problems; he included confederates in each group. One of the confederates was asked to take a deviant position; another was asked to take a deviant position but change eventually to the group position; the third confe­derate was asked to agree throughout.

After discussion, it was found that the confederate who agreed throughout was liked the most and was elected to a committee; next in order of preference was the deviate- agreer but the deviant confederate was liked the least and was rejected by a majority: this prevents him from even being a member of the committee.

Generally, an individual faced with a group that disagrees with him is reluctant to be a deviant. He wants the group to like him, to treat him well and to accept him. He tends to conform in order to avoid being rejected by the group and being treated as an outcast. In all groups there are strong pressures toward conformity; various efforts are made to get the deviant to conform.

If an individual maintains the deviant position in spite of the group pressures, the group may eventually stop communication with him. Later it may even harm him.

However, it must be realized that no society ever succeeds in getting all its people to behave as expected. The term social deviation indi­cates failure to conform to the customary norms of the society. Some persons fail to behave in the usual ways though they are capable of learning conventional behaviour; for example, the juvenile delinquents, the sex deviants, the alcoholics, the drug addicts etc. What causes such deviation?

Causes of Deviant Behaviour :

According to psychoanalysis deviant behaviour is attributed to con­flicts between the id and the ego or between the id and the super-ego. Crime, for example, takes place when the super-ego, the civilized self- control of the individual, is unable to restrain the destructive impulses of the id within him.

Another view is that deviant behaviour arises as a result of failure in socialization It is asserted that the socialization process has failed in some way to integrate the cultural norms into the individual’s personality; deviant behaviour arises as a result of failure to internalize the norms of the culture. Yet. another view is that deviant behaviour arises, when in a heterogeneous, changing society, there is no single set of norms, when many sets of norms and values compete with one another.

Many parents find that their efforts to train their children are undermined by other groups and influences. For example, the conservative and the not-so-radical mothers often complain that some magazines publish advertisements which make their daughters seek outlandish styles of clothes and hairdo. Durkheim (1897) asserted that conflicting norms give rise to anomie, a condition of “normlessness” in an individual or in a group; the individual has no firm sense of belonging to anything dependable and stabilizing.

It is true that deviant behaviour is a threat to social stability. A group can function efficiently only if there is order and predictability in social life. Deviant behaviour threatens them. If too many people fail to behave as expected, the group becomes disorganized and social order collapses.

On the other hand, deviant behaviour may be one way of adapting the group norms to changed conditions so that the group may survive under changing conditions. But it must be realized that such deviant behaviour is constructive.

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• Influence of the Group on Individual Behaviour | Group | Psychology

Collective Behaviour , Essay , Group and Conformity and Deviance , Psychology

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14 Conformity and Obedience

We often change our attitudes and behaviors to match the attitudes and behaviors of the people around us. One reason for this conformity is a concern about what other people think of us. This process was demonstrated in a classic study in which college students deliberately gave wrong answers to a simple visual judgment task rather than go against the group. Another reason we conform to the norm is because other people often have information we do not, and relying on norms can be a reasonable strategy when we are uncertain about how we are supposed to act. Unfortunately, we frequently misperceive how the typical person acts, which can contribute to problems such as the excessive binge drinking often seen in college students. Obeying orders from an authority figure can sometimes lead to disturbing behavior. This danger was illustrated in a famous study in which participants were instructed to administer painful electric shocks to another person in what they believed to be a learning experiment. Despite vehement protests from the person receiving the shocks, most participants continued the procedure when instructed to do so by the experimenter. The findings raise questions about the power of blind obedience in deplorable situations such as atrocities and genocide. They also raise concerns about the ethical treatment of participants in psychology experiments.

Learning Objectives

• Become aware of how widespread conformity is in our lives and some of the ways each of us changes our attitudes and behavior to match the norm.
• Understand the two primary reasons why people often conform to perceived norms.
• Appreciate how obedience to authority has been examined in laboratory studies and some of the implications of the findings from these investigations.
• Consider some of the remaining issues and sources of controversy surrounding Milgram’s obedience studies.

Introduction

When he was a teenager, my son often enjoyed looking at photographs of me and my wife taken when we were in high school. He laughed at the hairstyles, the clothing, and the kind of glasses people wore “back then.” And when he was through with his ridiculing, we would point out that no one is immune to fashions and fads and that someday his children will probably be equally amused by his high school photographs and the trends he found so normal at the time.

Everyday observation confirms that we often adopt the actions and attitudes of the people around us. Trends in clothing, music, foods, and entertainment are obvious. But our views on political issues, religious questions, and lifestyles also reflect to some degree the attitudes of the people we interact with. Similarly, decisions about behaviors such as smoking and drinking are influenced by whether the people we spend time with engage in these activities. Psychologists refer to this widespread tendency to act and think like the people around us as conformity .

What causes all this conformity? To start, humans may possess an inherent tendency to imitate the actions of others. Although we usually are not aware of it, we often mimic the gestures, body posture, language, talking speed, and many other behaviors of the people we interact with. Researchers find that this mimicking increases the connection between people and allows our interactions to flow more smoothly ( Chartrand & Bargh, 1999 ).

Beyond this automatic tendency to imitate others, psychologists have identified two primary reasons for conformity. The first of these is normative influence . When normative influence is operating, people go along with the crowd because they are concerned about what others think of them. We don’t want to look out of step or become the target of criticism just because we like different kinds of music or dress differently than everyone else. Fitting in also brings rewards such as camaraderie and compliments.

How powerful is normative influence? Consider a classic study conducted many years ago by Solomon Asch ( 1956 ). The participants were male college students who were asked to engage in a seemingly simple task. An experimenter standing several feet away held up a card that depicted one line on the left side and three lines on the right side. The participant’s job was to say aloud which of the three lines on the right was the same length as the line on the left. Sixteen cards were presented one at a time, and the correct answer on each was so obvious as to make the task a little boring. Except for one thing. The participant was not alone. In fact, there were six other people in the room who also gave their answers to the line-judgment task aloud. Moreover, although they pretended to be fellow participants, these other individuals were, in fact, confederates working with the experimenter. The real participant was seated so that he always gave his answer after hearing what five other “participants” said. Everything went smoothly until the third trial, when inexplicably the first “participant” gave an obviously incorrect answer. The mistake might have been amusing, except the second participant gave the same answer. As did the third, the fourth, and the fifth participant. Suddenly the real participant was in a difficult situation. His eyes told him one thing, but five out of five people apparently saw something else.

It’s one thing to wear your hair a certain way or like certain foods because everyone around you does. But, would participants intentionally give a wrong answer just to conform with the other participants? The confederates uniformly gave incorrect answers on 12 of the 16 trials, and 76 percent of the participants went along with the norm at least once and also gave the wrong answer. In total, they conformed with the group on one-third of the 12 test trials. Although we might be impressed that the majority of the time participants answered honestly, most psychologists find it remarkable that so many college students caved in to the pressure of the group rather than do the job they had volunteered to do. In almost all cases, the participants knew they were giving an incorrect answer, but their concern for what these other people might be thinking about them overpowered their desire to do the right thing.

Variations of Asch’s procedures have been conducted numerous times ( Bond, 2005 ; Bond & Smith, 1996 ). We now know that the findings are easily replicated, that there is an increase in conformity with more confederates (up to about five), that teenagers are more prone to conforming than are adults, and that people conform significantly less often when they believe the confederates will not hear their responses ( Berndt, 1979 ; Bond, 2005 ; Crutchfield, 1955 ; Deutsch & Gerard, 1955 ). This last finding is consistent with the notion that participants change their answers because they are concerned about what others think of them. Finally, although we see the effect in virtually every culture that has been studied, more conformity is found in collectivist countries such as Japan and China than in individualistic countries such as the United States ( Bond & Smith, 1996 ). Compared with individualistic cultures, people who live in collectivist cultures place a higher value on the goals of the group than on individual preferences. They also are more motivated to maintain harmony in their interpersonal relations.

The other reason we sometimes go along with the crowd is that people are often a source of information. Psychologists refer to this process as informational influence . Most of us, most of the time, are motivated to do the right thing. If society deems that we put litter in a proper container, speak softly in libraries, and tip our waiter, then that’s what most of us will do. But sometimes it’s not clear what society expects of us. In these situations, we often rely on descriptive norms ( Cialdini, Reno, & Kallgren, 1990 ). That is, we act the way most people—or most people like us—act. This is not an unreasonable strategy. Other people often have information that we do not, especially when we find ourselves in new situations. If you have ever been part of a conversation that went something like this,

“Do you think we should?” “Sure. Everyone else is doing it.”,

you have experienced the power of informational influence.

However, it’s not always easy to obtain good descriptive norm information, which means we sometimes rely on a flawed notion of the norm when deciding how we should behave. A good example of how misperceived norms can lead to problems is found in research on binge drinking among college students. Excessive drinking is a serious problem on many campuses ( Mita, 2009 ). There are many reasons why students binge drink, but one of the most important is their perception of the descriptive norm. How much students drink is highly correlated with how much they believe the average student drinks ( Neighbors, Lee, Lewis, Fossos, & Larimer, 2007 ). Unfortunately, students aren’t very good at making this assessment. They notice the boisterous heavy drinker at the party but fail to consider all the students not attending the party. As a result, students typically overestimate the descriptive norm for college student drinking ( Borsari & Carey, 2003 ; Perkins, Haines, & Rice, 2005 ). Most students believe they consume significantly less alcohol than the norm, a miscalculation that creates a dangerous push toward more and more excessive alcohol consumption. On the positive side, providing students with accurate information about drinking norms has been found to reduce overindulgent drinking ( Burger, LaSalvia, Hendricks, Mehdipour, & Neudeck, 2011 ; Neighbors, Lee, Lewis, Fossos, & Walter, 2009 ).

Researchers have demonstrated the power of descriptive norms in a number of areas. Homeowners reduced the amount of energy they used when they learned that they were consuming more energy than their neighbors ( Schultz, Nolan, Cialdini, Goldstein, & Griskevicius, 2007 ). Undergraduates selected the healthy food option when led to believe that other students had made this choice ( Burger et al., 2010 ). Hotel guests were more likely to reuse their towels when a hanger in the bathroom told them that this is what most guests did ( Goldstein, Cialdini, & Griskevicius, 2008 ). And more people began using the stairs instead of the elevator when informed that the vast majority of people took the stairs to go up one or two floors ( Burger & Shelton, 2011 ).

Although we may be influenced by the people around us more than we recognize, whether we conform to the norm is up to us. But sometimes decisions about how to act are not so easy. Sometimes we are directed by a more powerful person to do things we may not want to do. Researchers who study obedience are interested in how people react when given an order or command from someone in a position of authority. In many situations, obedience is a good thing. We are taught at an early age to obey parents, teachers, and police officers. It’s also important to follow instructions from judges, firefighters, and lifeguards. And a military would fail to function if soldiers stopped obeying orders from superiors. But, there is also a dark side to obedience. In the name of “following orders” or “just doing my job,” people can violate ethical principles and break laws. More disturbingly, obedience often is at the heart of some of the worst of human behavior—massacres, atrocities, and even genocide.

It was this unsettling side of obedience that led to some of the most famous and most controversial research in the history of psychology. Milgram ( 1963 , 1965 , 1974 ) wanted to know why so many otherwise decent German citizens went along with the brutality of the Nazi leaders during the Holocaust. “These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person,” Milgram ( 1963 , p. 371) wrote, “but they could only be carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of persons obeyed orders.”

To understand this obedience, Milgram conducted a series of laboratory investigations. In all but one variation of the basic procedure, participants were men recruited from the community surrounding Yale University, where the research was carried out. These citizens signed up for what they believed to be an experiment on learning and memory. In particular, they were told the research concerned the effects of punishment on learning. Three people were involved in each session. One was the participant. Another was the experimenter. The third was a confederate who pretended to be another participant.

The experimenter explained that the study consisted of a memory test and that one of the men would be the teacher and the other the learner. Through a rigged drawing, the real participant was always assigned the teacher’s role and the confederate was always the learner. The teacher watched as the learner was strapped into a chair and had electrodes attached to his wrist. The teacher then moved to the room next door where he was seated in front of a large metal box the experimenter identified as a “shock generator.” The front of the box displayed gauges and lights and, most noteworthy, a series of 30 levers across the bottom. Each lever was labeled with a voltage figure, starting with 15 volts and moving up in 15-volt increments to 450 volts. Labels also indicated the strength of the shocks, starting with “Slight Shock” and moving up to “Danger: Severe Shock” toward the end. The last two levers were simply labeled “XXX” in red.

Through a microphone, the teacher administered a memory test to the learner in the next room. The learner responded to the multiple-choice items by pressing one of four buttons that were barely within reach of his strapped-down hand. If the teacher saw the correct answer light up on his side of the wall, he simply moved on to the next item. But if the learner got the item wrong, the teacher pressed one of the shock levers and, thereby, delivered the learner’s punishment. The teacher was instructed to start with the 15-volt lever and move up to the next highest shock for each successive wrong answer.

In reality, the learner received no shocks. But he did make a lot of mistakes on the test, which forced the teacher to administer what he believed to be increasingly strong shocks. The purpose of the study was to see how far the teacher would go before refusing to continue. The teacher’s first hint that something was amiss came after pressing the 75-volt lever and hearing through the wall the learner say “Ugh!” The learner’s reactions became stronger and louder with each lever press. At 150 volts, the learner yelled out, “Experimenter! That’s all. Get me out of here. I told you I had heart trouble. My heart’s starting to bother me now. Get me out of here, please. My heart’s starting to bother me. I refuse to go on. Let me out.”

The experimenter’s role was to encourage the participant to continue. If at any time the teacher asked to end the session, the experimenter responded with phrases such as, “The experiment requires that you continue,” and “You have no other choice, you must go on.” The experimenter ended the session only after the teacher stated four successive times that he did not want to continue. All the while, the learner’s protests became more intense with each shock. After 300 volts, the learner refused to answer any more questions, which led the experimenter to say that no answer should be considered a wrong answer. After 330 volts, despite vehement protests from the learner following previous shocks, the teacher heard only silence, suggesting that the learner was now physically unable to respond. If the teacher reached 450 volts—the end of the generator—the experimenter told him to continue pressing the 450 volt lever for each wrong answer. It was only after the teacher pressed the 450-volt lever three times that the experimenter announced that the study was over.

If you had been a participant in this research, what would you have done? Virtually everyone says he or she would have stopped early in the process. And most people predict that very few if any participants would keep pressing all the way to 450 volts. Yet in the basic procedure described here, 65 percent of the participants continued to administer shocks to the very end of the session. These were not brutal, sadistic men. They were ordinary citizens who nonetheless followed the experimenter’s instructions to administer what they believed to be excruciating if not dangerous electric shocks to an innocent person. The disturbing implication from the findings is that, under the right circumstances, each of us may be capable of acting in some very uncharacteristic and perhaps some very unsettling ways.

Milgram conducted many variations of this basic procedure to explore some of the factors that affect obedience. He found that obedience rates decreased when the learner was in the same room as the experimenter and declined even further when the teacher had to physically touch the learner to administer the punishment. Participants also were less willing to continue the procedure after seeing other teachers refuse to press the shock levers, and they were significantly less obedient when the instructions to continue came from a person they believed to be another participant rather than from the experimenter. Finally, Milgram found that women participants followed the experimenter’s instructions at exactly the same rate the men had.

Milgram’s obedience research has been the subject of much controversy and discussion. Psychologists continue to debate the extent to which Milgram’s studies tell us something about atrocities in general and about the behavior of German citizens during the Holocaust in particular ( Miller, 2004 ). Certainly, there are important features of that time and place that cannot be recreated in a laboratory, such as a pervasive climate of prejudice and dehumanization. Another issue concerns the relevance of the findings. Some people have argued that today we are more aware of the dangers of blind obedience than we were when the research was conducted back in the 1960s. However, findings from partial and modified replications of Milgram’s procedures conducted in recent years suggest that people respond to the situation today much like they did a half a century ago ( Burger, 2009 ).

Another point of controversy concerns the ethical treatment of research participants. Researchers have an obligation to look out for the welfare of their participants. Yet, there is little doubt that many of Milgram’s participants experienced intense levels of stress as they went through the procedure. In his defense, Milgram was not unconcerned about the effects of the experience on his participants. And in follow-up questionnaires, the vast majority of his participants said they were pleased they had been part of the research and thought similar experiments should be conducted in the future. Nonetheless, in part because of Milgram’s studies, guidelines and procedures were developed to protect research participants from these kinds of experiences. Although Milgram’s intriguing findings left us with many unanswered questions, conducting a full replication of his experiment remains out of bounds by today’s standards.

Finally, it is also worth noting that although a number of factors appear to lead to obedience, there are also those who would not obey. In one conceptual replication of the Milgram studies, conducted with a small sample in Italy, the researchers explored the moment that approximately two-thirds of the sample refused to cooperate ( Bocchiaro & Zimbardo, 2010 ). The investigators identified compassion, ethics, and recognition of the situation as problematic as major influences on refusal. Thus, just as there are pressures to obey there are also instances in which people can stand up to authority.

Social psychologists are fond of saying that we are all influenced by the people around us more than we recognize. Of course, each person is unique, and ultimately each of us makes choices about how we will and will not act. But decades of research on conformity and obedience make it clear that we live in a social world and that—for better or worse—much of what we do is a reflection of the people we encounter.

Text Attribution

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Changing one’s attitude or behavior to match a perceived social norm.

Conformity that results from a concern for what other people think of us.

Conformity that results from a concern to act in a socially approved manner as determined by how others act.

The perception of what most people do in a given situation.

Responding to an order or command from a person in a position of authority.

An Introduction to Social Psychology Copyright © 2022 by Thomas Edison State University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Sociology – ROBERT K. MERTON: CONFORMITY AND DEVIANCE

ROBERT K. MERTON: CONFORMITY AND DEVIANCE

BACKGROUND:

Robert Merton in his theoretical analysis of ‘Social Structure and Anomie’ takes inspiration from Durkheim‘s work. It provided the intellectual foundation for Merton‘s attempt to develop a macro-level explanation of rates of norm violating behaviour in American society.

In contrast to Durkheim, Merton bases his theory on sociological assumptions about human nature. Merton replaces Durkheim‘s conception of limitless needs and appetites with the assumption that human needs and desires are primarily the product of a social process: i.e., cultural socialization . For instance, people raised in a society where cultural values emphasize material goals will learn to strive for economic success.

Anomie, for Durkheim, referred to the failure of society to regulate or constrain the ends or goals of human desire. Merton, on the other hand, is more concerned with social regulation of the means people use to obtain material goals.

MERTON’S THEORY OF DEVIANCE: (STRAIN THEORY)

Merton in his theory of deviance indicates that deviants are not a cub-cultural group. Rather people manifest deviant behaviour in different spheres of social life. A mismatch between cultural prescriptive means and socially prescriptive goals give way to deviant behaviour. He finds out that deviant behaviour persists in society because it has not outlived its function therefore sociology should not be concerned about deviance as a pathological problem rather one should study the latent and manifest orientations of deviance.

Merton considers that anomie is not a product of rapid social change. Rather it is a form of behaviour manifested by the people when they are suffering from social strain. Therefore anomie theory is also known as social strain theory. The strain is the product of mismatch between culturally prescriptive means and socially prescriptive goals. When people experience social strain, they channelize there strains in different ways in order to manifest different forms of anomic behaviour. At different points of time. These forms of deviant behaviours are functional, dysfunctional and non-functional.

This chronic discrepancy between cultural promises and structural realities not only undermines social support for institutional norms but also promotes violations of those norms. Just how do people adapt to these environmental pressures? Merton‘s answer to this question is perhaps his single most important contribution to the anomie tradition.

Merton presents an analytical typology, shown in the following table, of individual adaptations to the discrepancy between culture and social structure.

MERTON’S TYPOLOGY OF INDIVIDUAL ADAPTATIONS TO ENVIORNMENTAL PRESSURES

Note: (+) signifies acceptance; (–) signifies rejection; and (+/-) signifies rejection of prevailing goal or means and substitution of new goal or means.

These adaptations describe the kinds of social roles people adopt in response to cultural and structural pressures.

• Conformity , is a non-deviant adaptation where people continue to engage in legitimate occupational or educational roles despite environmental pressures toward deviant behaviour. That is, the conformist accepts and strives for the cultural goal of material success ( + ) by following institutionalized means ( + ).
• Innovation , on the other hand, involves acceptance of the cultural goal ( + ) but rejection of legitimate, institutionalized means ( – ). This type of adaptation occurs when the individual has assimilated the cultural emphasis on the goal without equally internalizing the institutional norms.
• Ritualism , represents quite a different sort of departure from cultural standards than does innovation. The ritualist is an over conformist. Here, the pursuit of the dominant cultural goal of economic success is rejected or abandoned ( – ) and compulsive conformity to institutional norms ( + ) becomes an end in itself.
• Retreatism , is the rejection of both cultural goals ( – ) and institutionalized means ( – ). Therefore, retreatism involves complete escape from the pressures and demands of organized society. Merton applies this adaptation to the deviant role ―activities of psychotics, outcasts, chronic drunkards, and drug addicts.
• Rebellion , is indicated by different notation than the other adaptations. The two (+/-) signs show that the rebel not only rejects the goals and means of the established society but actively attempts to substitute new goals and means in their place. This adaptation refers, then, to the role behaviour of political deviants, who attempt to modify greatly the existing structure of society. In his later work, Merton uses the term nonconformity to contrast rebellion to other forms of deviant behaviour that are atypical. The nonconforming rebel is not secretive as are other, the rebel publicly acknowledges his or her intention to change those norms and the social structure that they support in the interests of building a better, more just society.

Having identified the modes of individual adaptations, Merton defines anomie as: “ a breakdown in the cultural structure, occurring particularly when there is an n acute disjunction between the cultural norms and goals and the socially structured capacities of members of the group to act in accordance with them .” In this conception cultural values may help to produce behaviour which is at odds with mandates of the values themselves.

CONCLUSION:

Merton insists that anomie is essentially a sociological concept. Anomie refers to a “ property of a social system, not to the state of mind of this or that individual within the system .” For example, the condition of anomie exits when there is a general loss of faith in the efficacy of the government, when contractual cooperation is characterised more by mistrust that trust, or when there is an uneasiness gripping the community because of alarming increase in crime rate.

Thus, the appeal of Merton‘s theory and a major reason for its far-reaching impact upon the field of deviance lies in his ability to derive explanations of a diverse assortment of deviant phenomena from a relatively simple analytical framework. This is precisely what a general theory of deviance must do.

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Conformity, Deviance, and Crime

The issues of the occurrence of deviance and the ways in which it affects society have been objects of interest in the field of sociology for decades. Deviance can be defined as nonconformity to sets of norms accepted by a substantial number of people in society or a community (Giddens et al., 2018). When considering deviance from, or conformity to, social norms and rules, the question of whose norms and rules these are should always be asked. In fact, people’s definitions of deviance are directly related to social aspects of their lives, and leading deviance and crime theories agree with it.

Society cannot be divided between people deviating from norms and people conforming to them. It seems reasonable as most people tend to sometimes violate generally accepted rules of conduct. Granted, a significant proportion of all deviant acts (such as assault or murder) is criminal and illegal; however, many deviant behaviors – from dressing bizarrely to joining a cult – are not crimes. Similarly, many technically criminal behaviors, such as underage drinking or speed limit exceeding, are not deemed deviant because they are fairly normative. Modern sociological thinking highlights that definitions of deviance and conformity vary in accordance with social context. Societies today include many subcultures, and behavior conforming to the norms of one of them might be seen as deviant outside it. Moreover, wide disparities in social wealth and power have a significant impact on criminal capabilities of different groups. For instance, theft and burglary are mostly committed by the poorest, while misappropriation and tax evasion are limited to those in positions of superiority.

Since the emergence of sociology, researchers have been developing theories in an attempt to understand the nature of deviation and crime. According to Giddens et al. (2018), these theories can be classified into four main sociological paradigms: functionalist, interactionist, conflict, and control theories. In accordance with functionalist theories, the crime is the result of people’s aspirations not coinciding with available opportunities. For example, a French sociologist Émile Durkheim believed that deviant behavior occurs due to the structure of society (Giddens et al., 2018). He coined the notion of anomie, which is the state of no strong standards guiding behavior in a certain area of public life. Durkheim argued that in such circumstances, people feel lost and anxious, and deviance and crime become inevitable. Moreover, a modern age individual is less limited than one in traditional society. In today’s world there is more room for personal choice, and nonconformity is the logical outcome of it.

Sociologists working in the interactionist tradition deem deviance a phenomenon created by society. From their perspective, there are no inherently deviant behaviors, and they focus on how and why only some are labeled as such. As per Giddens et al. (2018), in the 1940s, Edwin H. Sutherland linked crime to so-called differential association. The theory of differential association states that people learn deviant behaviors just as they learn conventional ones, that is, from contacts with family members, peers, and colleagues. Deviance occurs when one is exposed to higher levels of deviant individuals and behaviors as compared to conventional influences. There is one more important interactionist approach to understanding crime, labeling theory. In the 1960s, Howard S. Becker studied marijuana smokers and discovered that becoming one depended on a person’s acceptance by and closeness with experienced users, as well as their attitudes towards non-users (Giddens et al., 2018). From deviance being interpreted as an interaction process between deviants and non-deviants, it comes that it is not a specific act that makes a person deviant, but other people’s reaction to it. Therefore, to understand the nature of deviance, this theory’s proponents attempt to establish why some people are labeled deviant.

Conflict theory argues that deviance is deliberate and often politically motivated. In accordance with it, deviance cannot be ‘determined’ by biology, individuality, anomie, or labels. Rather, people choose deviant behavior as a reaction to the capitalist system’s inequalities (Giddens et al., 2018). That is, members of counter-cultural groups perceived as deviant – for example, Black Power movement supporters or gay liberation movement advocates – are involved in political acts that challenge public order. Control theory, in its turn, holds that crime is the result of an imbalance between the impulse to criminal activity and the controls that interdict it. Giddens et al. (2018) note that, as per control theory, most people act rationally only because they do not have the opportunity to perform deviant acts. Travis Hirschi, a famous control theorist, believes that humans are essentially selfish creatures who make thoughtful decisions about whether to engage in criminal activities by pondering over benefits and risks.

When it comes to what theory appeals the most to me personally, I would say it is interactionist one. It seems logical to me that no act, or, at least, not most of them, are deviant inherently. What is acceptable and unacceptable varies from one group to another because it is defined by a given society. Those defining it are people in power that decide what is best for their specific environment, or simply pursue their own interests. Moreover, the theory of differential association is something the evidence of which I have observed many times in my life.

In conclusion, social norms and rules differ from society to society. Definitions of conformity and deviance depend on social context, and what is considered a norm in one community or society can be seen as deviant by those outside it. Researchers, upon trying to understand the nature of deviation, have been developing theories, which can be classified into four main paradigms: functionalist, interactionist, conflict, and control. All of them have reasonable justifications and can be viewed as convincing rationales for the nature of deviation.

Giddens, A., Duneier, M., Appelbaum, R. P., & Carr, D. (2018). Introduction to sociology (11 th ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.

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7.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance and Crime

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you should be able to:

• Describe the functionalist view of deviance in society through four sociologist’s theories
• Explain how conflict theory understands deviance and crime in society
• Describe the symbolic interactionist approach to deviance, including labeling and other theories

Why does deviance occur? How does it affect a society? Since the early days of sociology, scholars have developed theories that attempt to explain what deviance and crime mean to society. These theories can be grouped according to the three major sociological paradigms: functionalism, symbolic interactionism, and conflict theory.

Functionalism

Sociologists who follow the functionalist approach are concerned with the way the different elements of a society contribute to the whole. They view deviance as a key component of a functioning society. Strain theory and social disorganization theory represent two functionalist perspectives on deviance in society.

Émile Durkheim: The Essential Nature of Deviance

Émile Durkheim believed that deviance is a necessary part of a successful society. One way deviance is functional, he argued, is that it challenges people’s present views (1893). For instance, when Black students across the United States participated in sit-ins during the civil rights movement, they challenged society’s notions of segregation. Moreover, Durkheim noted, when deviance is punished, it reaffirms currently held social norms, which also contributes to society (1893). Seeing a student given detention for skipping class reminds other high schoolers that playing hooky isn’t allowed and that they, too, could get detention.

Durkheim’s point regarding the impact of punishing deviance speaks to his arguments about law. Durkheim saw laws as an expression of the “collective conscience,” which are the beliefs, morals, and attitudes of a society. “A crime is a crime because we condemn it,” he said (1893). He discussed the impact of societal size and complexity as contributors to the collective conscience and the development of justice systems and punishments. For example, in large, industrialized societies that were largely bound together by the interdependence of work (the division of labor), punishments for deviance were generally less severe. In smaller, more homogeneous societies, deviance might be punished more severely.

Robert Merton: Strain Theory

Sociologist Robert Merton agreed that deviance is an inherent part of a functioning society, but he expanded on Durkheim’s ideas by developing strain theory , which notes that access to socially acceptable goals plays a part in determining whether a person conforms or deviates. From birth, we’re encouraged to achieve the “American Dream” of financial success. A person who attends business school, receives an MBA, and goes on to make a million-dollar income as CEO of a company is said to be a success. However, not everyone in our society stands on equal footing. That MBA-turned-CEO may have grown up in the best school district and had means to hire tutors. Another person may grow up in a neighborhood with lower-quality schools, and may not be able to pay for extra help. A person may have the socially acceptable goal of financial success but lack a socially acceptable way to reach that goal. According to Merton’s theory, an entrepreneur who can’t afford to launch their own company may be tempted to embezzle from their employer for start-up funds.

Merton defined five ways people respond to this gap between having a socially accepted goal and having no socially accepted way to pursue it.

• Conformity : Those who conform choose not to deviate. They pursue their goals to the extent that they can through socially accepted means.
• Innovation : Those who innovate pursue goals they cannot reach through legitimate means by instead using criminal or deviant means.
• Ritualism : People who ritualize lower their goals until they can reach them through socially acceptable ways. These members of society focus on conformity rather than attaining a distant dream.
• Retreatism : Others retreat and reject society’s goals and means. Some people who beg and people who are homeless have withdrawn from society’s goal of financial success.
• Rebellion : A handful of people rebel and replace a society’s goals and means with their own. Terrorists or freedom fighters look to overthrow a society’s goals through socially unacceptable means.

Social Disorganization Theory

Developed by researchers at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, social disorganization theory asserts that crime is most likely to occur in communities with weak social ties and the absence of social control. An individual who grows up in a poor neighborhood with high rates of drug use, violence, teenage delinquency, and deprived parenting is more likely to become engaged in crime than an individual from a wealthy neighborhood with a good school system and families who are involved positively in the community.

Social disorganization theory points to broad social factors as the cause of deviance. A person isn’t born as someone who will commit crimes but becomes one over time, often based on factors in their social environment. Robert Sampson and Byron Groves (1989) found that poverty and family disruption in given localities had a strong positive correlation with social disorganization. They also determined that social disorganization was, in turn, associated with high rates of crime and delinquency—or deviance. Recent studies Sampson conducted with Lydia Bean (2006) revealed similar findings. High rates of poverty and single-parent homes correlated with high rates of juvenile violence. Research into social disorganization theory can greatly influence public policy. For instance, studies have found that children from disadvantaged communities who attend preschool programs that teach basic social skills are significantly less likely to engage in criminal activity. (Lally 1987)

Conflict Theory

Conflict theory looks to social and economic factors as the causes of crime and deviance. Unlike functionalists, conflict theorists don’t see these factors as positive functions of society. They see them as evidence of inequality in the system. They also challenge social disorganization theory and control theory and argue that both ignore racial and socioeconomic issues and oversimplify social trends (Akers 1991). Conflict theorists also look for answers to the correlation of gender and race with wealth and crime.

Karl Marx: An Unequal System

Conflict theory was greatly influenced by the work of German philosopher, economist, and social scientist Karl Marx. Marx believed that the general population was divided into two groups. He labeled the wealthy, who controlled the means of production and business, the bourgeois. He labeled the workers who depended on the bourgeois for employment and survival the proletariat. Marx believed that the bourgeois centralized their power and influence through government, laws, and other authority agencies in order to maintain and expand their positions of power in society. Though Marx spoke little of deviance, his ideas created the foundation for conflict theorists who study the intersection of deviance and crime with wealth and power.

C. Wright Mills: The Power Elite

In his book The Power Elite (1956), sociologist C. Wright Mills described the existence of what he dubbed the power elite , a small group of wealthy and influential people at the top of society who hold the power and resources. Wealthy executives, politicians, celebrities, and military leaders often have access to national and international power, and in some cases, their decisions affect everyone in society. Because of this, the rules of society are stacked in favor of a privileged few who manipulate them to stay on top. It is these people who decide what is criminal and what is not, and the effects are often felt most by those who have little power. Mills’ theories explain why celebrities can commit crimes and suffer little or no legal retribution. For example, USA Today maintains a database of NFL players accused and convicted of crimes. 51 NFL players had been convicted of committing domestic violence between the years 2000 and 2019. They have been sentenced to a collective 49 days in jail, and most of those sentences were deferred or otherwise reduced. In most cases, suspensions and fines levied by the NFL or individual teams were more severe than the justice system's (Schrotenboer 2020 and clickitticket.com 2019).

Crime and Social Class

While crime is often associated with the underprivileged, crimes committed by the wealthy and powerful remain an under-punished and costly problem within society. The FBI reported that victims of burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft lost a total of $15.3 billion dollars in 2009 (FB1 2010). In comparison, when former advisor and financier Bernie Madoff was arrested in 2008, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reported that the estimated losses of his financial Ponzi scheme fraud were close to $50 billion (SEC 2009).

This imbalance based on class power is also found within U.S. criminal law. In the 1980s, the use of crack cocaine (a less expensive but powerful drug) quickly became an epidemic that swept the country’s poorest urban communities. Its pricier counterpart, cocaine, was associated with upscale users and was a drug of choice for the wealthy. The legal implications of being caught by authorities with crack versus cocaine were starkly different. In 1986, federal law mandated that being caught in possession of 50 grams of crack was punishable by a ten-year prison sentence. An equivalent prison sentence for cocaine possession, however, required possession of 5,000 grams. In other words, the sentencing disparity was 1 to 100 (New York Times Editorial Staff 2011). This inequality in the severity of punishment for crack versus cocaine paralleled the unequal social class of respective users. A conflict theorist would note that those in society who hold the power are also the ones who make the laws concerning crime. In doing so, they make laws that will benefit them, while the powerless classes who lack the resources to make such decisions suffer the consequences. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, states passed numerous laws increasing penalties, especially for repeat offenders. The U.S. government passed an even more significant law, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (known as the 1994 Crime Bill), which further increased penalties, funded prisons, and incentivized law enforcement agencies to further pursue drug offenders. One outcome of these policies was the mass incarceration of Black and Hispanic people, which led to a cycle of poverty and reduced social mobility. The crack-cocaine punishment disparity remained until 2010, when President Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, which decreased the disparity to 1 to 18 (The Sentencing Project 2010).

Symbolic Interactionism

Symbolic interactionism is a theoretical approach that can be used to explain how societies and/or social groups come to view behaviors as deviant or conventional.

Labeling Theory

Although all of us violate norms from time to time, few people would consider themselves deviant. Those who do, however, have often been labeled “deviant” by society and have gradually come to believe it themselves. Labeling theory examines the ascribing of a deviant behavior to another person by members of society. Thus, what is considered deviant is determined not so much by the behaviors themselves or the people who commit them, but by the reactions of others to these behaviors. As a result, what is considered deviant changes over time and can vary significantly across cultures.

Sociologist Edwin Lemert expanded on the concepts of labeling theory and identified two types of deviance that affect identity formation. Primary deviance is a violation of norms that does not result in any long-term effects on the individual’s self-image or interactions with others. Speeding is a deviant act, but receiving a speeding ticket generally does not make others view you as a bad person, nor does it alter your own self-concept. Individuals who engage in primary deviance still maintain a feeling of belonging in society and are likely to continue to conform to norms in the future.

Sometimes, in more extreme cases, primary deviance can morph into secondary deviance. Secondary deviance occurs when a person’s self-concept and behavior begin to change after his or her actions are labeled as deviant by members of society. The person may begin to take on and fulfill the role of a “deviant” as an act of rebellion against the society that has labeled that individual as such. For example, consider a high school student who often cuts class and gets into fights. The student is reprimanded frequently by teachers and school staff, and soon enough, develops a reputation as a “troublemaker.” As a result, the student starts acting out even more and breaking more rules; the student has adopted the “troublemaker” label and embraced this deviant identity. Secondary deviance can be so strong that it bestows a master status on an individual. A master status is a label that describes the chief characteristic of an individual. Some people see themselves primarily as doctors, artists, or grandfathers. Others see themselves as beggars, convicts, or addicts.

Techniques of Neutralization

How do people deal with the labels they are given? This was the subject of a study done by Sykes and Matza (1957). They studied teenage boys who had been labeled as juvenile delinquents to see how they either embraced or denied these labels. Have you ever used any of these techniques?

Let’s take a scenario and apply all five techniques to explain how they are used. A young person is working for a retail store as a cashier. Their cash drawer has been coming up short for a few days. When the boss confronts the employee, they are labeled as a thief for the suspicion of stealing. How does the employee deal with this label?

The Denial of Responsibility: When someone doesn’t take responsibility for their actions or blames others. They may use this technique and say that it was their boss’s fault because they don’t get paid enough to make rent or because they’re getting a divorce. They are rejecting the label by denying responsibility for the action.

The Denial of Injury: Sometimes people will look at a situation in terms of what effect it has on others. If the employee uses this technique they may say, “What’s the big deal? Nobody got hurt. Your insurance will take care of it.” The person doesn’t see their actions as a big deal because nobody “got hurt.”

The Denial of the Victim: If there is no victim there’s no crime. In this technique the person sees their actions as justified or that the victim deserved it. Our employee may look at their situation and say, “I’ve worked here for years without a raise. I was owed that money and if you won’t give it to me I’ll get it my own way.”

The Condemnation of the Condemners: The employee might “turn it around on” the boss by blaming them. They may say something like, “You don’t know my life, you have no reason to judge me.” This is taking the focus off of their actions and putting the onus on the accuser to, essentially, prove the person is living up to the label, which also shifts the narrative away from the deviant behavior.

Appeal to a Higher Authority: The final technique that may be used is to claim that the actions were for a higher purpose. The employee may tell the boss that they stole the money because their mom is sick and needs medicine or something like that. They are justifying their actions by making it seem as though the purpose for the behavior is a greater “good” than the action is “bad.” (Sykes & Matza, 1957)

Social Policy and Debate

The right to vote.

Before she lost her job as an administrative assistant, Leola Strickland postdated and mailed a handful of checks for amounts ranging from $90 to $500. By the time she was able to find a new job, the checks had bounced, and she was convicted of fraud under Mississippi law. Strickland pleaded guilty to a felony charge and repaid her debts; in return, she was spared from serving prison time.

Strickland appeared in court in 2001. More than ten years later, she is still feeling the sting of her sentencing. Why? Because Mississippi is one of twelve states in the United States that bans convicted felons from voting (ProCon 2011).

To Strickland, who said she had always voted, the news came as a great shock. She isn’t alone. Some 5.3 million people in the United States are currently barred from voting because of felony convictions (ProCon 2009). These individuals include inmates, parolees, probationers, and even people who have never been jailed, such as Leola Strickland.

Under the Fourteenth Amendment, states are allowed to deny voting privileges to individuals who have participated in “rebellion or other crime” (Krajick 2004). Although there are no federally mandated laws on the matter, most states practice at least one form of felony disenfranchisement .

Is it fair to prevent citizens from participating in such an important process? Proponents of disfranchisement laws argue that felons have a debt to pay to society. Being stripped of their right to vote is part of the punishment for criminal deeds. Such proponents point out that voting isn’t the only instance in which ex-felons are denied rights; state laws also ban released criminals from holding public office, obtaining professional licenses, and sometimes even inheriting property (Lott and Jones 2008).

Opponents of felony disfranchisement in the United States argue that voting is a basic human right and should be available to all citizens regardless of past deeds. Many point out that felony disfranchisement has its roots in the 1800s, when it was used primarily to block Black citizens from voting. These laws disproportionately target poor minority members, denying them a chance to participate in a system that, as a social conflict theorist would point out, is already constructed to their disadvantage (Holding 2006). Those who cite labeling theory worry that denying deviants the right to vote will only further encourage deviant behavior. If ex-criminals are disenfranchised from voting, are they being disenfranchised from society?

Edwin Sutherland: Differential Association

In the early 1900s, sociologist Edwin Sutherland sought to understand how deviant behavior developed among people. Since criminology was a young field, he drew on other aspects of sociology including social interactions and group learning (Laub 2006). His conclusions established differential association theory , which suggested that individuals learn deviant behavior from those close to them who provide models of and opportunities for deviance. According to Sutherland, deviance is less a personal choice and more a result of differential socialization processes. For example, a young person whose friends are sexually active is more likely to view sexual activity as acceptable. Sutherland developed a series of propositions to explain how deviance is learned. In proposition five, for example, he discussed how people begin to accept and participate in a behavior after learning whether it is viewed as “favorable” by those around them. In proposition six, Sutherland expressed the ways that exposure to more “definitions” favoring the deviant behavior than those opposing it may eventually lead a person to partake in deviance (Sutherland 1960), applying almost a quantitative element to the learning of certain behaviors. In the example above, a young person may find sexual activity more acceptable once a certain number of their friends become sexually active, not after only one does so.

Sutherland’s theory may explain why crime is multigenerational. A longitudinal study beginning in the 1960s found that the best predictor of antisocial and criminal behavior in children was whether their parents had been convicted of a crime (Todd and Jury 1996). Children who were younger than ten years old when their parents were convicted were more likely than other children to engage in spousal abuse and criminal behavior by their early thirties. Even when taking socioeconomic factors such as dangerous neighborhoods, poor school systems, and overcrowded housing into consideration, researchers found that parents were the main influence on the behavior of their offspring (Todd and Jury 1996).

Travis Hirschi: Control Theory

Continuing with an examination of large social factors, control theory states that social control is directly affected by the strength of social bonds and that deviance results from a feeling of disconnection from society. Individuals who believe they are a part of society are less likely to commit crimes against it.

Travis Hirschi (1969) identified four types of social bonds that connect people to society:

• Attachment measures our connections to others. When we are closely attached to people, we worry about their opinions of us. People conform to society’s norms in order to gain approval (and prevent disapproval) from family, friends, and romantic partners.
• Commitment refers to the investments we make in the community. A well-respected local businessperson who volunteers at their synagogue and is a member of the neighborhood block organization has more to lose from committing a crime than a person who doesn’t have a career or ties to the community.
• Similarly, levels of involvement , or participation in socially legitimate activities, lessen a person’s likelihood of deviance. A child who plays little league baseball and takes art classes has fewer opportunities to ______.
• The final bond, belief , is an agreement on common values in society. If a person views social values as beliefs, they will conform to them. An environmentalist is more likely to pick up trash in a park, because a clean environment is a social value to them (Hirschi 1969).

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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.

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Girl’s Night: The Upper Limit of Gender Euphoria

Maria higa mcglashan.

Though I discovered my nonbinary identity through the pursuit of pleasure, there are constraints on how much pleasure can be found in gender experimentation. This essay describes my effort to play with the tools of the gender binary - and the disastrous results. I wanted to depart from my lifelong masculine comfort zone by trying more feminine clothes. I put on a wig, makeup, and a pink dress, and went to a nightclub to see how I felt. Based on the theory of Preciado, I expected that gender’s constructedness would leave it open to deconstruction and experimentation. Instead, I found that I was treated better than I had ever been before. I suddenly understood how poor my treatment is, how inaccessible “normal” life is to me, and the restrictions on my capacity to seek pleasure. The reasons for this can be found in the history of gender as a tool of biopower. The gender binary was, from the beginning, built to incentivize conformity and punish deviance, and thus it cannot tolerate my existence. If I am ever to access pleasure the way the rest of the world can, it cannot be in a world structured by binary gender.

Author Biography

(he/she/they)

Maria is a zoology major completing their final semester of their BSc. Despite their scientific background, Maria has always maintained a strong interest in gender studies because of their gender, sexuality, and close connection to queerness. He believes that an understanding of the sciences is incomplete without an understanding of the humanities (and vice versa). Maria plans to pursue a Master’s and a PhD in zoology with a focus in entomology, and intends to keep all of their work informed by an intersectional lens.

Copyright (c) 2024 Maria Higa McGlashan

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

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