Demonstrate A Concept Blog

The first week of November has been extremely politically charged, especially with talks of the upcoming Presidential election. Because of all the hype, I have spent a good amount of time discussing my views with friends and family, even if we do not all agree. As we are learning more about conformity in social psychology, I began to see how the propensity to alter opinions and behaviors in order to go along with norms of certain groups (Sherif, 1936) is quite influential in political discussions. When I started forming ideas for my demonstrate-a-concept blog, I realized that political dialogue would be the perfect forum to effectively illustrate conformity.

As I mentioned, it is not uncommon for me to have political discussions with my friends. Two of my best friends work for a state representative candidate, and are always pushing me to vote for their boss. On Mondays, five of us often have dinner together before our sorority chapter meetings, and political discussions almost always slip in somewhere. Therefore, I thought this Monday would be the perfect opportunity to test out the theory of conformity on my friends.

While we were sitting at Dos Salsas, I brought up women’s rights, and how I felt that McCain’s platform was very anti-women’s rights. Knowing that Erin and Shana were very liberal and that Taryn and Teryl were pretty conservative, I wondered if the opinions voiced first would influence the others. Although I am conservative in many aspects, I have certainly made a shift leftward in college. I went ahead and voiced my opinion first, knowing that Erin and Shana would probably follow close behind with their opinions, as they are invested in working for a liberal candidate. I detailed my views on Obama’s forward-thinking platform, and my worries about McCain’s desire to take away certain rights from women, such as the right to choose. I ended my little speech by saying, “overall, I’d say I am pretty liberal.” Erin and Shana immediately jumped in with examples and supported what I had to say. One of them even went so far as to say that she already voted straight-ticket liberal. Taryn and Teryl were pretty quiet during the discussion, so I looked over to Teryl next and asked her point-blank, “would you say you’re more liberal or conservative?” Although there were no confederates in my experiment, I was counting on Teryl as my “participant” to hopefully support some aspect of conformity, especially knowing that she was a staunch conservative. As I expected, Teryl only slightly hesitated and then stated that she was probably somewhat liberal, especially in consideration of her stance on women’s rights. I deduced that Teryl was persuaded to conform by informational influence, meaning that one perceives others to be correct in their opinions, so they go along with them (Crutchfield, 1955). However, my attribution was proven wrong by Teryl when she later explained why she answered the way she did. This can be seen in the posted video.

In conclusion to my small experiment, we asked Taryn what her political views were. She discussed the women’s rights issue pretty thoroughly, and then said that although she would consider herself conservative in many ways, she guessed she had some liberal views too. In the end, my two conservative friends had answered that they were somewhat liberal, after what seemed like a liberal group consensus from three of the others in the group. I was interested to see whether or not this could be attributed to conformity, and therefore videotaped myself asking Teryl why she said what she did at the table. Knowing that Teryl was conservative, I hoped that she would give me an honest answer now that the group norm of being liberal had been dissipated. The video was the first time I had asked her about her answer since our dinner conversation the night before. I had also already asked my other friends separately not to discuss our conversation with her because I was exploring something for Psychology. In her answer, she essentially explains that she felt she needed to go along with the group. She demonstrates that she was persuaded by a normative influence, meaning she was attempting to avoid negative social perception or penalties due to her answer (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955). Even though we are all close and comfortable with each other, Teryl felt that a group norm had been established and dared not challenge it with her difference of opinion.

Now that Teryl has been de-briefed about the experiment, she says she feels that she would voice her opinions in most situations, and may have felt extra pressure because of the controversial political topic. However, I explained to her that most people rationalize their behavior in this way, but not to worry because most people also often fall prey to conformity!

References

Crutchfield, R. S. (1955). Conformity and character. American Psychologist, 10, 195-198.

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

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