Scientific Evidence of Conformity

Although it is reasonable to say that most, if not all of us, conform to societal expectation, beliefs and behaviours in some form or another I though it would be good to find some actual scientific proof of the various different forms in action.

Compliance has been noted in action during the Asch line experiment. This was where a individuals were put into a group, the other members of which were aware of what was going on in the experiment, and told to match lines on a left card with that of a right. For certain cards the majority of the group purposefully gave an incorrect answer, the aim of which was to see whether or not the participant would follow the group given that answers were given out loud. The results found that roughly 75% of all participants would give an incorrect answer at least once in order to conform to the rest of the group despite it being clearly wrong (an early and similar experiment Sherif had sought to find a similar answer but it was considered to ambiguous in what it got participants to answer).

The Stanford prison experiment can also be seen to prove both compliance theory and integration theory, where by one conforms in order to create a defined social standing and role within society. Despite participants agreeing to the experiment and knowing it was only make believe, it was carried out as much like that of an actual prison as possible with all the normal procedures for arrest and incarceration such as fingerprinting, being strip searched and deloused all taking place.

The aim was to see whether or not the problems of brutality and corruption found in many prisons were a result of a few individuals with sadistic tendencies or simply a result of conflicting personality traits, eg lawless and disrespectful prisoners vs domineering guards, coupled with societal expectations. The study found that participants, particularity the 'guards', quickly and easily took to their assigned roles and that within hours the guards were acting in cruel and often sadistic ways towards the 'inmates'. In much the same way prisoners also adopted behaviours expected of them such as a strictly obeying the rules, regarding them as being there for their own good, as well as telling on other prisoners and siding with guards when rules were broken. As the experiment progressed it found that the 'guards' readily became more aggressive where as the 'prisoners' became more submissive.

It concluded that people will readily conform to social roles, however its over all credibility has been debated given its situational rather than dispositional subject matter.