Conformity (psychology) in the context of "Swarthmore College"

Conformity or conformism is the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to group norms, politics or being like-minded. Norms are implicit, specific rules, guidance shared by a group of individuals, that guide their interactions with others. People often choose to conform to society rather than to pursue personal desires – because it is often easier to follow the path others have made already, rather than forging a new one. Thus, conformity is sometimes a product of group communication. This tendency to conform occurs in small groups and/or in society as a whole and may result from subtle unconscious influences (predisposed state of mind), or from direct and overt social pressure. Conformity can occur in the presence of others, or when an individual is alone. For example, people tend to follow social norms when eating or when watching television, even if alone.

Solomon Asch, a social psychologist whose obedience research remains among the most influential in psychology, demonstrated the power of conformity through his experiment on line judgment. The Asch conformity experiment demonstrates how much influence conformity has on people. In a laboratory experiment, Asch asked 50 male students from Swarthmore College in the US to participate in a 'vision test'. Asch put a naive participant in a room with seven stooges in a line judgment task. When confronted with the line task, each stooge had already decided what response they would give. The real members of the experimental group sat in the last position, while the others were pre-arranged experimenters who gave apparently incorrect answers in unison; Asch recorded the last person's answer to analyze the influence of conformity. Surprisingly, about one third (32%) of the participants who were placed in this situation sided with the clearly incorrect majority on the critical trials. Over the 12 critical trials, about 75% of participants conformed at least once. Ash demonstrated in this experiment that people could produce obviously erroneous responses just to conform to a group of similar erroneous responders, this was called normative influence. After being interviewed, subjects acknowledged that they did not actually agree with the answers given by others. The majority of them, however, believed that groups are wiser or did not want to appear as mavericks and chose to repeat the same obvious misconception. There is another influence that is sometimes more subtle, called informational influence. This is when people turn to others for information to help them make decisions in new or ambiguous situations. Most of the time, people were simply conforming to social group norms that they were unaware of, whether consciously or unconsciously, especially through a mechanism called the Chameleon effect. This effect is when people unintentionally and automatically mimic others' gestures, posture, and speech style in order to produce rapport and create social interactions that run smoothly (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). It is clear from this that conformity has a powerful effect on human perception and behavior, even to the extent that it can be faked against a person's basic belief system.