If you went back in time to the 1930s and visited any commuter train station, you would notice a number of similarities to today’s commuting scene as well as a few obvious differences. One important similarity is that most people would keep to the right to minimize collisions and inconvenience. But two important differences would stand out: Nearly all the commuters in the 1930s were men, and nearly all of them wore hats. The transition from a predominantly male workforce in the 1930s to today’s more gender-egalitarian workplace was the product of all sorts of social influences, many of them intentional and hard fought. But what about the hats? Was their disappearance over the years deliberate? If so, who did the deliberating? It’s hard to resist the conclusion that this trend was much more mindless—that most people simply copied the clothing choices of everyone else.
Is the tendency to go along with others a good thing or a bad thing? In today’s Western society, which prizes autonomy and uniqueness, the word conformity can seem negative. If someone called you a conformist, for instance, you probably wouldn’t take it as a compliment. To be sure, some types of social influence are bad, such as going along with a crowd to pull a harmful prank or submitting to pressure to drive a vehicle while intoxicated. Other types of conformity, however, are neither good nor bad, such as millennial women parting their hair on the side and Generation Z preferring to part in the middle.
Still other types of conformity are clearly beneficial. Conformity eliminates potential conflict, makes human interaction much smoother, and allows us not to have to think much about every possible action. Conformity plays a big part, for example, in getting people to suppress anger; to pay taxes; to form lines at the theater, museum, and grocery store; and to stay to the right side of the sidewalk or roadway (in the United States anyway). Would any of us really want to do away with those conformist tendencies? Indeed, evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists have argued that a tendency to conform is adaptive. Unless we have a good reason not to conform, we are often well served by doing what others are doing (Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Henrich & Boyd, 1998; T. J. H. Morgan, Laland, & Harris, 2015).
Perhaps the most subtle form of conformity is our tendency to mindlessly imitate other people’s behavior and movements. It’s often said that yawning and laughter are contagious, but a great deal of other behavior is contagious as well. Like it or not, we’re all nonconscious copycats: We all mimic those around us.
The tendency to reflexively mimic the posture, mannerisms, expressions, and other actions of those around us has been examined under carefully controlled conditions. In one study, undergraduate participants were paired with another student (in reality, a confederate) for two 10-minute sessions, during which the participant and confederate took turns describing various photographs from popular magazines, such as Newsweek and Time (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). Participants worked alongside a different confederate in each of the two sessions. The confederate in one session frequently rubbed his or her face; the confederate in the other session continuously shook his or her foot. As the participant and confederate went about their business of describing the various photographs, the participant was surreptitiously filmed. The films captured the participants only—the confederates weren’t visible—so the experimenters watching and scoring the videos later on could not have been affected by any knowledge of what movement—face rubbing or foot shaking—the confederates were making. As predicted, the participants tended to mimic (conform to) the behavior exhibited by the confederate. The participants shook their feet more often in the presence of a foot-shaking confederate and rubbed their faces more often when next to a face-rubbing confederate (Figure 8.1).
Why do we mindlessly copy the behavior of other people? There appear to be two reasons. William James (1890) provided the first explanation, arguing that merely thinking about a behavior makes performing that behavior more likely. Simply thinking about eating a bowl of ice cream, for example, makes us more apt to open the freezer, take out the carton, and dig in. The thought that we might type the wrong letter on the keyboard makes us more prone to typing that very letter (Lane, Groisman, & Ferreira, 2006; Wegner, 1994; Wegner, Ansfield, & Pilloff, 1998). This principle is based on the fact that the brain regions responsible for perception overlap with those responsible for action. When applied to mimicry, it means that when we see others behave in a particular way, that behavior is brought to mind (consciously or otherwise), making us more likely to behave that way ourselves.
The second reason we reflexively mimic others is to facilitate smooth, gratifying interaction and, in so doing, foster social connection. People tend to like those who mimic them more than they like those who don’t, even when they’re unaware of being mimicked (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). What’s more, people who have been mimicked tend to engage in more prosocial behavior (behavior intended to help others) immediately afterward, such as donating money to a good cause or leaving a larger tip for the person who mimicked them (van Baaren et al., 2003, 2004). Studies have shown that our tendency to mimic others is particularly strong when we feel a need to affiliate with others and when the others in question are well liked (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999; Hess, 2021; Lakin & Chartrand, 2003; Leighton et al., 2010; Stel et al., 2010). Mimicry seems to be a helpful first step toward goodwill and harmonious interaction.
Quite a bit of mimicry is asynchronous: You yawn and then the person next to you yawns. But a particularly powerful form of mimicry is synchronous: You and those around you yawn at the same time. Studies have shown that synchronized action can create especially powerful feelings of closeness and bonding. In one simple and very direct test of this idea, students were asked to tap a pencil in time with a metronome. They did so while the experimenter was also tapping in time with a separate metronome. For half of the participants, the metronomes were synched so that they and the experimenter tapped in time with one another. For the other half, the participants and the experimenter tapped at different times. Those who tapped in time with the experimenter reported liking the experimenter more than those who tapped out of phase did (Hove & Risen, 2009).
In another study, groups of three students were asked to walk around campus either in step with one another or as they normally would. Afterward, the students who walked in step with one another indicated that they felt more connected to one another and trusted each other more. They also made more trusting and cooperative decisions in an economic game (Wiltermuth & Heath, 2009; see also Jackson et al., 2018). Studies like this make it easy to understand why armies around the world practice marching together even though no one marches into battle anymore. Doing so facilitates an esprit de corps that fosters a more cohesive and committed fighting force.
Sometimes people conform to one another a bit more consciously, as illustrated by an early conformity experiment by Muzafer Sherif (1936). Sherif was interested in how groups influence the behavior of individuals by shaping how they perceive reality. He noted that frames of reference influence even our most basic perceptions. Whether we think of someone as tall or short depends on the height of everyone else. John Lucas III, at 5'11'' (see accompanying photo), would probably strike you as a bit taller than average if you saw him on campus. But he always looked short during his career as an NBA player. Sherif designed his study to examine how other people, in just this way, can serve as a social frame of reference to change our perception of reality.
Sherif’s experiment was built around what’s called the autokinetic illusion—the sense that a stationary point of light in a completely dark environment is moving. Ancient astronomers first noted this phenomenon, which occurs because in complete darkness there are no other stimuli, or frames of reference, to help the viewer discern where the light is located. Perhaps, Sherif thought, other people in such a completely dark space would serve as a social frame of reference that would influence the viewer’s perceptions of the light’s movement. To start, Sherif put individual participants in a darkened room alone, presented them with a stationary point of light on trial after trial, and had them estimate how far the light “moved” each time. Some people thought, on average, that the light moved very little on each trial (say, 2 inches), while others thought it moved a good deal more (say, 8 inches).
Sherif’s next step was to bring several participants into the room together and have them call out their estimates. He found that people’s estimates tended to converge over time. Those who individually had thought the light moved a considerable amount soon lowered their estimates; those who individually had thought the light moved very little soon raised theirs (Figure 8.2). Sherif argued that everyone’s individual judgments quickly fused into a group norm that influenced how far participants saw the light move. A follow-up experiment reinforced his interpretation: When participants came back for individual testing up to one year later, their judgments still showed the influence of their group’s earlier responses (Rohrer et al., 1954).
Social psychologists typically interpret the behavior of Sherif’s participants to be the result of informational social influence—the reliance on other people’s comments and actions as an indication of what’s likely to be correct, proper, or effective (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004; Deutsch & Gerard, 1955). We want to be right, and the opinions of other people can be a useful source of information to draw on. The tendency to draw on other people’s comments, actions, and opinions as useful sources of information is most pronounced when we’re uncertain about what is factually correct or when we’re in unfamiliar situations and unsure how to behave. For example, we’re more likely to conform to others’ views on subjects we have only vague ideas about, such as macroeconomic policy, than on familiar topics, such as how much more fun it would be to vacation in Northern Italy versus North Korea (Sharps & Robinson, 2017; Tesser, Campbell, & Mickler, 1983). And we’re more likely to conform to what others are doing when we are in a foreign country than when we are in the familiar environment of our own country. Note that the task Sherif asked his participants to perform was about as ambiguous as it gets, so informational social influence was strong. The light, in fact, didn’t move at all—it just appeared to move.
Informational social influence has a strong impact on the popularity of contemporary music. In one ingenious study, investigators allowed one group of participants to listen to whatever they wanted from a long list of largely unknown songs and to download any songs they especially liked (Salganik, Dodds, & Watts, 2006). These participants made their choices on their own, without any social influence. Other subjects, meanwhile, were assigned to one of eight “markets.” These participants could see the choices made by their peers in that market, and that market only. What were their peers listening to and downloading? And critically, what influence did that knowledge have on their own choices? The decision of which songs are “good” and worth listening to is not at all clear and can be highly idiosyncratic, leaving room for informational social influence.
Indeed, the results were striking. In each of the eight markets, participants were far more likely to download songs that their in-market peers had downloaded. Thus, whatever songs a few people happened to listen to early on influenced the subsequent choices of others, creating very different music scenes in the eight different markets.
As you read about Sherif's autokinetic illusion study, you might have been wondering: What’s the big deal here? It makes sense that participants conformed to one another’s judgments. After all, there was in fact no right answer, and participants couldn’t have felt confident in their own estimates. Why not rely on others? If this is your reaction, then you’re thinking just like another pioneer of conformity research, psychologist Solomon Asch. Asch thought that Sherif’s experiment, although informative about a certain type of conformity, didn’t address situations in which there is a clear conflict between an individual’s own judgment and that of the group. Sherif’s findings don’t apply, for example, to the conflict people might feel knowing that they would be better off getting vaccinated for COVID-19 but also knowing that their families wouldn’t approve. Asch predicted that in a case of clear conflict between a person’s own position and the viewpoint of the group, there would be far less conformity than what Sherif observed. He was right. There is less conformity in those circumstances. The reduced rate of conformity, however, was not what made Asch’s experiment one of the most famous in the history of psychology. What made his study so well-known was how often participants actually did conform, even when they thought the group’s viewpoint was completely wrongheaded (Levine, 1999; Prislin & Crano, 2012).
In this famous experiment (Asch, 1956), eight students (all men) were gathered together to perform a simple perceptual task: determining which of three lines was the same length as a target line (Figure 8.3). Each person called out his judgment publicly, one at a time. The task was so easy that the experience was uneventful, boring even—at first.
On the third trial, however, one participant found that his private judgment was at odds with the expressed opinions of everyone else in the group. He was the only true participant in the experiment; the seven others were confederates instructed by Asch to respond incorrectly. The confederates responded incorrectly on 11 more occasions before the experiment was over. The question was how often the participant would forsake what he knew to be the correct answer and conform to the incorrect judgment given by everyone else. In this study, there was no ambiguity as there had been in Sherif’s experiment: The right answer was clear. (When participants in a control group made these judgments by themselves, with no social pressure, they almost never made a mistake.)
As Asch predicted, there was less conformity in his study than in Sherif’s, but the rate of caving in to the group was still surprisingly high. Three-quarters of the participants conformed to the group’s incorrect answer at least once. Overall, participants conformed on a third of the critical trials. These results aren’t simply surprising; they are disturbing as well. We like to think of people, ourselves especially, as sticking to what we think is right rather than following the herd (Pronin, Berger, & Molouki, 2007; Wice & Davidai, 2021). In addition, we worry about people abandoning the dictates of their own conscience to follow others into wrongheaded or potentially destructive behavior.
There is undoubtedly some informational social influence, discussed in the previous section, at work in Asch’s experiment: The incorrect judgments called out by the confederates were for lines that were only 0.5–0.75 inch off the correct answer, so some participants may have questioned their own judgment and regarded the confederates’ responses as reliable sources of information. However, control participants who were not subject to social pressure got the answer right nearly 100 percent of the time, so there shouldn’t have been much uncertainty about the correct response. Thus, informational social influence was not the main cause of conformity. The primary reason people conformed was to avoid standing out negatively in the eyes of the group. Social psychologists refer to this kind of influence as normative social influence—the desire to avoid being criticized, disapproved of, or shunned (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955).
People are often reluctant to depart from the norms of society, or at least the norms of the groups they care most about, because they fear the social consequences (Cialdini, Kallgren, & Reno, 1991). Consider what happened to Wyoming’s sole member of the House of Representatives, Liz Cheney. At the time of the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Cheney was the chair of the House Republican Conference, the third-highest position in the House Republican leadership. But when she voted to impeach President Donald Trump, her Republican colleagues in the House voted to remove her from her leadership position. Normative social influence stems from the fear that such punishment from one’s peers is possible. That fear has led many of Cheney’s Republican colleagues to remain silent about the insurrection and Trump’s role in it, even as they have been highly critical in private (DeBonis & Sotomayor, 2021).
In Asch’s experiment, the normative social pressures were sufficiently intense that the participants found themselves in a wrenching dilemma: “Should I say what I truly think the answer is? But what would everyone else think if I did that? They all agree, and they all seem so confident. Will they think I’m daft? Will they interpret my disagreement as a slap in the face? But what kind of person am I if I go along with them? What the #@!$% should I do?”
To get an idea of the intensity of this dilemma, imagine the following scenario. As part of a discussion of Asch’s experiment, your social psychology professor shows an image of the target line and the three test lines and reports that although the right answer is line B, the confederates all say it’s C. As your professor begins to move on, one student raises his hand and announces with conviction, “But the right answer is C!”
What would happen? Probably everyone would chuckle, making the charitable assumption that the student was trying to be funny. But if the student continued to insist that the confederates’ answer was correct, the chuckles would turn to nervous laughter, and everyone would turn toward the professor in an implicit plea to “make this awkward situation go away.” In subsequent lectures, people might avoid sitting by the nonconformist, and lunch invitations, dating opportunities, and offers to join a study group would likely diminish as well. Negative social repercussions like these are what Asch’s participants likely felt they risked if they departed from the majority’s response. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that participants in Asch’s studies and many subsequent investigations have so often chosen not to take the risk and instead to conform to the majority response (Janes & Olson, 2000; Kruglanski & Webster, 1991; Levine, 1989; Lisciandra, Postma-Nilsenovà, & Colombo, 2013; Schachter, 1951).
Several generations of researchers have examined a number of variables that influence the tendency to conform. These include the characteristics of the group; the surrounding context, including cultural influences; and the task or issue at hand. (See Box 8.1 for another determinant of people’s readiness to conform.) This research has provided a clearer understanding of when people are especially likely to conform and when they’re less likely to do so. Both informational and normative social influences are powerful forces: Change either one, and the rate of conformity changes as well.
DATA EXPLORATION
It’s probably no surprise that people are more likely to conform to a bigger group. What is surprising, perhaps, is that the effect of group size levels off pretty quickly (Figure 8.4). Research using Asch’s paradigm, for example, has shown an increase in conformity as the size of the group increases, but only to a group size of three or four; after that, the amount of conformity levels off (Bond, 2005; Campbell & Fairey, 1989; Gerard, Wilhelmy, & Conolley, 1968; Insko et al., 1985; L. A. Rosenberg, 1961).
When we consider informational social influence, it makes sense that the more people who express a particular opinion, the more likely it is that the opinion has merit as a source of information—but only to a certain point. The validity of a consensus opinion increases only if the individual opinions are independent of one another. And the more people there are, the less likely it is that their views are independent; therefore, additional consenting opinions don’t offer any additional real information.
As for normative social influence, it makes sense that the larger the group, the more people one stands to displease, so conformity is more likely. But here, too, group size has an impact only up to a point. A person can feel only so much embarrassment, and the difference between being viewed as odd, foolish, or difficult by 2 versus 4 people is psychologically much more powerful than the difference between being viewed that way by, say, 12 versus 14 people.
BOX 8.1Not So Fast: Critical Thinking About Conformity and Construal
A common reaction to learning about Asch’s experiment is to think, “Wow, if people conform that much to a group of strangers, imagine how much they’d conform to the judgments of people they care about and have to deal with in the future!” Indeed, it is true that normative social influence is diminished in situations, like Asch’s, where people care less about others’ judgments because everyone is a stranger and they all assume they’ll never see one another again (Lott & Lott, 1961; Wolf, 1985).
Yet there are other, more subtle aspects of Asch’s procedure that can lead to more conformity than usually occurs in daily life. Participants in Asch’s experiment faced a double whammy. First, they had to confront the fact that everyone else saw things differently than they did. Second, they had no basis for understanding why everyone else saw things differently. (“Could I be mistaken? No, it’s as plain as day. Could they be mistaken? I don’t see how, because they’re not any farther away than I am and it’s so clear. Are they unusual? No, they don’t look much different from me or anyone else.”)
If we can pinpoint a reason why our opinions are different (“They don’t see things the way I do because they’re wearing distorting glasses”), both informational influence and normative social influence weaken. Informational social influence decreases because the explanation for the difference of opinion can diminish the group’s impact as a source of information (“They’re biased”). Normative social influence decreases because we can assume that those in the majority are aware of why we differ from them. For instance, if we have different views on some burning political issue of the day, those who disagree with us might think we’re biased, selfish, or have different values, but at least they won’t think we’re crazy. In Asch’s situation, in contrast, the participants faced the reasonable fear that if they departed from everyone else’s judgment, their behavior would look truly bizarre, and everyone would think they were nuts.
The broader lesson here is about the importance of construal, even in the context of experiments. As we have stressed throughout this book, people respond not to the objective situations they face but to their subjective interpretations of those situations. Participants in Asch’s study were in a situation in which it was unusually hard to develop a compelling interpretation of what was going on. And it’s hard to act independently and decisively when things have stopped making sense, so it may be a mistake to assume that Asch’s participants would conform even more outside the psychology lab (L. Ross, Bierbrauer, & Hoffman, 1976).
To understand the real meaning of any experiment, it’s important to pay attention to how the participants might have interpreted the instructions, procedures, and stimuli they faced. Likewise, experimenters must pay attention to the meaning that participants are apt to give their experience in the lab in order to design studies that constitute truly informative tests of their hypotheses. Running participants in experiments isn’t the same as running rats in mazes: People don’t passively record and respond to the surrounding context; they actively construe it and respond to what they’ve construed.
A striking effect was observed in Asch’s studies when the group was not entirely unanimous. Recall that in the basic paradigm, the participant went along with the confederates and reported the wrong answer a third of the time. That figure dropped precipitously when the true participant had an ally—that is, when just one other member of the group deviated from the majority (Figure 8.5). This effect occurs because the presence of an ally weakens both informational social influence (“Maybe I’m right after all”) and normative social influence (“At least I’ve got someone to stand by me”). This effect suggests a powerful tool for protecting independence of thought and action: If you expect to be pressured to conform and want to remain true to your beliefs, bring along an ally. Indeed, an important subtext of Asch’s research is just how hard it can be to go it alone. People can stand up to misguided peers, but they usually need some help. Being the lone dissenter can be agonizingly difficult.
Note that the other person who breaks the group’s unanimity doesn’t need to offer the correct answer—just something that departs from the group’s answer (Asch, 1955; Morris & Miller, 1975; Wilder & Allen, 1977). Suppose the right answer is the shortest of the three lines, and the majority claims it’s the longest. If the fellow dissenter states that the middle line is the correct match, it still reduces the rate of conformity even though the participant’s own view (that it’s the shortest line) hasn’t been reinforced. What matters is the break in unanimity. This fact has important implications for free speech. It suggests that we might want to tolerate loathsome and obviously false statements (“The Gates Foundation engineered the coronavirus pandemic”; “The World Trade Center attacks were a government hoax”) not because what is said has any value but because it liberates other people to make atypical remarks that are of value. The presence of voices, even bizarre or patently wrongheaded ones, that depart from conventional opinion can encourage other people (and the body politic as a whole) to speak out and thus can foster productive political discourse.
If standing up to a misguided majority is hard, what happens when people can register dissent without calling attention to themselves? In other words, what happens when the response is anonymous? Anonymity eliminates normative social influence and therefore should substantially reduce conformity. Indeed, when the true participants in Asch’s paradigm were allowed to write their judgments on a piece of paper instead of having to say them aloud for the group to hear, conformity dropped dramatically. When nobody else is aware of your judgment, there is no need to fear the group’s disapproval.
This effect highlights an important distinction between the impacts of informational and normative social influence. Informational social influence, by guiding how we come to see the issues or stimuli before us, leads to internalization, or the private acceptance of the position advanced by the majority (Kelman, 1958; S. Winter, Remmelswaal, & Vos, 2021). We don’t just mimic a particular response—we adopt the group’s perspective. Normative social influence, in contrast, often has a greater impact on public compliance than on private acceptance. That is, to avoid disapproval, we sometimes do or say one thing but continue to believe another.
Suppose you were a participant in Asch’s experiment, and the other participants who were inexplicably stating what you thought was the wrong answer were all former major-league batting champions. If you proceeded on the assumption that a player can’t lead the league in hitting without exceptional eyesight, you’d probably grant the group considerable authority and go along with the group’s opinion. In contrast, if the rest of the participants were all wearing thick eyeglasses, you’d be less apt to take their opinions seriously.
As this thought experiment illustrates, the expertise and status of the group members powerfully influence the rate of conformity. Expertise and status often go together: We grant greater status to those with expertise, and we often assume (not always correctly) that those with high status are experts (Koslowsky & Schwarzwald, 2001). To the extent that these characteristics can be separated, however, expertise primarily affects informational social influence. Experts are more likely to be right, so we take their opinions more seriously as sources of information. Status, in contrast, mainly affects normative social influence. High-status individuals can do more to hurt our social standing than lower-status individuals can.
Many researchers have examined the effects of expertise and status on conformity (Cialdini & Trost, 1998; Crano, 1970; Driskell & Mullen, 1990; Ettinger et al., 1971). One of the most intriguing studies of status used a paradigm quite different from Asch’s. E. Paul Torrance (1955) gave the members of navy bombing crews—pilot, navigator, and gunner—a number of reasoning problems, such as this horse-trading problem:
A man bought a horse for $60 and then sold it for $70. He later repurchased the horse for $80 and then, changing his mind yet again, sold it for $90. How much money did he make on his series of transactions? Click below to see the correct answer.
$20.
Amount paid = $140 ($60 + $80).
Amount received = $160 ($70 + $90).
The crew then had to report one answer for the whole group. Torrance monitored the group’s deliberations and found that if the pilot (who generally held the highest status) originally came up with the correct solution, the group eventually reported it as their answer 91 percent of the time. If the navigator offered the correct answer, the group ended up reporting the correct answer 80 percent of the time. But if the lowly gunner offered the correct answer, the group offered it up only 63 percent of the time. The opinions of higher-status individuals thus tend to carry more weight (Foushee, 1984).
As we emphasize throughout this book, people from interdependent cultures are much more concerned about their relationships with others and about fitting into the broader social context than people from independent cultures are. People reared in interdependent cultures are therefore likely to be more susceptible to both informational social influence (they consider the actions and opinions of others to be very telling) and normative social influence (they consider the high regard of others to be very important). Thus, people from interdependent cultures might be expected to conform more often than those from independent cultures.
Evidence supports this contention. An analysis of the results of 133 experiments using the Asch paradigm in 17 countries found that conformity does indeed tend to be greater in interdependent countries (R. Bond & Smith, 1996). The individualism that is highly valued in American and Western European societies has encouraged individuals in those independent cultures to be more willing to stand apart from the majority.
Michele Gelfand and her colleagues have pursued a distinction between cultures that overlaps somewhat with the independent-interdependent dimension but differs enough that it deserves a name of its own: tightness versus looseness (Elster & Gelfand, 2021; Gelfand, 2018; Gelfand et al., 2011). Conformity to social norms lies at the heart of this construct. Some cultures, which Gelfand calls “tight,” have strong norms regarding how people should behave, and they don’t readily tolerate departure from those norms. Other cultures are “loose”: Their norms aren’t as strong, and their members tolerate more deviance.
In a highly ambitious study, the Gelfand team examined a number of variables in 33 nations (Gelfand et al., 2011). They found that compared with loose nations, tight nations are more likely to have autocratic or dictatorial governments, to punish dissent, to have sharp controls on what can be said in the media, to have more laws and higher monitoring to ensure that the laws are obeyed, and to inflict more punishment for disobedience. If a nation was tight on one of these dimensions, it tended to be tight on all; if it was loose on one, it tended to be loose on all. Tight countries include India, Germany, the People’s Republic of China, South Korea, Japan, Austria, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Turkey, and Italy. Loose countries include Greece, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Ukraine, New Zealand, and Brazil. You probably guessed that the United States is relatively loose, which it is—on the whole. But there’s great variation across the 50 states on almost everything, including how tight or loose they are. California, Nevada, and Maine are rather loose, whereas Mississippi, Kansas, and Texas are rather tight (Harrington & Gelfand, 2014).
Gelfand and her colleagues asked people in each of the 33 countries about the appropriateness of arguing, crying, laughing, singing, flirting, reading a newspaper, and several other behaviors in each of 15 different social situations or places, such as a doctor’s office, a restaurant, and a movie theater (Gelfand et al., 2011). The tighter the nation’s laws and norms, the fewer of these behaviors were allowed in these various situations. The researchers also asked people if their country had many social norms, whether others would strongly disapprove if someone acted inappropriately, and so forth. Citizens in tighter nations pointed to tighter constraints.
Why are some nations tight and others loose? The Gelfand team found that tighter nations tend to have higher population densities, fewer natural resources, less reliable food supplies, less access to safe water, greater risk of natural disasters, more territorial threats from neighbors, and a higher prevalence of pathogens (Gelfand et al., 2011). It appears, then, that behavioral constraints are associated with, and perhaps partly caused by, ecological constraints. Necessity has been described as the mother of invention, and it appears to give birth to cultural tightness as well.
There were times in the United States when some people enslaved others, when women weren’t allowed to vote, and when children worked long hours for scandalously low pay in unhealthy conditions. But small groups of abolitionists, suffragettes, and child welfare advocates saw things differently than their peers. They worked tirelessly to change public opinion about each of these issues—and they succeeded. In each case, the broader public changed its views, and important legislation was passed. Minority opinion became the majority opinion. One of the most dramatic examples of minority influence in much of the developed world is quite recent. Over the past 25 years, the acceptance of same-sex marriage has grown from a small minority opinion to a majority opinion today.
Examples like these remind us that although conformity pressures can be powerful, majority opinion doesn’t always prevail. It’s possible to resist conformity pressure, and minority voices are sometimes persuasive enough to change the prevailing norms. How do minority opinions come to influence the majority? Are the sources of influence the same as those that majorities bring to bear on minorities?
In the first experimental examination of these questions, Serge Moscovici and his colleagues had groups of participants call out whether a color was green or blue (Moscovici, Lage, & Naffrechoux, 1969). The border between blue and green isn’t always clear, but the critical stimuli the participants saw were ones that, when tested alone, participants nearly always thought were blue (99 percent of the time). The experimenter showed participants these stimuli in a setting where they could hear one another’s responses, including those of a minority group of respondents (confederates of the study) who all responded alike. When the confederates varied their collective responses between “green” and “blue,” the participants said “green” after the confederates did so only 1 percent of the time, about the same as when participants were tested alone. But when the confederates responded with “green” consistently, the participants responded with “green” 8 percent of the time.
The influence of the consistent minority showed up in other ways as well. When the participants thought the study was over, the experimenter introduced them to a second investigator. This second investigator showed participants a series of blue-green colors and recorded where each participant, individually, thought blue left off and green began. Those who had earlier been exposed to a consistent minority now identified more of these stimuli as green; their sense of the border between blue and green had shifted. Thus, when the minority opinion was consistent, it had both an immediate effect on participants’ responses in the public setting and a latent effect on their subsequent private judgments.
Further investigations of minority influence have shown that minorities have their effect primarily through informational social influence rather than through normative social influence (Moscovici, 1985; Nemeth, 1986; W. Wood et al., 1994). People in the majority are typically not terribly concerned about the social costs of stating their opinion out loud—they have the majority on their side and normative social influence is minimal. But they might wonder why the minority keeps stating its divergent opinion. This can lead the majority to consider the stimulus more carefully, resulting in a level of scrutiny and systematic thought that can produce genuine change in attitudes and beliefs. Thus, majorities typically elicit more conformity, but it is often of the public compliance sort. In contrast, minorities typically influence fewer people, but the nature of the influence is often deeper and results in true private attitude change (Maass & Clark, 1983).
LOOKING BACKConformity can be a response to implicit or explicit social pressure, and it can be the result of automatic mimicry, informational social influence, or normative social influence. Group size influences conformity, but it appears to reach maximum effect at around four people. Unanimity is also crucial in conformity, and a single ally can help an individual hold out against the group. People conform more to those with high status or expertise, and they conform more when they must express their opinions publicly rather than register them in private. People from interdependent cultures conform more than people from independent cultures do, and the pressures to conform are greater in tight cultures than in loose ones. Conformity pressures notwithstanding, minorities can make an impact, primarily through informational social influence.
