Conformity Essay

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Conformity is a concept that has intrigued psychologists for decades; a concept that has been the foundation of numerous studies, books, and that has been subtly woven into the media. Most of the research done on conformity has to do with what can cause conforming behavior and when conforming behavior is most prevalent. There are generally two types of influences that can cause conforming behavior, informational social influences and normative social influence. Both deal with the when and why of conformity in society and what situations typically cause a group or one or two people to conform. The most powerful and dangerous type of conformity is conformity to authority, which can cause people to obey orders that they would normally not follow in any other situation. With that being said, informational social influence can fuel conforming behavior, especially in instances when the situation is a crisis, ambiguous, and when other people in the situation have authority or expertise. One example of informational influence and conformity is a study of conforming behavior to authority done by Milgram (1963). Milgram advertised his study as a way to test memory and learning and used male participants ranging from ages 20 to 50. One subject and one victim performed in each experiment, the subject was always the participant and the victim was always the confederate. To make it believable, Milgram told the participants that he wanted to test how much punishment is best for learning and told each participant to pick a slip of paper to determine which would be the teacher and which would be the learner. Both slips of paper were labeled with teacher, after drawing the slip of paper both the teacher and the learner were led to a room and the le... ... middle of paper ... ...rong simply because they believed the confederate had more knowledge and would choose the right answer. And though the situation was not as confusing as in other studies it still had the effect of making the participants look to others for guidance on how to precede in the giving their answers. In conclusion, informational social influence plays a large role in how and when people will give into conforming behavior. In both studies, the concept of informational social influence is used to test what the participants do; by adding that factors of putting the participants in an ambiguous situation, a crisis, or in a situation where they feel the need to look to someone with expertise to go forward. Both Williamson et al. (2013) and Milgram (1963) have proved how easy it is to give into influences and exhibit conforming behavior, even up to a possibly dangerous result.

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