Normative influence

In addition to wanting to hold correct beliefs about the world, people are motivated to be accepted by other group members. The desire for social acceptance is very powerful in a wide range of situations and explains why people are typically quite uncomfortable if they think others currently reject them or are likely to do so in the future.

People sometimes conform to groups because they are motivated to be liked (or at least not disliked) and believe that other members will feel more kindly toward them if they conform to rather than deviate from group norms. That kind of conformity reflects what Deutsch and Gerard labeled normative influence. In general, normative influence produces public compliance but not private acceptance. That is illustrated in the work of Asch, as discussed above.

Group members exhibit more conformity when working toward a common goal rather than toward individual goals, presumably because they believe that deviance on their part will be punished more severely in the former case. As might be expected, however, conformity in common-goal groups is substantially reduced if members believe that such behaviour will lower the group’s probability of attaining a positive outcome. Another factor that increases normative influence is surveillance by other group members. People who are concerned about others’ evaluations ought to conform more when their behaviour is public than when it is private, and conformity is in fact higher in the former condition.

It should be noted that group members do reject people who deviate from the group consensus. Factors influencing the likelihood of rejection include the extremity and content of the deviate’s position, the presumed reason for the deviate’s behaviour, and the deviate’s status in the group.

Mixed cases

Although informational and normative influences have been discussed here as though they are mutually exclusive, they occur simultaneously in at least some group situations. That is a major premise of social-identity theory, which examines how the self-concept is influenced by social-group membership. Social-identity theory assumes that disagreement with others produces uncertainty only when one expects to agree with those people. For that reason, disagreement with in-group members produces more uncertainty than disagreement with out-group members. In addition, the theory assumes that some in-group members are more influential than others.

More specifically, a member’s influence depends on how much that member’s position embodies what is unique about the group—the norm that differentiates the in-group from out-groups. Members who are closer to that norm are more influential than those who are farther from it. Finally, the theory assumes that conformity involves private acceptance as well as public compliance, because people believe that in-group norms provide valid evidence about reality. A substantial amount of research is consistent with the social-identity explanation of conformity.

Individual differences

Every conformity experiment has found that some people conform more than others. By using analytic techniques that combined the results of many studies, the American psychologists Alice Eagly and Linda Carli found that women were more influenceable than men, particularly in conformity experiments that did not involve surveillance and in attitude-change studies where participants listened to persuasive communications. The most plausible explanation is that most men are socialized to be more dominant and assertive than are most women, and most people of both sexes are more likely to exhibit such gender-consistent behaviour in public (group-pressure) settings than in private settings.

The psychologists Michael Bond and Peter Smith examined cultural differences in conformity by analyzing the results of studies involving participants from 17 countries. They measured the relationship between the extent of individualism or collectivism in the countries involved and the amount of conformity that residents displayed on Asch’s line-judgment task. Individualism is a cultural orientation that emphasizes independence, autonomy, and self-reliance. Collectivism is a cultural orientation that emphasizes interdependence, cooperation, and social harmony.

Bond and Smith found that cultural values were indeed related to conformity: people in collectivist cultures displayed more conformity than did people in individualist cultures. Although the interpretation of those results is not completely clear, it is plausible that collectivists conform more than individualists because they give greater weight to collective goals and are more concerned about how other people view their behaviour and are affected by it.