Majority Influence

There are many studies which have been carried out to research conformity, and some are of a higher validity than others.

The main study which has been carried out on majority influence was carried out by Asch in 1956. This study aimed to find out how people would behave when given an unambiguous task, and whether or not they would be influenced by confederates, who would be asked to give the wrong answer before the participants themselves answered the question that they were being asked. He found that 75% of all participants conformed at least once, which lead him to believe that confederates could actually influence the behaviour and even opinions of others. Although this study was carried out in controlled conditions, which makes the outcomes seem valid, the study may tell us very little about real life itself. The participants were asked to identify the length of a line; a rather insignificant task which they wouldn’t be asked to do in real life. This means that they may have conformed to save themselves from feeling embarrassed because of being different to the other ‘participants’. Because of this, we would expect the levels of conformity to decrease if it were a different task that may have had more relevance to the daily lives of the participants. As well as this, the findings may be specific to one culture, as all of the participants were from America in the 1950’s; so were therefore part of a highly conformist society. Because of this, we should expect to see different results if the study was to be carried out in different cultures. Because of these reasons, the study only has limited validity with our own culture today, however it can still give us a good idea of how people conform.

Similar to this, Jennes (1932) asked some students to estimate how many beans were in a jar. After they had estimated, they were asked to discuss their ideas with the rest of the group. After they had done this, they were asked to give their individual estimates again, and it was found that they all conformed to a group norm. This showed that in a situation which is ambiguous, we look to others for ideas as to what to say. This could be considered as valid, because even though the task was not likely to be carried out in real life, the fact that the discussion with the group actively changed the opinions of most of the individuals shows that people do conform to a group norm.

Another study which is very similar to the one carried out by Jennes is the one carried out by Sherif, in which he sat participants in a dark room and asked them to estimate how far a point of light moved. As they were allowed to discuss their answers in a group, they came to a group norm, as in the study above. This is also valid, as it has actively shown that people do conform.

One factor that must be taken into account in all studies is the size of the majority. It has been shown that as the size of the majority increases, the percentage of conformity increased to a certain point. For instance, after the majority had been increased to above three, there was still an increase in conformity, but not as significant.

Overall, the above studies can be seen to be valid to some extent, and, providing you take into account their limitations, they can be useful to psychologists studying conformity.