Individual and the Group

Humans are social animals and have a basic need to "belong".

Human behaviour can only fully be understood if the social context is taken into account.

1. Assumptions in sociocultural approach

a. Culture influences behaviour.
b. People do not only have an individual identity but also a social identity(s) depending
upon the their various group memberships.
i. Social identities are very important to the definition of who we are, and many
behaviours are determined by membership to groups such as family, community,
club, or nationality.
c. Our behaviour is influenced by others.
i. The relationship between the individual and the group is bidirectional: as the
individual is affected by being part of a group, the individual can also affect
behaviour in the group – what Albert Bandura called reciprocal determinism.
d. Our behaviour is determined by social comparison: we look at other in a group to
determine how we must behave.
i. Informational social influence is when we don't know how to behave in a
particular group and hence we look at the behaviours of others to understand the
expectations and behave the same way.
ii. Normative social influence is when we look at other to copy them and behave in a
way so that we can fit into that group. This is where the "need to belong" comes
in.
iii. Conformity is when we adapt our behaviour to be in line with other in the group.

Research in psychology: Asch (1956)

Asch used a lab experiment to study conformity. His sample was made up of male students in
the USA. They were deceived and told that they were taking part in a ‘vision test’. In his original
research, the independent variable was the "number of confederates providing an incorrect
response" – and the dependent variable was "whether or not the participant conformed" - that is,
agreeing with the incorrect response.
The naive participant entered a room where there were six people and the researcher. The men
in the room were dressed like businessmen, in suits and ties. These men were part of the study,
and they were playing a role unknown to the participant. They were confederates that helped
the researcher to deceive the participant. The true aim of the study was to investigate how the
naive participant would respond to group pressure in a situation where confederates give wrong
responses to an unambiguous task. After the participant took his seat, he was shown cards
similar to the ones depicted here.
The participant was asked to select the line from the second card that matched the length of the
line on the first card. There were 18 trials in total; in 12 of these trials, the confederates gave
wrong answers. The confederates had been instructed to answer correctly for some of the trials,
but to answer incorrectly for the majority of the trials. The goal was to see if the participant would
act independently and give the right answer or go with the majority and give the wrong answer,
even when it was very clear that this response was incorrect.
To set up a control for the experiment, Asch had another condition where one participant
answered all 18 trials without the confederates present and with only the experimenter in the
room. Here the participants made errors in fewer than 1 percent of all trials.
The results showed that a mean of 36.8 percent per cent of the participants agreed with incorrect
responses in half or more of the trials. However, 24 per cent of the participants did not conform to
any of the incorrect responses given by the confederates. In variations of the experiment, Asch
showed that if there was one dissenter who gave the correct answer, while the other
confederates gave the wrong answer, the rate of conformity dropped to around 5% of
participants agreeing with the confederates at least once.
During the debriefing after the experiment, Asch asked the participants how they felt about the
experiment. All reported experiencing some degree of self-doubt about their answers. Those
participants who conformed said that they knew their responses were incorrect, but went along
with the group because they thought that they had misunderstood the instructions, and they did
not want to appear to be against the group.

According to Bond and Smith (1996) Asch's study does not only demonstrate conformity to group
processes. Asch intended to demonstrate factors that enabled resistance to group pressure, and he
saw these factors as rooted in a society's values and socialization practices. Although the focus on
Asch’s research is often on the level of conformity, what is most interesting is the high percentage of
participants who did not conform, in spite of the social pressure to do so.

There have been several studies that use Asch’s procedure to test the effect of different variables on
the level of conformity. The original procedure is now called the Asch paradigm.

Seen in the US judiciary system as well. When the judges were asked if they agreed with the
jury's decision, 1/3rd of them disagreed, for the rest of them, conformity might have played a role.

Analysis of the study

1. Strengths
a. The paradigm is easily replicated because it is a highly standardized procedure.
b. Asch also used a control group to make sure that the task was, in fact, not ambiguous –
in other words, the average person would have no problem identifying which two lines
were the same length.
 c. Asch carried out a debriefing that helped him to understand the choices made by the
participants – that is, whether they conformed or not.
2. Limitations
a. The task – judging the lengths of lines - lacks any personal meaning for the participants.
b. Low on ecological validity: the participants did not know the other people in the
experiment. In real life, often conformity is a very personal choice that is affected by
people you know.
3. Ethical considerations
a. Asch used deception by using the confederates; he put participants in an embarrassing
situation where they had to decide whether to believe their own eyes or conform to the
opinion of the majority.
b. To ensure that participants were informed about the true nature of the study, Asch
debriefed the participants, revealing the deception and discussing the results with
them.
4. It is difficult to isolate variables when studying conformity. Although the independent variable
of the original study was the “unanimous” or not unanimous response of the confederates, it
is not possible to exclude other variables. Since all of the participants and confederates were
men, it is possible that they conformed because they felt that this was “their group” – known
as an in-group. It is also possible that the size of the group played a role. We also cannot
exclude variables like culture, the fact that responses had to be stated publicly or the gender
of the participants. Asch recognized that several variables may influence conformity and his
later research attempted to investigate the role of these variables.