Written by Do you shake hands upon greeting? If so, do you use the right or the left? Is there a reason for this?
Do you smile a lot? Is it normal to smile at strangers in your culture? Is politeness valued?
Whether you answered ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to any of these questions, the answers are relative to the norms that exist in your culture.
Are we all susceptible to cultural norms, and are you conforming to them right now?
Conformity
Conformity is expected in most cultures, but the degree of conformity is often based on the strength of a culture’s survival values vs. its self-expression values.
However, even in cultures where self-expression values are strong, individuals feel pressure to conform to some degree.
Does everyone, then, conform to norms?
It’s almost impossible not to. In the end, the degree to which one does depends on if an individual wants to ‘fit in’ or not.
Solomon Asch Study
In 1951, Solomon Asch experimented with societal pressure and its relation to conformity. Asch gave 50 male students from Swarthmore College a ‘vision test,’ in which one oblivious tester was placed amongst seven trained testers who had prepared their responses beforehand.
The students were given three lines (A, B, and C) to compare, and they had to choose which was the ‘target line.’ The answer was always obvious. Each of the trained participants would state their answer aloud, with the real participant answering last.
Of the 18 trials, the prepared group gave 12 wrong answers. What Asch found was that nearly a third of real participants conformed to the majority view, despite the fact that the majority was quite obviously wrong, with around three-fourths conforming at least once.
Only a quarter of the real participants didn’t conform at all to the wrong answers. In the control group (a group with all real participants), less than 1% answered incorrectly.
Why Conform?
In their post-experiment interviews, real participants admitted that they didn’t agree with the answers of the crowd.
But they conformed to them anyway.
So, why are we so inclined to conform with something we think is wrong?
The participants expressed a fear of being thought peculiar or of being teased by their peers. Some also said that, due to the majority view, they considered that perhaps they were mistaken in their answer. The probability that an entire group answered incorrectly seemed less likely than that they were wrong.
These results show that people conform because:
- They want to fit in
- They believe a group must be better informed than an individual
These are called normative and informational influences, respectively. And, in essence, they are what enforce a society’s values and norms.
Next week, we’ll talk about different types of cultural norms and what this conformity looks like. Stay tuned.
Success Across Cultures 