Social Conformity

Doing What Others Do

Imagine that you find yourself in a group of six people, engaged in a test of visual perception. You are given a ridiculously simple task. You are supposed to compare a line, shown on a large white card, to three other lines and match it to the one that is identical in length.

In the first three rounds of this test, everything proceeds smoothly and easily. People make their matches aloud, in sequence, and everyone agrees with everyone else. The task is not hard. But on the fourth round, something odd happens. The five other people in the group announce their matches before you—and each one makes an obvious error. They choose the wrong line! It is now time for you to make your announcement. What will you do?

If you are like most people, you think it is easy to predict your behavior in this task: You will say exactly what you think. You’ll call it as you see it. You are independent-minded, and so you will tell the truth. But if you are a Human, and you really participated in the experiment, you might well follow those who preceded you and say what they said, thus defying the evidence of your own senses.

In the 1950s, Solomon Asch, a brilliant social psychologist, conducted a series of experiments in just this vein.7 When asked to decide on their own, without seeing judgments from others, people almost never erred, since the task was easy. But when everyone else gave an incorrect answer, people erred more than one-third of the time. Indeed, in a series of twelve questions, nearly three-quarters of people erroneously went along with the group at least once, defying the evidence of their own senses. Notice that in Asch’s experiment, people were responding to the decisions of strangers, whom they would probably never see again. They had no particular reason to want those strangers to like them.

Asch’s findings seem to capture something universal about humanity. Conformity experiments have been replicated and extended in more than 130 studies from seventeen countries, including Zaire (now known as Democratic Republic of the Congo), Germany, France, Japan, Lebanon, and Kuwait.8 The overall pattern of errors—with people conforming to a clearly mistaken judgment between 20 and 40 percent of the time—does show intriguing differences across nations, but in every nation, the level of conformity is pretty high. And though 20 to 40 percent of the time might not seem large, remember that in this task the correct answer was obvious. It is almost as if people can be nudged into identifying a picture of a dog as a cat as long as other people before them have done so.

Why, exactly, do people sometimes ignore the evidence of their own senses? There are two main explanations. The first involves the information that seems to be conveyed by other people’s answers; the second involves peer pressure and the desire not to face the disapproval of the group. In Asch’s own studies, several of the conformists said, in private interviews, that their initial perceptions must have been wrong. If everyone in the room accepts a certain proposition, or sees things in a certain way, you might conclude that they are probably right. Brain-imaging work has been interpreted as suggesting that conformity in Asch-like settings may involve changes in perception as well as in reported answers.9

On the other hand, social scientists have found less conformity, in the same basic circumstances as Asch’s experiments, when people are asked to give anonymous answers. People become more likely to conform when they know that others will see what they have to say. Sometimes people will go along with the group even when they think, or know, that everyone else has blundered. Unanimous groups are able to provide the strongest nudges—even when the question is an easy one and people ought to know that everyone else is wrong.10

Asch’s experiments involved evaluations with pretty obvious answers. Most of the time, it isn’t hard to assess the length of lines. What if the task is made a bit more difficult? The question is especially important for our purposes, because we are particularly interested in how people are influenced, or can be influenced, in dealing with problems that are both hard and unfamiliar. Some key studies were undertaken back in the 1930s by the psychologist Muzafer Sherif.11 In Sherif’s experiments, people were placed in a dark room, and a small pinpoint of light was positioned at some distance in front of them. The light was actually stationary, but because of a perceptual illusion called the autokinetic effect, it appeared to move. On each of several trials, Sherif asked people to estimate the distance that the light had moved. When polled individually, subjects did not agree with one another, and their answers varied significantly from one trial to another. This is not surprising; because the light did not move, any judgment about distance was a stab in the literal dark.

But Sherif found big conformity effects when people were asked to act in small groups and to make their estimates in public. Here the individual judgments converged and a group norm, establishing the consensus distance, quickly developed. Over time, the norm remained stable within particular groups, thus leading to a situation in which different groups made, and were strongly committed to, quite different judgments. There is an important clue here about how seemingly similar groups, cities, and even nations can converge on very different beliefs and actions simply because of modest and even arbitrary variations in starting points.

Sherif also tried a nudge. In some experiments, he added a confederate—his own ally, unbeknownst to the people in the study. When he did that, something else happened. If the confederate spoke confidently and firmly, his judgment had a strong influence on the group’s assessment. If the confederate’s estimate was much higher than those initially made by others, the group’s judgment would be inflated; if the confederate’s estimate was very low, the group’s estimate would fall. A little nudge, if it was expressed with confidence, could have major consequences for the group’s conclusion. Decades after Sherif’s work, social scientists uncovered the confidence heuristic: people tend to think that confident speakers must be correct. The clear lesson here is that consistent and unwavering people, in the private or public sector, can move groups and practices in their preferred direction. An important implication is that if senior members of a group want to obtain the actual beliefs of their junior coworkers, they will ask for those beliefs independently (so coworkers don’t influence each other) and, most important, before they state their own opinion.

More remarkably still, the group’s judgments became thoroughly internalized, so that people would adhere to them even when reporting on their own—indeed even a year later, and even when participating in new groups whose members offered different judgments. Significantly, the initial judgments were also found to have effects across the laboratory equivalent of “generations.” Even when enough fresh subjects were introduced and others retired so that all the participants were new to the situation, the original group judgment tended to stick, although the person who was originally responsible for it was long gone.12 In a series of experiments, people using Sherif’s basic method have shown that an arbitrary “tradition,” in the form of some judgment about the distance, can become entrenched over time, which means that many people end up following it notwithstanding its original arbitrariness.13

This offers one possible explanation for why some traditions persist over decades or centuries after their original purpose has been lost. We can also see why many groups fall prey to what is known as “collective conservatism”: the tendency of groups to stick to established patterns even as new needs arise. Once a practice (like wearing ties) has become established, it can be perpetuated, even if there is no reason for it. To be sure, many traditions persist because they help the people who live by them. But sometimes a tradition can last for a long time, and receive support or at least acquiescence from large numbers of people, even though it was originally the product of a small nudge from a few people or perhaps even one. Of course, a group might shift if it can be shown that the practice is causing serious problems. But if there is uncertainty on that question, people might well continue doing what they have always done. “It’s a tradition!”

Many experiments, growing out of Asch’s basic method, find large conformity effects for judgments of many different kinds.14 Consider the following finding. People were asked, “Which one of the following do you feel is the most important problem facing our country today?” Five alternatives were offered: economic recession, educational facilities, subversive activities, mental health, and crime and corruption. Asked privately, a mere 12 percent chose subversive activities. But when exposed to a group that unanimously selected that option, 48 percent of people made the same choice15 — Figure unavailable in the source files.

In a similar finding, people were asked to consider this statement: “Free speech being a privilege rather than a right, it is proper for a society to suspend free speech when it feels threatened.” Asked this question individually, only 19 percent of the control group agreed, but confronted with the shared opinion of only four others, 58 percent of people agreed. These results are closely connected with one of Asch’s underlying interests, which was to understand how Nazism had been possible. Asch believed that conformity could produce a very strong nudge, ultimately generating behavior (such as that which led to the Holocaust) that might seem (and still seems) unthinkable.

Whether or not Asch’s work provides an adequate account of the rise of fascism, or any other surprising movement, there is no question that social pressures nudge people to accept some pretty odd conclusions—and those conclusions might well affect their behavior. For choice architects, this raises the question of when social information helps people make better decisions and when it merely encourages conformity.