Conformity Experiment

BY:

Harsha Tiwari -2014CE10340

Nimma Santosh -2014CE10350

Sunny Kashyap -2014CE10334

Amarender Reddy -2014EE

Objective
↣ Our objective was to study the social and personal conditions that induce
individuals to resist or to yield to group pressures when the latter are perceived to
be contrary to fact.

↣ To compare the difference in the levels of the conformity when they are
subjected to audio and visual stimuli.
Introduction:
Conformity is the tendency to align the people’s attitudes,beliefs,and behaviour
with those around them.

The changes in the attitude could be a response to real and imagined social
pressure.
Types of Conformity
↣ Normative: Involves changing one’s behaviour in order to fit in the group.

↣ Informative: Happens when a person lacks knowledge and looks to a group for
the information.

↣ Identification: occurs when people conform to what is expected of them based

upon the social roles.

↣ Compliance: Publicly changing behavior to fit in with the group while privately
disagreeing. In other words, conforming to the majority (publicly), in spite of not
really agreeing with them (privately).
Conformity in everyday life
↣ How people dress-All try to wear same type of clothes.

↣ In a class discussion when everyone raises hand for a side, no one wants to be
the only one raising their hand for the other side.

↣ A pep rally or any other large crowd-one person stands,every person stands

↣ Hollywood movies and stars- How everyone tries to be like them and wear the
same styles.

↣ In an exam when you see another answer on someone else’s paper you doubt
your own answer,and may infact change your answer
The Original Experiment
↣ The study consisted of 50 critical subjects

↣ Each subject was placed with 7 confederates in a group where he was asked to
participate in a perceptual task.

↣ In the task the person was showed 2 sets of cards, the first card with a line and
second card with 3 lines of varying lengths.

↣ Then each person in the group was asked to state aloud, which line on the
second card he thought had the same length as the line on the first card.

↣ 18 such trials were taken.

The Stimuli Used by Asch
 Original Experiment

↣ Out of the 18 trials, 12 of the trials the confederates purposefully gave the
incorrect answer.

↣ And it was the subject’s behaviour to these 12 critical trials that formed the aim
of the study: To test how many subjects would change the answer to conform to
those of the 7 confederates despite of being wrong.

↣ Also there was a control group of 37 people where the task was performed
individually without the confederates just with the experimenter so that the
conformity wouldn’t be a factor for the judgements.
Critique and Modification
Asch’ conformity experiment places emphasis on individual differences,that is by
its results, it elaborates on the varying response shown by different
individuals,when they were presented with conflicting views of the group. The
responses varied from independent( not showing conformity), to
yielding(conforming greatly,that is on the majority of trails).The interviews of the
people gave us valuable insight into the reasoning of the people and helped us
understand why the chose to react the way they did.

But, what Asch failed to consider was varying levels of conformity shown by the
same person to different stimuli.
↣ We have experienced the extensive usage of both auditory and visual stimuli,in
propaganda,especially in politics.Also in advertising there is extensive usage of
both these stimuli.

↣ But the question that arises is,what is more effective, a catchy jingle or slogan or
rather an eye catching logo or banner.

↣ We thus intend to use auditory stimuli along with visual stimuli to analyse
whether an individual shows different levels of conformity,to different types of
stimuli,and thus also find to a certain degree which sense out of the two a person
trusts more.
Our Hypothesis
There is a study by Melanie. J. Spence and Emily. W. Touchstone, which
Compared infants attention to dynamic auditory and visual stimuli

Six-month-olds experienced auditory (infant directed speech), and visual stimuli

(emotionally expressive faces) during two different habituation paradigms.
Attention (looking time) to auditory stimuli was greater than attention to visual
stimuli.

We thus hypothesize that conformity to the auditory stimuli would be less than that
to visual stimuli as auditory stimuli would be attended to more efficiently
Our basic experimental design
Sample:

↣ We performed the experiment on 10 critical subjects and 10 control

subjects,who were all aged between 18 to 25. All the subjects were male
engineering students.(15 B.Tech students, 3 M.Tech students and 2 PhD students)

IV and DV :

↣ Independent Variable- The wrong answers given by the confederates for the
task given to the subject.

↣ Dependent Variable- It is the level of conformity which arises for a subject.

Controls
↣ The critical subjects being the ones subjected to group pressure while the
control group are tested individually.This is our main control for the experiment
which ensures that social pressure is the factor for conformity.

↣ Another control was that the same individual was subjected to both audio and
visual stimuli,so that individual differences won’t be a factor.

↣ The confederates and the responses they give are same for each subject.
Design and Procedure
↣ We had 18 trials for each group. Out of these, 9 were for the visual stimuli, and
the other 9 for the auditory one,with each having 6 critical trials (the critical trials
are the one in which the confederates purposefully gave the incorrect answer).

↣ Each group consisted of 5 confederates and 1 subject.The control group

subjects were asked questions individually.

↣ The visual stimuli consist of 3 lines of varying lengths which are to compared
with the standard line.
Design and Procedure
↣ The audio stimuli consist of different notes(sounds) from the same instrument,
the details of each trial are given in the table.

↣ The sounds would be easily distinguishable.but not completely different( like

plucking of a guitar string and banging of a drum),that is say the sounds would
differ in pitch and note,but not in the quality.
List of the stimuli used for the 18 trials
 Results
Table showing comparison of errors for audio and visual stimuli
Discussion:
The results clearly show that the conformity for audio stimuli is more than that for
the visual stimuli.These results are contrary to what our hypothesis
suggested.This is because our hypothesis was based on a study on attention,but
for our experiment it seems the retention of the stimuli plays a more key role.

For the auditory stimuli the 3 notes are played sequentially.So the subjects had to
remember the sounds of the notes for comparison with the standard sounds.
Whereas for the visual stimuli the lines were presented alongside each other and
so the lengths could be compared simultaneously.

Although one should still remember that the incorrect answers were due to social
pressure alone as shown by the control group cent percent correct responses.
Limitations
The basic limitation of our experimental design seemed to be that for the audio
stimuli one had rely on the short term memory too,for which we had no control.

Also the experiment was performed on just male students and could have been
performed on the female gender,and different age groups too,to lend it more
ecological validity.

References
Documents of Gestalt Psychology - Mary Henle

Study by Mary J Spence and Emily W Touchstone