Open Psychology Interactives Free teaching tools for psychology

Social and Critical Psychology

Conformity Under Context

Six things you can change about a fictional group judgement, two different routes by which people end up agreeing, and the distribution that every headline conformity percentage is hiding.

Simulated - a fictional task, a model with visible parameters, no historical dataset reproduced

Learning objective

By the end you should be able to tell informational from normative influence by what moves each, and say why “people conform” is not a finding without a context.

About 30 minutes. Nothing you do here is saved or sent anywhere.

The task, and what it is not

Six people look at a fictional display and say how many marks it contains. The original studies used line lengths and points of light; nothing here reproduces their stimuli, their procedure or their data. The percentages come from a small two-route model whose parameters are printed on screen. They are chosen to put the classic conditions in roughly the right order of magnitude, which is a teaching decision, not a replication.

How to use this

  1. Commit to a percentage before you see any conditions.
  2. Experiment 1: load the classic condition, then change one thing at a time. Every condition you run is kept in the comparison table.
  3. Watch the split between the two routes, not only the total.
  4. Experiment 2: look at the 100 simulated participants behind the percentage you have been reading.

First, a judgement

A fictional participant sits with five other people. They are shown a display and asked in turn how many marks it contains. The answer is obvious. On twelve of the eighteen rounds, all five of the others give the same clearly wrong answer out loud before the participant replies.

On what percentage of those twelve rounds will the participant go along with the group?

Challenge - which route is being manipulated?

Each change below would move the conformity rate. Say whether it acts mainly through the normative route, mainly through the informational route, or through both.

What this demonstrates

Going along with a majority has two routes: wanting to fit in, and taking the group as evidence about an ambiguous world. What separates them is what moves them. Answering privately removes the audience and leaves the evidence; making the judgement harder does the reverse. And one ally collapses conformity far more than removing one voice from a majority should — unanimity is not a headcount.

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