In this video, we're going to go over some factors that can affect conformity, and we're going to talk a little bit about why people conform in the first place. So in terms of factors that affect conformity, a lot of these were actually discovered by doing little modifications to Asch's original line study. So one thing that we know is that, in general, the more people that are in the majority, the more conformity we tend to see. And that makes sense. Right?

Like, in the context of Asch's line study, what are the odds that seven people are all wrong in the exact same way on an easy task like that? Pretty low odds. Right? And so things like that can increase conformity. We also know that the presence of one other dissenter can decrease conformity.

So again, in the context of Asch's line study, for example, if everyone's going through and saying it's line A, line A, line A, and you're thinking, oh my god. It's definitely line C. What are they talking about? And then one other person says, I think it's line C. You are much more likely to go with your gut and not conform in that case.

And finally, we know that the nature of the conformity behavior can also kind of influence it. So a more public behavior, we tend to see higher levels of conformity and with a more private behavior, we tend to see lower levels of conformity. And that makes sense. Right? If you're concerned about social evaluation or social judgment, you're more likely to conform in public and maybe dissent or do the less popular thing in private.

Now when we think about why people conform, psychologists kind of have two main explanations, and the names of these sound kind of fancy, but they're actually very intuitive. So the first one is called normative social influence, and this just refers to the fact that conforming helps us to fit into and be accepted by groups, which is very important. And I do want to make a note here because, especially here in The United States, quite often we think about conformity in kind of a negative light. We put a really strong emphasis on individualism, you know, be yourself, be an individual, don't conform. But from an academic standpoint, conformity is a very neutral behavior, and it's a very common behavior.

You know, we all have to fit into some groups sometimes. That's just part of being in society, and so conformity helps us do that. So that is normative social influence. Conformity just helps us fit into groups. Now, we also have informational social influences, and this is basically a tendency that we have to assume that groups have accurate information.

So we assume that groups are confident or are competent and that they know what they're doing, and especially when we are in novel or uncertain situations, we just tend to look to a group and conform to their behavior because we assume that they have more information than we do. So for example, imagine you're at a grocery store and you encounter a brand new type of self-checkout machine that you've never seen before and you don't know how to use it. What are you going to do? You're just going to watch people, right? You're just going to watch them and conform to their behavior.

And as long as grocery store security isn't chasing them down, they're probably doing it correctly. You know, one other example, my husband and I recently went to a restaurant that's a bit fancier than we would normally go to. There were lots of little plates and little tiny knives and forks, and we both had the instinctual reaction to just look at the people next to us and pretty much conform to their behavior. Oh, you know, that tiny little knife is just for buttering our bread and, you know, there's a pitcher of water on the table. Do we pour that or should we wait for our server?

And by just conforming to the people around us, we were able to fit into that environment. At least nobody had kicked us out, so we were fancy enough that night. But that is an example of informational social especially, again, in those kinds of uncertain situations, we tend to assume that the people around us, that groups, are behaving correctly or that they have information that we don't. Alright. So those are a few factors that can affect conformity, and I will see you guys in the next one.

Bye bye.