Conformity

Conformity

Within this assignment I shall explain what is meant by conformity and obedience, I will identify out of two conformity studies what factors influenced the outcome of the studies. I will then explain why we conform and what happens if public service personnel do not conform to the rules and regulations of their force.

Finally I shall highlight what happens to the public service personnel when they are reprimanded for a disciplinary matter.

Conformity & Obedience

Conformity: To act or be in accord or agreement or to comply.

Conformity as an example could be, out of a class of thirty students, two wore jeans where as the rest of the class wore trousers. The next day everybody wore trousers, thus the two that wore jeans conformed to the rest of the class by not being different.

Often conformity is at the basis of rules, laws and traditions. Men & Women are expected to conform to society, to get married and have children.

Obedience: The act of obeying; dutiful or submissive behaviour with respect to another person.

Obedience as an example could be, a corporal commanding a section within the army orders a soldier to attack a machine gun pillbox. The soldier turns to the corporal and says “yes corporal” even though there is definitely a present danger. Thus the soldier is obeying the corporal.

Obedience is expected throughout the Public services (unless it leads to an illegal incident) and thus members of the public services are trained from the beginning to obey and respect those in positions of higher ranks & responsibility than them.

Conformity Studies

The two conformity studies that I shall utilise are the study conducted by Asch et al and Sherif et al, I will briefly outline what happened and then I will identify the factors that produced the outcomes.

Asch et al (1955)

In Asch's experiments, a group of people were seated around a table. Of these all but one were actually the experimenters confederates. The group was shown a display of vertical lines of different lengths and were asked to say which of the lines (card B below) was the same length as another standard line (card A).

A= B=

One after another, the members of the group announced their decision. The confederates had been asked to give the incorrect response. The subject sat in the next to last seat so that all but one had given their obviously incorrect answer before s/he gave hers/his. Even though the correct answer was always obvious, the average subject conformed to the group response on 32% of the trials and 74% of the subjects conformed at least once.

Sherif et al (1954)

Sherif's experiment involved the so-called auto kinetic effect whereby a point of light in an otherwise totally dark environment will appear to move randomly. You may have experienced the effect yourself when looking at the stars. Subjects were invited to estimate the amount of 'movement' they observed. They made their estimates in groups where

each member could hear the others' estimates. Ultimately, the group members' estimates converged on a middle-of-the-road 'group estimate'. This would appear to show an urge to conform.

Why we conform

There are five main reasons as to why we conform; I shall briefly describe each one below.

The need for social respect

We don’t like to look like a fool, people wish to avoid criticism and this then drives individuals to make concessions as to what they stand up for etc. For example a soldier within a group of soldiers would not turn around and say “ these defence cuts are quite fair aren’t they!” even though they might believe that, they wont say it to keep social respect.

Informational conformity

If a person is involved in an experiment or intelligence test and they are not sure of what is going on. They may use other peoples answers as a guideline to how to answer questions, thus if a person is in the police and they are not sure how to arrest a person they may watch a trained officer and copy what they did the next time.

Attraction

The attraction side of conformity is basically about reference groups; a reference group is a group of people that are pretty much just like you. If you are a fire fighter you are more likely to conform in a group of fire fighters that if you are within a group of police officers.

Group size

The group size has an important bearing on whether

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