Knowledge base Updated 2 November 2026 1 views

Conformity

Changing behaviour or judgement to match a group, whether because the group is taken as evidence about reality or because of the social cost of standing apart.

Definition

Two mechanisms are distinguished:

Informational influence: accepting the group's judgement as evidence, particularly where the situation is ambiguous. Tends to produce private acceptance.
Normative influence: going along to avoid disapproval. Tends to produce public compliance without private change.

A third category, referent informational influence, comes from social identity work: people conform to the norms of groups they identify with, which explains why conformity is not uniform across audiences.

History

Sherif's autokinetic studies (1935) showed group norms forming in genuinely ambiguous conditions and persisting in the individual afterwards.

Asch's line-judgement studies (1951-56) used an unambiguous task and found around a third of critical-trial responses conformed to an obviously wrong majority, with about three quarters of participants conforming at least once. Around a quarter never conformed at all — a finding usually omitted from summaries.

Theory

Moderators are well established: conformity rises with group size up to about three or four and then flattens, falls sharply when a single ally dissents, rises with task ambiguity, and rises with group cohesion and identification.

The unanimity finding is the practically important one: a single dissenter reduces conformity dramatically, even a dissenter who gives a different wrong answer. What matters is the breaking of consensus, not the correctness of the alternative.

Research

Asch's paradigm replicates, but with a declining effect over time and variation across cultures. Bond and Smith's meta-analysis of 133 studies found conformity in US samples has decreased since the 1950s and is higher in collectivist samples, which indicates the effect is culturally and historically situated rather than a fixed constant of human nature.

The social norms literature is the applied descendant and is more robust than most of social psychology's applied programmes: telling people what others actually do changes behaviour, with the important qualification that descriptive norm messages can increase an undesirable behaviour among people already below average, unless paired with an injunctive signal.

Applications

Behaviour change campaigns, energy and health interventions, jury and committee design, safety culture where speaking up is the target behaviour, and understanding online opinion dynamics.

The design implication from the dissent findings is concrete: structures that guarantee at least one independent voice change outcomes more than exhortations to think independently.

Criticism

Asch is routinely overstated. The most common summary implies most people conformed on most trials; the actual figure is about a third of critical responses.
Cultural and historical variation undercuts claims about universal susceptibility.
The samples were narrow, overwhelmingly young male students in the original work.
Ecological validity. Judging line lengths among strangers is not a model of most real conformity pressure.

References

Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity. Psychological Monographs, 70(9), 1-70.
Sherif, M. (1935). A study of some social factors in perception. Archives of Psychology, 27(187), 1-60.
Bond, R., & Smith, P. B. (1996). Culture and conformity: A meta-analysis of studies using Asch's task. Psychological Bulletin, 119(1), 111-137.
Schultz, P. W., et al. (2007). The constructive, destructive, and reconstructive power of social norms. Psychological Science, 18(5), 429-434.

Written for PsychologyOrbit and reviewed before publishing. It is a summary for professionals and students, not clinical guidance, and it is not a substitute for the primary sources listed above.