Conformity is a common phenomenon in human society.
Why should people follow the crowd? Social psychologists mainly study the factors that lead to conformity from two aspects: one is the process of information influence-hoping to be accurate and understand the correct response in a given situation; The second is to regulate the process of influence-hoping to be liked, accepted and supported by others.
Factors affecting consistency:
Some people are easy to follow the crowd, others are not easy to follow the crowd; In some cases, conformity is easy to occur, and in other cases, conformity is not easy to occur. So, what factors affect herd behavior? We can do further analysis on this.
(A) Group factors
1. Population size. If only two people are against you, you are likely to stick to your opinion; And if there are 100 people against you, you are likely to panic, feel uneasy and eventually follow the crowd. Generally speaking, the larger the group size, the more people agree or take concerted action, the greater the psychological pressure that individuals feel, and the easier it is to follow the crowd.
2. Group consistency. If only one person in the group disagrees, he will be under great pressure. If there is another person in the group who disagrees, the pressure of conformity faced by the former will be greatly reduced, thus obviously reducing the degree of conformity. In further experiments, Ashi made a fake subject react differently from most other people, and as a result, the herd behavior of the subject decreased by 3/4, because the subject had a "collaborator" and gained great support from it. Even if the fake subject does not express the same opinion as the subject, as long as he does not agree with the group, it will enhance the confidence of the subject and weaken the herd mentality. In short, the more consistency is increased, the more individuals tend to comply.
3. The cohesion of this group. The stronger the cohesion of the group, the stronger the dependence between the members of the group, and the more inclined they are to follow the norms and standards of the group. Individuals will be consistent with the opinions of the group for the benefit of the group. Someone once deliberately designed an Ashi-style experiment, but in the way of grouping, five experimental groups competed with each other. In the online comparison experiment, the team member with the least mistakes will get two tickets. The results show that individuals are more likely to follow the crowd with the same goals, because otherwise they may not be able to achieve their goals.
4. The position of the individual in the group. The higher the status and authority of the individual in the group, the less likely it is to succumb to the pressure of the group. Generally speaking, members with high status have rich experience, deep capital, strong ability and much information, and can win the trust of members with low status. Their views and opinions can have a great influence on the group, making people with low status yield, while members with low status can't influence them. Teachers in front of students, officers in front of soldiers, and leaders in front of subordinates will be less conformity, because they know that they are high-ranking people in the group and generally do not feel conformity pressure.
(2) Individual factors
1. Knowledge and experience. The more individuals know about the stimulus object, the more information they have, and vice versa. If a doctor discusses education with a group of teachers, he often won't object to the teachers' opinions because he doesn't know much about it; If he is discussing nutrition, he often opposes the consensus of teachers because he has rich knowledge and experience in this field. Individuals with more knowledge and experience have stronger self-confidence, and they tend to regard themselves as experts in the group rather than conformity.
2. Personality characteristics. Individual psychological characteristics such as intelligence, self-confidence, self-esteem and social praise need are closely related to herd behavior. People with high intelligence have more information, flexible thinking and strong self-confidence, and it is not easy for people with low intelligence to follow the crowd. People who need high praise from society pay special attention to others' evaluation, hoping to get others' praise, and are easy to follow the crowd. People who are weak and suggestive are also prone to show conformity.
3. Gender differences. For a long time, people think that women are more likely to follow the crowd than men, and many experiments have proved this. However, further research points out that in the past experiments, women were more likely to follow the crowd because most of the experimental materials were familiar to men and unfamiliar to women, such as politics and ball games. If we choose cooking, clothing and other experimental materials that are beneficial to women, both men and women show a high conformity tendency, and the proportion difference is very small.
And people are more likely to follow the crowd; When it comes to ethical, moral and political principles, people are unlikely to lose their position. Petrovsky once did an experiment on this. The experiment takes some students in grade four, grade seven and grade nine as subjects. First, they were asked to fill out a questionnaire, which contained several judgments about moral issues, and the subjects could answer them according to recognized standards. After a while, the subjects were sent a questionnaire with many questions, including these questions, which implied that others were in favor of the wrong judgment before they answered. It turned out that only a few people accepted the proposal, while the vast majority did not change their original views. It can be seen that subjects can often stick to their own judgments on ethical issues.
cultural difference
Due to different cultural backgrounds, members of different nationalities have different conformity degrees. S. gleim (196 1) made a comparative study of college students in France and Norway, and found that Norwegians are more inclined to conform than the French. He believes that part of the reason may be that French culture encourages independence and individuality, while Norwegian culture encourages loyalty to the collective and attaches importance to social responsibility. Later, some research found that people's conformity behavior is different under different cultural and social backgrounds, which shows that cultural differences do have an impact on conformity.
Social influence and the main means of social influence:
Social influence refers to the use of social forces of individuals or groups to change the attitudes or behaviors of others in a specific direction. The social forces mentioned here refer to various forces used by influencers to cause changes in the attitudes and behaviors of others. They come from a wide range of sources, including all kinds of power related to social status and influence from being loved and respected. French and Raven( 1959) analyzed the sources of social forces, and they summarized six sources of social forces:
Reward power: refers to people's ability to outline rewards to others. For example, private enterprise bosses have this right to their subordinates, and parents also have the right to reward their children.
Coercive force: contrary to reward force, it refers to the ability of people with power to provide punishment. For example, teachers have this right to students who don't obey classroom discipline.
Reference right: the right to let others refer to it. For example, the group is an important source of reference power, and keeping consistent with the group is a portrayal of reference power to personal influence.
Legitimate power: refers to the power associated with a certain position, such as the power of ministers and principals to handle affairs.
Expert power: power related to certain professions, such as the influence of doctors in dealing with diseases and the ability of politicians in dealing with international affairs.
Information power: refers to the influence of knowing some information that others do not know.
References:
Social psychology and consulting psychology