Social psychologists consider a group to be composed of two or
more people who interact and depend on each other in some way. Examples of groups
include a baseball team, an Internet listserv, a college psychology class, and a
cult.
Features of Groups
Groups usually have the following features:
- Norms that determine appropriate behavior
- Roles that are assigned to people that determine what behaviors and
responsibilities people should take on
- A communication structure that determines who talks to whom within the
group
- A power structure that determines how much authority and influence
group members have
Example: A college psychology class has norms, such as when
people should arrive for class. The professor’s role includes
teaching, inviting discussion, and administering exams. The
students’ role is to attend class, listen to lectures, read
materials, and pose questions. The communication structure of
the class demands that students listen without talking to each
other while the professor lectures. The power structure gives
the professor more authority than any of the students. Some
students also may have more authority and influence than other
students, such as those who are more familiar with the class
material.
Conformity
Conformity is the process of giving in to real or
imagined pressure from a group. In the 1950s, the psychologist Solomon
Asch did a famous study that demonstrated that people often
conform.
Asch’s Conformity Study
Asch recruited male undergraduate subjects for the study and told them
that he was doing research on visual perception. He placed each subject in a
room with six accomplices. The subject thought that the six were
also subjects. The seven people were then given a series of easy tasks.
In each task, they looked at two cards, one with a single line on it and
the other with three lines of different lengths. The people were asked
to decide which line on the second card was the same length as the line
on the first card. On the first two tasks, the accomplices announced the
correct answer to the group, as did the subject. On the next twelve
tasks, the accomplices picked a line on the second card that was clearly
a wrong answer. When put in this situation, more than one-third of the
subjects conformed to the choices made by their
group.
Factors that Influence Conformity
Asch and other researchers have found that many factors influence
conformity:
