Page 37 - The Social Animal

Conformity 19

chological processes underlying faulty decision making. But it is only
through digging deeper and trying to understand these processes
that we can have any hope of improving the way people make deci-
sions and thus of reducing the frequency of disastrous decisions in
the future.

What Is Conformity?

Conformity can be defined as a change in a person’s behavior or
opinions as a result of real or imagined pressure from a person or
group of people. Most situations are not as extreme as the examples
cited above. We will attempt to zero in on the phenomenon of con-
formity by beginning with a less extreme (and perhaps simpler) illus-
tration. Let’s return to our friend Sam, the hypothetical college
student we first encountered in Chapter 1. Recall that Sam watched
a presidential candidate on television and was favorably impressed
with his sincerity. However, in the face of the unanimous opinion of
his friends that the candidate was insincere, Sam acceded—verbally,
at least—to their opinion.
Several questions can be asked about this kind of situation: (1)
What causes people to conform to group pressure? Specifically, what
was in it for Sam? (2) What was the nature of the group pressure?
Specifically, what were Sam’s acquaintances doing to induce con-
formity? (3) Did Sam revise his opinion of the candidate during that
brief but horrifying period when he learned that all his fellow stu-
dents disagreed with him? Or was it the case that Sam maintained
his original opinion but only modified what he said about the can-
didate? If there was a change in opinion, was it permanent or merely
transient?
Unfortunately, we cannot say precisely and definitely what was
going on in Sam’s mind at the time because there are many factors
in the situation that we don’t know about. For example, we don’t
know how confident Sam was in his initial opinion; we don’t know
how much he liked the people with whom he watched the candi-
date; we don’t know whether Sam considered himself to be a good
judge of sincerity or whether he considered the others to be good
judges of sincerity; we don’t know whether Sam is generally a
strong person or a wishy-washy person; and so on. What we can do