Page 42 - The Social Animal

24 The Social Animal

majority consists of only 3 other people as it is when the unanimous
majority is 16.

Commitment One way conformity to group pressure can be de-
creased is by inducing the individual to make some sort of commit-
ment to his or her initial judgment. Picture yourself as an umpire at
a major-league baseball game. There is a close play at first base and
you call the runner out—in the presence of 50,000 fans. After the
game, the three other umpires approach you and each says that he
thought the runner was safe. How likely are you to alter your judg-
ment? Compare this with a situation (like the Asch situation) in
which each of the three umpires calls the runner safe and then it is
your turn to make a judgment. Such a comparison was made in an
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experiment by Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard, who used the
Asch paradigm and found that where there was no prior commit-
ment (as in the Asch experiment), some 25 percent of the responses
conformed to the erroneous judgment of the majority. But, when the
individuals had publicly committed themselves before hearing the
judgment of the other “umpires,” only less than 6 percent of their
new responses were conformist.

Accountability Suppose you found yourself being subjected to
group pressure while trying to make a decision. In addition, suppose
that you knew that, at the end of the session, you would need to jus-
tify your decision to the other members of the group. What effect do
you think that might have on your decision-making? Research has
shown that under most conditions, this kind of accountability to the
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group tends to increase conformity. But what happens if you were
also given instructions indicating that it is important for you to be as
accurate as possible? To answer that question Andrew Quinn and
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Barry Schlenker put people through a procedure aimed at produc-
ing conformity to a poor decision. Before the conformity aspect of
the experiment began, the experimenters did two things: (1) They
got half their participants thinking about the importance of being as
accurate as possible while getting the other half thinking about the
importance of cooperation; and (2) They made it clear to half the
subjects in each of those two conditions that, after they made a de-
cision, they would need to talk to their partners about their decision
and justify having made it. The results were clear. The people who