Page 43 - The Social Animal

Conformity 25

showed the most independence and made the best decisions were
those who were oriented toward being accurate and had to explain
their nonconformity to the very people whose influence they resis-
ted. It is interesting to note that the people in this condition behaved
with greater independence than those people who were oriented to-
ward being accurate but were not held accountable. What this sug-
gests is that most people will go along to get along unless they know
that they will be held accountable for a dumb, compliant decision.

The Person and the Culture Another important factor affecting
conformity involves some of the characteristics of the target person.
Specifically, individuals who have generally low self-esteem are far
more likely to yield to group pressure than those with high self-es-
teem. Furthermore, task-specific self-esteem plays an important part
in the process. If individuals are led to believe that they have little or
no aptitude for the task at hand, their tendency to conform increases.
Similarly, individuals who are given the opportunity to have prior
success with a task like judging the lengths of lines are far less likely
to conform than those who walk into the situation cold. 17
Another important factor is how secure the individual feels in a
particular group. For example, to return to our previous illustration,
if Sam had felt sure that he was liked and accepted by his acquain-
tances, he would have been more likely to voice disagreement than if
he felt insecure in his relationship with them. This assertion receives
strong support from an experiment by James Dittes and Harold Kel-
18
ley in which college men were invited to join an attractive, presti-
gious group and subsequently were given information about how
secure their position was in that group. Specifically, all members of
the group were informed that, at any point during the lifetime of the
group, the members could remove any member in the interest of ef-
ficiency. The group then engaged in a discussion of juvenile delin-
quency. Periodically, the discussion was interrupted and each
member was asked to rate every other member’s value to the group.
After the discussion, each member was shown how the others rated
him; in actuality, the members were given prearranged false feedback.
Some members were led to believe they were well accepted, and oth-
ers were led to believe they were not terribly popular. Each member’s
conformity was measured by the opinions he subsequently expressed
in further discussion of juvenile delinquency and by his vulnerability