Page 53 - The Social Animal

Conformity 35

and also believed that the judge thought he was guilty. They them-
selves were also more likely to impose the death penalty if the defen-
dant were convicted. Thus, the factors that influence our opinions
and behavior can be subtle—and they may be a matter of life and
death.

Responses to Social Influence
Thus far, I have been describing two kinds of conformity in more or
less commonsensical terms. This distinction was based upon (1)
whether the individual was being motivated by rewards and punish-
ments or by a need to know, and (2) the relative permanence of the
conforming behavior. Let us move beyond this simple distinction to
a more complex and useful classification that applies not only to con-
formity but to the entire spectrum of social influence. Instead of
using the simple term conformity, I would like to distinguish among
three kinds of responses to social influence: compliance, identification,
and internalization. 33

Compliance The term compliance best describes the behavior of
a person who is motivated by a desire to gain reward or avoid pun-
ishment. Typically, the person’s behavior is only as long-lived as the
promise of reward or the threat of punishment.Thus, one can induce
a rat to run a maze efficiently by making it hungry and placing food
at the end of the maze. Chances are that a ruthless dictator could get
a percentage of his citizens to indicate their allegiance by threaten-
ing them with torture if they don’t comply or by promising to feed
and enrich them if they do. On the level of compliance, most re-
searchers see little difference between the behavior of humans and
other animals because all organisms are responsive to concrete re-
wards and punishments. Thus, remove the food from the goal box
and the rat will eventually stop running the maze; remove the food
or the threat of punishment and the citizens will cease showing alle-
giance to the dictator.

Identification The term identification describes a response to so-
cial influence brought about by an individual’s desire to be like the
influencer. In identification, as in compliance, we do not behave in a