Normative Social Influence

Normative Social Influence Definition

Have you ever done something you didn’t like because your friends wanted to do it? It could be dressing in a way you don’t like to match their style or stealing from a store because they wanted you to. You know that behaviour is wrong but do it anyway to fit in with your friends.

Normative social influence is the pressure that causes us to conform to others to fit in. In normative social influence, we don’t agree with our behaviour but do it to be accepted by a group.

Chances are, you see a lot of normative social influence in secondary school. Have you ever seen the movie Mean Girls? In Mean Girls, Cady tries to fit in with the popular girls, causing her to change how she dresses, eats, and acts. By the end, Cady reverts to how she dressed in the beginning, showing that she knew that conforming wasn’t right for her but rather done only to get socially accepted by the popular girls.

Normative Social Influence vs Informational Social Influence

The other main type of social influence is informational social influence. While normative and informational social influence results in the person conforming, there are different reasons for conformity.

As we reviewed earlier, normative social influence happens when someone conforms to fit into a group. The person might not necessarily agree with what they conform to, but they are doing so to try to fit in.

Informational social influence happens for an entirely different reason.

Fig. 1. What do you do when you see a crowded store?

Both of these types of social influence are prevalent in our daily lives. While they are different, they share the similarity of knowing that you are conforming. When you walk into the store, you know you’re going in because other people are there.

Asch’s 1951 Study and Normative Social Influence

Now that we better understand normative social influence, let’s look at one of its most famous studies, Asch’s 1955 conformity study.

Solomon Asch was a Polish-American psychologist who was influential in studying a wide range of psychological topics but is renowned for his work in conformity (and social influence). Asch was curious about a group’s effects on an individual’s conformity levels and designed a study around that idea.

Asch created his study in response to Sherif’s (1935) autokinetic conformity experiment, in which Sherif asked participants how much a stationary projected light on a screen appeared to move. Asch believed conformity was theoretically impossible because there was no correct answer to the task in Sherif’s experiment, making it more challenging to know whether participants had confirmed.

With his study, Asch wanted to find out how strong the effects of conformity were even when there was an obvious answer to the task.

He thought that even if the participants knew the correct answer in a group, the effects of normative social influence would be too strong, so that the participants would conform to the wrong answer.

Asch’s Conformity Experiment Summary

To start the experiment, Asch gathered participants from the student body at Swarthmore College, where he was employed.

Asch told his participants they would partake in an experiment centred around a vision test.

The participants were put into a group with seven other participants and informed they would judge the lengths of lines. They were given sheets of paper with four lines printed on them. One line was the target line, and the others were marked A, B, and C.

Participants had to name the line that corresponded to the target line. The participants stated their answers out loud so everyone in the group could hear what they thought. Each participant would go through multiple trials.

Fig. 2. The participants sat at a table, all hearing the others’ answers. Pixabay.com.

However, that’s the deception that Asch told the participants. Here’s what really happened.

Asch recruited his participants by telling them it was an experiment on vision, but in reality; it was a conformity test. The other seven participants in the room were confederates, members of the research team who were told beforehand how to answer each question. Asch instructed the confederates to say the correct answer initially, but as more trials went on, they were all told to answer incorrectly, despite the correct answer.

This section of the experiment -- when the confederates were answering incorrectly -- was the part that Asch was studying. Would the participants conform to the social influence of their peers or stay with the answer they knew was right?

Results of Asch’s Experiment

Would you have conformed to the wrong answer in this experiment?

If you were anything like Asch’s participants, you would have conformed. Even though there was an obvious answer to the line question, 74% of the participants answered incorrectly at least once when the confederates responded poorly. This result shows that while many participants did a handful of trials without conforming, they succumbed to the pressure at least once, despite knowing they were giving the incorrect answer.

Fig. 3 A diagram example of Asch’s line experiment

This result shows the impact of normative social influence and conformity on groups. This result becomes more impactful than the control group (without confederates), where only 1% of the participants answered incorrectly.

These findings support the claim that people are more likely to conform to a group, even if they know they are wrong. What is more impressive is that the participants were in a group of strangers! Do you think they would have conformed more or less to a group of people they knew?

Asch’s Additional Studies

Asch ran additional experiments with changes to the setup to see if other related factors impact conformity.

In one of Asch’s subsequent studies, he found that the participants’ conformity peaked at three confederates and then plateaued after three. This result means that in a laboratory setting like Asch, it only took a smaller group of confederates to get the same results as the initial larger group.

Another study looked at unanimity. When just one confederate agreed with the participant, the conformity rate dropped from 76% to 5%. Additionally, conformity rates dropped (to 9%) when one confederate gave a different answer from the participant and the group. This finding suggests that social influence is significantly reduced when there is just one dissenter in a group.

Finally, conformity increased when the task was harder, making the answer less obvious to participants. This result could be an example of informational social influence, which occurs when someone is unsure of their knowledge and looks to the information of others for help.