Conformity
Changing what you say, do or believe to match a group. It runs on two motors: informational (the group probably knows something I don't) and normative (I don't want to be the odd one out).
What drives it
It protects belonging and spares you the cost of being visibly wrong alone. Under uncertainty it is also a cheap and often sensible shortcut, which is why it is hard to see in yourself.
How it shows
Work
In a meeting the most senior or most confident person speaks first and the room converges within two or three comments. Private dissent surfaces afterwards in the corridor or by DM: 'I didn't want to say it in there, but...'. Asch's key finding plays out daily: one ally who breaks ranks collapses the pressure, so the first dissenter matters more than the tenth. Who conforms: newcomers, people whose status is insecure, people on contracts or visas, high self-monitors. Who resists: people with status to spare, people with an outside identity (a professional ethic, a different team) and people who have already paid the price of dissent and survived it.
Relationships
Families have house opinions (about money, politics, which relative is difficult) that members repeat without having examined. Friends adopt the group's taste in restaurants, holidays, even partners. The tell is a view that changes depending on which group the person is sitting with.
Self
You notice your answer forming only after you have heard what others said, or you soften a view mid-sentence when you see faces. Afterwards you feel a small relief at having agreed and a small dishonesty you would rather not look at.
What tells it apart
Obedience to authority: Conformity follows peers with no explicit instruction; obedience follows a specific order from someone with recognised authority. Remove the boss from the room: conformity persists if the peers remain, obedience drops.
Pluralistic ignorance: In conformity people may genuinely shift their private view; in pluralistic ignorance everyone privately disagrees and wrongly assumes the others agree. Anonymous polling reveals the latter as a sudden gap between public and private answers.
People-pleasing: People-pleasing is aimed at one person's approval and shows up even one-to-one; conformity tracks the group's position and shifts when the group changes.
A test
Ask people to write their view down before discussion, then compare it with what they say aloud; a consistent shift towards the first speaker or the majority confirms conformity.
Questions to carry
- Between what was written down before the meeting and what was said aloud, what shifted, and toward whom?
- When did I last say I agreed with a group while thinking otherwise, and what was I protecting?
How strong the research is
strong
Where it comes from
Muzafer Sherif, 1935; Solomon Asch, 1951 and 1956; Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard, 1955 (normative versus informational influence)
Sources
- Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927)
- Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (1941)
- Solomon E. Asch, Effects of Group Pressure upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgments (1951)
- Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of 'Brainwashing' in China (1961)
- Elliot Aronson (later editions with Joshua Aronson), The Social Animal (1972)
- Irving L. Janis, Victims of Groupthink (1972)