Conformity is influenced by amount of contradictors
With groups, issues of numbers come into play with conformity—how many other voices are urging you to join the cool kids? Among chimps or two-year-old humans, one individual doing something three times does not evoke the conformity of three individuals doing the same act once each. Echoing this, follow-up studies by Asch showed that conformity first kicks in when there are at least three people unanimously contradicting what the subject thinks, with maximum conformity first evoked by around half a dozen contradictors. But this is the artificial world of lab subjects judging the length of a line—in the real world the conforming power of a lynch mob of six doesn’t approach that of a mob of a thousand.
References
- Sapolsky, Robert. (2017). Behave Chapter 12. Hierarchy, Obedience, and Resistance (p. 535). New York, NY: Penguin Random House.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Psychology / Social Psychology Status:☀️