Literature Review: Conformity and Deviation (Part 3)

Resuming my previous post on Berg and Bass' Conformity and Deviation, I will now go over some of the problems of conformity and deviation and highlight the importance of them being used relative to the situation at hand. 

There are certain questions that should be raised in dealing with problems of conformity and deviation. "An item of behavior, taken in and by itself, cannot be labeled either conformity or deviation. There is no such thing as conforming and deviating behavior in the abstract" ( p.159). That means that terms "conformity" and "deviation" only make sense in relative to certain scenarios, such as when the following questions are raised: 

1. Conformity to what? Deviation or departure from what? Conformity is always conforming to something while deviation is always departure from something, whether the referent of that "something" is made explicit or not. What is that 'something'? The referents may be the prevailing, usual, or expected ways of doing things in the individual's surroundings. This is the normative basis of the problem. The referents may be the individual's particular place of position in the scheme of interpersonal or group relationships. This is the organizational basis of the problem. Does the individual accept and behave in term of the place and position expected of him and his kind in the scheme of things?

2. What is the relative importance of the behavior area in which conformity and deviance occur? For example, is it a matter of whether a father takes care of his family as he should, or is it a question of whether he keeps up with the baseball scores in the World Series as his friends do?

3. Is the normative basis of the behavior shared and upheld by other groups to which the individual is related in some capacity? Or do his or her multiple groups put contradictory or even conflicting demands and expectations on the individual for his or her behavior in given dimensions? This, of course, relates to the problem of integration or conflict of social values in the psychological world of the individual.

4. Does conformity or deviation occur through coercion or threat of subsequent coercion and force, or is the behavior in question prompted by the individual's inner convictions and personally cherished values?           

5. What are the alternatives available for the individual in the stimulus situation with respect to the area of behavior in question? Are they clearly defined or difficult to distinguish? In other words, what situational factors enter into the picture, both as to the physical setting and the other people involved?

When studied in the context of these questions, conforming or nonconforming behavior can be taken as 

an index of the degree of stability or the extent of change in the human relations of a given setting and specifies whether change occurs primarily through coercion or through the voluntary interaction of individuals (p.161).

Thus viewed, conforming and nonconforming behaviors can serve as a basis for evaluating the trends in human relationships: how a group is doing and in what direction it is headed. 

Taking a stand as an apologist of conformity could amount to the praise of blind subservience. Conversely, singing the praise of nonconformity, apart from the evaluation of the norm value to which it is related, may make conformity seem righteous. As a result, nonconformity or conformity cannot be evaluated in its own right apart from its referent, namely the normative basis of the behavior in question. 

The representative problems of conformity and nonconformity can be more effectively singled out through due recognition of man's behavior relative to significant other persons. This is because conforming or nonconforming behavior makes very little sense when it is not analyzed within a framework of these relationships.

 An observation will illustrate this point. Bass cites a 1958 study in which a group of liberal students in the southwest was interested in persuading shopkeepers to cater to Negro students. The response of the shopkeepers was that they were willing to do so but each individual was concerned about what the other shopkeepers in the area would do. From this, he states that,

Our image of ourselves, our appraisals of our own practices, are not self-generating. They are not independent or our relatedness to people significant in our eyes, whether these significant people are seen as friend or foe (p.174). 

If the problem of conformity and independence is formulated within a framework of the individual's group's setting, we are confronted with relationships in which the problem is an ever-present, integral aspect of interaction situations and not an incidental issue. If the problem is formulated within the concreteness of group relations, as these relations unfold in the actualities of social life, then conformity and nonconformity acquire a functional significance which loses meaning apart from these relations. When man enters into repeated interaction with others, directed toward similar concerns and goals, he takes part in a process of norm formation and stabilization.  

Furthermore, issues are not necessarily in a dichotomous form, that are either for the individual or for the group; it depends on the specific scenario. "Within the framework of man's ties with other men in lasting relationships, the conflicting or harmonious character of interests is itself a problem of study. With the vantage point, thus gained, the external stimulus can be studied as it becomes relevant to relationships among individuals facing definable problem situations" (p.175).

To summarize, "in all phases of his daily living- social, political, economic, etc.- man is confronted today with pressures to regulate his behavior within advocated mold and directions"(p.193). An item of behavior, whether in social, political, or economic spheres, cannot be characterized by itself either conforming or deviating. It is always conformity or deviation relative to some premise, canon, standard, or value- in short. to some norm. Finally, since social value, moral standards, or norms are products of interactions between human beings over a period of time, issues of conformity and nonconformity must be analyzed in such a context.   

This concludes my literature review series on Conformity and Deviation by Berg and Bass.  I will continue future posts by analyzing more modern psychological studies that I can relate to my senior project.

If you're interested in the book (or dubious about my claims), you can pick it up from Amazon here: Conformity and Deviation.

   

Literature Review: Conformity and Deviation (Part 2)

Continuing with Berg and Bass' Conformity and Deviation, I will now go over psychological behaviorism and the traits related to conformity.  

What are the exact phenomenal means by which conformity can be induced into groups and individuals? Rather than looking at the occurrences of group situations and viewing the factors that impact them, I will now dive into how behaviors are psychologically formed to produce conformity and the individual traits that affect it. 

Berg and Bass strive to reconcile three separate dispositional theories from various other conformity psychologists: the hypotheses of Murphy's (1947) "unity of perception and action", Asch's (1952) "isomorphism of experience and action", and Sherif's (1956) "unity of experience and action". They believe that in doing so they can reconcile theories that express past experiences, social perceptions, etc. with the theories that describe the elicitation of responses in the presence of external stimuli.  

In psychology, dispositional theories are otherwise known as traits and experimenters who measure these traits are primarily interested in how they form habitual patterns of behavior, thought, and emotion. "The conscious, perceptual experience thus referred to contains within it both central nervous system projections of the current external objects plus residues of past experience with similar objects" (p.101). With context, this means that whenever a person formulates a behavior through interacting with something they have their immediate perception of the object as well as the knowledge they have acquired about it in the past. Sensory neural inputs are filtered through the brain's association areas in which learned meanings are represented. Such awareness or perceptions are hypothesized to be isomorphic to - or corresponding with - behavior or action. 

Conformity research is typically research in composite dispositions. This means psychologists measure traits that correlate with a behavior and calculate them into composites The research is usually centered around instances of incompatible dispositional tendencies caused by individual and social modes of behavior. To clarify, I am describing conformity through the lens of behavioral psychology and how people acquire certain dispositions. "For social beings, learning by direct experience is only one of the several ways of acquiring behavioral dispositions" (p. 103). The authors articulate on six distinguishable methods or 'modes' by which people's behavior is shaped. The first two are personal while the other four are considered social modes: 

1. Learning, blind trial and error, or locomotor exploration. This means that if an experiment was done where a child was blindfolded, it could learn its way about in a room through a series of explorations, and eventually interpret its surroundings.

2. Perception. If a child is placed in a balcony overlooking the room, by which the experimental scenario is made visible, then the behavioral dispositions acquired are equivalent to trial and error. This would mean that mnemonic expectations of a scenario would coordinate with perceptual expectations and the behavior that is produced is not likely distinguishable to personal exploration. Amusingly, Berg and Bass mention an experiment that involved elevating animals before they entered a maze where this theory, to some extent, applied.

3. Perceptual observation of the outcomes of another person's trial-and-error exploration. Postulate a scenario you were to take two children, both equally unaware of the contents of a room, in which one explores by trial and error and the other watches. Logically, the observing child should acquire behavioral dispositions very similar to those acquired simultaneously by the model through trial and error. This is especially important in society since human beings are successfully equipped so as to learn and profit from the experiences of others.

4. Perceptual observation of another person's responses. If a child had learned behaviors based on the whereabouts of the room, an observing child can see the results of his responses and later mimic their pattern. This produces an overt response sequence indistinguishable from that of the model (the first child). "Miller and Dollard (1941) have called this matched dependent behavior and have demonstrated that both rats and children can learn to initiate responses independently of mode 3, in which information about the environment is obtained by observing the outcomes to another when that other explores" (p.105).

5. Linguistic instruction about the characteristic of objects. Once one child has learned the room, he can easily induce a parallel set of behavioral dispositions in a second child by saying: "The green box will give you a shock. The red box has candy in it. The other boxes are all empty".

6. Linguistic instruction about responses to be made. Finally, a knowledgeable child could tell another child "Take three steps forward and two steps to your right. Open the red box and place your hand inside. Then completely ignore the green box".

Though this sounds boring at first glance, if you were to stop and think about the ways that humans shift behaviors, in general, you would eventually come up with: "Well, they can experience something themselves, see someone else do it, see someone else's reactions, or be told how to do it".

After the authors list each mode related to behavior, they provide us with traits that are directly related to conformity associated with each mode. Here is the practical sociological stuff! Of the six modes of dispositions, giving weight to social modes (such as 3, 4, 5, or 6) is regarded as synonymous with conformity, suggestibility, persuadability, or yielding. As a result, relying on individual dispositional source or personal modes (1 or 2) will lead to decreased conformity while strengthening social sources lead to increased conformity. 

1.      Learning and competence.

a.      Learning

                                                    i.   The stronger the specific individual disposition (attitude, habit, knowledge, belief, response-tendency, expectancy, etc.)against which social-dispositional sources conflicts, the less the conformity

The more difficult the subject material, i.e., the less well learned and unfamiliar the task, the more the conformity.

                                                  ii.     The greater a person’s knowledge on a subject, the less conformant he is.

                                                iii.     The older a person is, the more established his dispositions and therefore the less conformant he is.

                                                iv.     The more certain the person is about a judgment, the less conformity he will demonstrate (These principles deal with the strength of the specific disposition when conformity pressures are involved. These subsequent principles are not specific to a single disposition).

b.     Competence

                                               i.        The more competent the person has been in learning and generating valid dispositions through individual modes the more heavily he weigh in individual modes over social modes.

                                            ii.         The more intelligent and generally competent a person is, the less he will conform. (This rationale is actually important in the survey that I am doing for my senior project).

                                          iii.         The higher a person’s status, the greater his influence on others, the less conformant,  he will be.

                                          iv.         The greater a person’s self-perceived own ability, the less his conformity. The more self-esteeming, self-assured, aggressive, impulsive, self-confident, etc. persons are less conformant.

                                             v.        The greater the general value placed upon individual achievement, the less conformity will occur.

2.      Perception.

a.      The clearer and more distinct the perceptual situation, the stronger the perceptual disposition, the less conformity is likely to occur.

b.     Judgments based upon memory are more subject to conformity influence than those based upon immediate perception.

3.      Observational Learning.

a.       Simple vicarious reinforcement. A person observing the behavior of a model will acquire the same incentives or valences which the model is acquiring, providing the conditions of observation and communication are adequate to inform the observer of the rewards and punishments being received by the model. Simply put, The more rewarded the model for the act or response, the more conformant will be the observer. The more punished the model the more the observer will tend to inhibit the punished act.

b.      Prestige generalization across behavior samples for one model. A person observing the responses of a model in a situation in which the reinforcement for the model cannot be observed will acquire positive valence and incentive for the response being made by the model to the extent that the responses of the model have been observed to be rewarding to the model in previous situations. (Translation: The more the observer sees the model be rewarded, the more conformant will be the observer).

                                                    i.     Intelligent, strong, successful, high-status persons will induce more conformity than low-status ones. Adults induce more conformity in children than peers. Older students as models induce more conformity than younger ones.

c.      Prestige generalization across models. Persons raised by the more competent, effective parents, and surrounded by the more effective adequate, teachers and peers will be more gullible and conformant to a new model. This makes sense considering that in the individuals perceive their social groups to be very reliable and therefore will be more willing to conform. Meanwhile, Persons raised by ineffectual parents and surrounded by failures, will be less conformant to a new model.

                                                    i.     The average person from a stable social background will tend to conform to new models.

d.     The more numerous the models modeling the same act, the stronger the incentive for the act. With groups of four, five, and six more conformity was found in the larger groups. It is noted that with regret that this principle has had only partially consistent conformation, or that the asymptote occurs at a very low number of others. Asch (1951) found that three other people were more persuasive than one or two, but more numerous models had no additional effect.

4.       Reinforced initiative responding 

a.       Rewarding observers for imitative responses led to increased imitation of a given model.

b.     Imitation generalizes across models. Observers reinforced for imitating a given model will tend to imitate new similar models.  

c.      The more rewarding a model has been, the more an observer will tend to imitate the model’s acts in the model’s absence.

5.      Verbal Instruction

a.      The more a communicator's own responses have been known the have been rewarding to the communicator the more his communications about the goodness and badness of descriptions and actions will lead to positive and negative incentives for those descriptions and actions.

b.     The more that similar communicators have been observed to have their own actions rewarded in the past, the more influential a new communicator will be.

c.      The more similar the communicator to past effective communicators, the more persuasive he will be. For these reasons, ceteris paribus, movie and TV presentations are more effective than radio, which is more effective than the printed page.

To summarize, the authors focused on combining dispositional theories that are borrowed from both cognitive and behavioristic psychological sources. "Social-observational modes of acquiring dispositional strength have been given particular emphasis" (p. 132). Finally, conformity research is typified as one in which individual dispositional tendencies or simply traits are compared with social sources. These traits and correlations are measured and general findings of conformity can be confirmed and published.

If you're interested in the book  (or dubious about my claims), you can pick it up from Amazon: Conformity and Deviation.