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1- Importance of social information.
2- Social comparison
3- Social Disapproval Avoidance.
4- Need to be liked and accepted.

Why do people obey?
1- People feel obliged to follow orders in different professions.
2- Authoritative figures has a grave impact on the individulas.
3- In many situations the orders seem fair for the moment. Intensity of it increases later.

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It is the term used to refer to the situation in which individuals change their beliefs or behaviour so that they become more similar to those of others. Conformity is a type of social influence involving a change in belief or behavior in order to fit in with a group.
To study Conformity an experiment was conducted by Solomon Asch in (1951).

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Solomon Asch - Conformity Experiment

By Saul McLeod, updated Dec 28, 2018

Solomon Asch conducted an experiment to investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform.

He believed that the main problem with Sherif's (1935) conformity experiment was that there was no correct answer to the ambiguous autokinetic experiment. How could we be sure that a person conformed when there was no correct answer?

Asch (1951) devised what is now regarded as a classic experiment in social psychology, whereby there was an obvious answer to a line judgment task.

If the participant gave an incorrect answer it would be clear that this was due to group pressure.

Experimental Procedure

Asch used a lab experiment to study conformity, whereby 50 male students from Swarthmore College in the USA participated in a 'vision test.'

Using a line judgment task, Asch put a naive participant in a room with seven confederates/stooges. The confederates had agreed in advance what their responses would be when presented with the line task.

The real participant did not know this and was led to believe that the other seven confederates/stooges were also real participants like themselves.

Each person in the room had to state aloud which comparison line (A, B or C) was most like the target line. The answer was always obvious. The real participant sat at the end of the row and gave his or her answer last.

There were 18 trials in total, and the confederates gave the wrong answer on 12 trails (called the critical trials). Asch was interested to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view.

Asch's experiment also had a control condition where there were no confederates, only a "real participant."

Findings

Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the majority view. On average, about one third (32%) of the participants who were placed in this situation went along and conformed with the clearly incorrect majority on the critical trials.

Over the 12 critical trials, about 75% of participants conformed at least once, and 25% of participants never conformed.

In the control group, with no pressure to conform to confederates, less than 1% of participants gave the wrong answer.

Conclusion

Why did the participants conform so readily? When they were interviewed after the experiment, most of them said that they did not really believe their conforming answers, but had gone along with the group for fear of being ridiculed or thought "peculiar.

A few of them said that they really did believe the group's answers were correct.

Apparently, people conform for two main reasons: because they want to fit in with the group (normative influence) and because they believe the group is better informed than they are (informational influence).

Critical Evaluation

One limitation of the study is that is used a biased sample. All the participants were male students who all belonged to the same age group. This means that the study lacks population validity and that the results cannot be generalized to females or older groups of people.

Another problem is that the experiment used an artificial task to measure conformity - judging line lengths. How often are we faced with making a judgment like the one Asch used, where the answer is plain to see?

This means that the study has low ecological validity and the results cannot be generalized to other real-life situations of conformity. Asch replied that he wanted to investigate a situation where the participants could be in no doubt what the correct answer was. In so doing he could explore the true limits of social influence.

Some critics thought the high levels of conformity found by Asch were a reflection of American, 1950's culture and told us more about the historical and cultural climate of the USA in the 1950s than then they do about the phenomena of conformity.

In the 1950s America was very conservative, involved in an anti-communist witch-hunt (which became known as McCarthyism) against anyone who was thought to hold sympathetic left-wing views. Conformity to American values was expected. Support for this comes from studies in the 1970s and 1980s that show lower conformity rates (e.g., Perrin & Spencer, 1980).

Perrin and Spencer (1980) suggested that the Asch effect was a "child of its time." They carried out an exact replication of the original Asch experiment using engineering, mathematics and chemistry students as subjects. They found that on only one out of 396 trials did an observer join the erroneous majority.

Perrin and Spencer argue that a cultural change has taken place in the value placed on conformity and obedience and in the position of students. In America in the 1950s students were unobtrusive members of society whereas now they occupy a free questioning role.

However, one problem in comparing this study with Asch is that very different types of participants are used. Perrin and Spencer used science and engineering students who might be expected to be more independent by training when it came to making perceptual judgments.

Finally, there are ethical issues: participants were not protected from psychological stress which may occur if they disagreed with the majority.

Evidence that participants in Asch-type situations are highly emotional was obtained by Back et al. (1963) who found that participants in the Asch situation had greatly increased levels of autonomic arousal.

This finding also suggests that they were in a conflict situation, finding it hard to decide whether to report what they saw or to conform to the opinion of others.

Asch also deceived the student volunteers claiming they were taking part in a 'vision' test; the real purpose was to see how the 'naive' participant would react to the behavior of the confederates. However, deception was necessary to produce valid results.

Asch Conformity Video Clip

The clip below is not from the original experiment in 1951, but an acted version for television from the 1970s.

Factors Affecting Conformity

In further trials, Asch (1952, 1956) changed the procedure (i.e., independent variables) to investigate which situational factors influenced the level of conformity (dependent variable).

His results and conclusions are given below:

APA Style References

Allen, V. L., & Levine, J. M. (1968). Social support, dissent and conformity. Sociometry, 138-149.

Asch, S. E. (1951). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgment. In H. Guetzkow (ed.) Groups, leadership and men. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Press.

Asch, S. E. (1952). Group forces in the modification and distortion of judgments.

Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological monographs: General and applied, 70(9), 1-70.

Back, K. W., Bogdonoff, M. D., Shaw, D. M., & Klein, R. F. (1963). An interpretation of experimental conformity through physiological measures. Behavioral Science, 8(1), 34.

Longman, W., Vaughan, G., & Hogg, M. (1995). Introduction to social psychology.

Perrin, S., & Spencer, C. (1980). The Asch effect: a child of its time? Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 32, 405-406.

Sherif, M., & Sherif, C. W. (1953). Groups in harmony and tension. New York: Harper & Row.

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Asch Conformity Experiment | Simply Psychology

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By Saul McLeod, updated Dec 28, 2018 Solomon Asch conducted an experiment to investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform. He believed that the main problem with Sherif's (1935) conformity experiment was that there was no correct answer to the ambiguous autokinetic experiment.

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A form of social influence in which one or more individuals behave in specific ways in response to direct orders from someone. It refers to the situations in the agent has the legitimate right to influence the FP(focal person) and the FP has the legitimate right to obey.
To study Obedience an experiement was conducted by Stanley Miligram in (1961).

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Stanley Milgram Shock Experiment: Summary, Results, & Ethics

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Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, carried out one of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology. He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. Milgram

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Efforts by one or more person to change the attitudes or behaviours of one or more other. It refers to the way in which individuals change their behavior to meet the demands of a social environment.
3 FORMS OF INFLUENCE :
1- OBEDIENCE
2- CONFORMITY
3- COMPLIANCE

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3. Automatic vigilance - is to direct attention toward events that may have undesirable consequences for the perceiver's well-being. Events that may negatively affect the individual are typically of greater time urgency than are events that lead to desirable consequences. The phenomenon of automatic vigilance, where emotional cues in the environment bias subsequent information processing. More precisely, the detection of threatening information can interrupt ongoing cognitive activity in ways that tune subsequent perception, attention, judgment, and even memory towards threat-related outcomes.
In decision making, potential costs are more influential than potential gains. In impression formation, negative information is weighted more heavily than positive information . In non-verbal communication any information which is negatively stated will have more impact than a positively stated message.
Eg,

In the present circumstances the individuals perception of getting the virus if they step out is stronger than actually going out and doing the work required.  Thus the people prefer to stay indoors even if they have to leave a very important task.

Someone who has had a very bad experience with driving will in future avoid driving due to the fear of an accident.

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2. False-consensus effect or false-consensus bias- is an attributional type of cognitive bias whereby people tend to overestimate the extent to which their opinions, beliefs, preferences, values, and habits are normal and typical of those of others (i.e., that others also think the same way that they do).This cognitive bias tends to lead to the perception of a consensus that does not exist, a "false consensus". This false consensus is significant because it increases or decreases self-esteem, the (overconfidence effect) or a belief that everyone knows one's own knowledge.
Sometimes individuals tend to believe that others are more similar to them than is actually the case. One reason why this effect is likely to occur is that the people with which we regularly come into contact, we use our knowledge of  similarities to make judgments.
Eg.

The false consensus effect could cause extremists to incorrectly assume that the majority of the population shares their political views, despite the fact that almost everyone disagrees with them.

A student will engage in taking drugs and smoking because of the mistaken belief that most other students approve of it, its a style statement and all the children of their age do. While in reality most other students disapprove, but behave in the same way because they share the same mistaken (but collectively self-sustaining) belief.

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ATRIBUTIONAL BIASES - ERRORS IN FORMING JUDGEMENTS.

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ATRIBUTIONAL BIASES - ERRORS IN FORMING JUDGEMENTS.

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1. Self-serving bias- are those in which people tend to give themselves credit for successes but lay the blame for failures on outside causes. This bias does serve an important role; it helps to protect our self-esteem, the tendency to perceive oneself in an overly favorable manner. It is the belief that individuals tend to ascribe success to their own abilities and efforts, but ascribe failure to external factors. This can be affected by age, culture, clinical diagnosis, and more.
By attributing positive events to personal characteristics, you get a boost in confidence. By blaming outside forces for failures, you protect your self-esteem and absolve yourself from personal responsibility. The self-serving bias is the tendency people have to seek out information and use it in ways that advance their self-interest. In other words, people often unconsciously make decisions that serve themselves in ways that other people might view as indefensible or unethical.
Eg.

A student gets a good grade on a test and tells herself that she studied hard or is good at the material. She gets a bad grade on another test and says the teacher doesn’t like her or the test was unfair.

A job applicant believes he’s been hired because of his achievements, qualifications, and excellent interview. For a previous opening he didn’t receive an offer for, he says the interviewer didn’t like him.

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A combination of high consistency,high consensus and high distinctiveness creates external attribution. Whereas high consistency, combined with low consensus and low distinctiveness determines internal attribution.

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Attribution Theory - Basic covariation | Individuals and Society | MCAT | Khan Academy

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COVARIATION THEORY OF ATTRIBUTION - HAROLD KELLY.

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COVARIATION THEORY OF ATTRIBUTION - HAROLD KELLY.

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The term covariation simply means that a person has information from multiple observations, at different times and situations, and can perceive the covariation of an observed effect and its causes. The basic method used is the "presence-absence test". The PAT is a basic tenet of experiment in which the conditions "experimental" and "control" conditions helps in judging whether a particular action is the cause of internal factors or external factors.
The basic 3 factors used in assessing are:
1- CONSENSUS: the extent to which other people behave in the same way in a similar situation. They see the way other people respond in the same manner as the person being judged.

2- DISTINCTIVENESS: the extent to which the person behaves in the same way in similar situations.

3- CONSISTENCY: the extent to which the person behaves like this every time the situation occurs.
The person show similar behaviour across time.

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The process through which we attempt to answer the questions, to determine the causes behind others behaviours. It is an orderly process in which we examine the others behaviour for cues as to the cause behind what they say or do, then reach our decision.

2 KINDS OF ATTRIBUTION
1- DISPOSITIONAL (Internal):It
assigns the cause of behavior to some internal characteristic of a person, rather than to outside forces. When we explain the behavior of others we look for enduring internal attributions, such as personality traits.

2- SITUATIONAL(External): The process of assigning the cause of behavior to some situation or event outside a person's control rather than to some internal characteristic. When we try to explain our own behavior we tend to make external attributions, such as situational or environment features.

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Psychologist who study all aspects of social behvaiour & social thought. Social psychology is the study of how the presence of people can affect one individual's behaviors, thoughts, and feelings. The group of people that can influence a person is often real, but the imagined or even the implied presence of other people can sometimes alter an individual's behavior or thoughts.