Using research evidence, explain conformity and obedience.
Within any society, conformity and obedience are required factors with which to maintain a balanced order. Without social normalities or, the desire to merge into society and to be liked by others virtually nothing could grow or prosper. The two states of: conformity, a state achieved when one cedes to outside real or imagined social pressure and obedience, a compliance to an authoritative figure walk side by side. It could be said that each requires the other for existance: people would not display obedience to a higher power unless they wished to conform to a normality displayed by others as they obeyed a command; just as equally as people would not, for example, stand in an orderly queue unless a teacher or other authority figure had instructed them to do so.
The human psyche is ingrained with a desire to be right and to be liked by our peers and one way in which to achieve this state is to follow the example of the larger group. In a conformity study conducted Sherif in 1935, participants were subjected to a perceptual illusion in which a small light on a backdrop of darkness appears to be in a state of movement when it actually is not. The participants were asked to observe the light and examine how far it had moved. When when tested individually, the answers the participants gave varied widely but when they were placed in groups with one another, the estimates they gave quickly merged into a spectrum more aligned with that of others in the group. When placed into the same individual test, the subjects still reverted to the estimates which conformed with the group's and when asked if they had been influenced by the group's answers in any way, they claimed repeatedly that they had not. The same result - to a greater degree of poignancy - was achieved by Asch in a study of Opinions and Social Pressure in 1951. The experiment consisted of 18 trials in which the participants had to look at a piece of paper in which there was a standard line and three other lines of varying length and to determine which line of the three was the same length as the standard line. In each group there was only one 'real' paricipant and the rest were instructed by the experimenter to give obviously wrong answers on 12 out of the 18 trials which took place. The seating was arranged so that the 'real' participant was the last one to answer. A second group was tasked with taking the test individually. The results of the test showed that on 32% of tests in which the participants had given the wrong answer, the 'real' participant had agreed with them. 74% of participants conformed at least once and, 26% did not conform at all while 5% conformed with every wrong answer.
