| Conforming your opinion to UU standards |
Wednesday, December 07 2005 @ 04:23 AM PST
Contributed by: Jimmy C
Views: 2883
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We conform our opinion to match that of the group we are in to a much greater extent than you might believe we do. Solomon Asch performed an experiment in 1958 that showed that opinions based on even obvious facts like the length of a line relative to another line could be swayed by conformity to the percieved group majority opinion.
Asch was disturbed by these results: "The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black." Are UU young adults immune to this? Not likely. Plus non conformists are ridiculed on FUUSE, which actually increases conformity by others to keep from being ridiculed themselves.
Imagine that in our discussions of AR/AO programming, the FUUSE covenant, and the disruption of Con Con, that as much conformity despite obvious facts is happening nowadays as happened in 1958. What does this mean for FUUSE and for UUism for UU young adults in 2006?
Have you seen conformity of opinion taking place on FUUSE due to ridicule or coercion? What about at youth or young adult events? It happens. If we are to believe Asch's results, conformity of opinion within UU young adult circles happens to a much greater extent than we are aware. What does this mean for dissent within UU youth and young adult discussions?
If you missed it in Psych 101, here is a description of Asch's actual results:
Solomon Asch experiment (1958)
A study of conformity
Social Pressure and Perception
Imagine yourself in the following situation: You sign up for a psychology experiment, and on a specified date you and seven others whom you think are also subjects arrive and are seated at a table in a small room.
You don't know it at the time, but the others are actually associates of the experimenter, and their behavior has been carefully scripted. You're the only real subject.
The experimenter arrives and tells you that the study in which you are about to participate concerns people's visual judgments. She places two cards before you. The card on the left contains one vertical line. The card on the right displays three lines of varying length.
The experimenter asks all of you, one at a time, to choose which of the three lines on the right card matches the length of the line on the left card. The task is repeated several times with different cards.
On some occasions the other "subjects" unanimously choose the wrong line. It is clear to you that they are wrong, but they have all given the same answer.
What would you do? Would you go along with the majority opinion, or would you "stick to your guns" and trust your own eyes?
In 1951 social psychologist Solomon Asch devised this experiment to examine the extent to which pressure from other people could affect one's perceptions. In total, about one third of the subjects who were placed in this situation went along with the clearly erroneous majority.
Asch showed bars like those in the Figure to college students in groups of 8 to 10. He told them he was studying visual perception and that their task was to decide which of the bars was the same length as the one on the left. The task is simple, and the correct answer is obvious.
Asch asked the students to give their answers aloud. He repeated the procedure with 18 sets of bars. Only one student in each group was a real subject. All the others were confederates who had been instructed to give incorrect answers on 12 of the 18 trials.
Asch arranged for the real subject to be the next-to-the-last person in each group to announce his answer so that he would hear most of the confederates incorrect responses before giving his own. Would he go along with the crowd?
To Asch's surprise, 37 of the 50 subjects conformed to the majority at least once, and 14 of them conformed on more than 6 of the 12 trials. When faced with a unanimous wrong answer by the other group members, the mean subject conformed on 4 of the 12 trials.
Asch was disturbed by these results: "The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black. This is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct."
Why did the subjects 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.
Asch conducted a revised version of his experiment to find out whether the subjects truly did not believe their incorrect answers. When they were permitted to write down their answers after hearing the answers of others, their level of conformity declined to about one third what it had been in the original experiment.
Apparently, people conform for two main reasons: because they want to be liked by the group and because they believe the group is better informed than they are.
Suppose you go to a fancy dinner party and notice to your dismay that there are four forks beside your plate. When the first course arrives, you are not sure which fork to use. If you are like most people, you look around and use the fork everyone else is using.
You do this because you want to be accepted by the group and because you assume the others know more about table etiquette than you do.
Conformity, group size, and cohesiveness
Asch found that one of the situational factors that influence conformity is the size of the opposing majority.
In a series of studies he varied the number of confederates who gave incorrect answers from 1 to 15. He found that the subjects conformed to a group of 3 or 4 as readily as they did to a larger group.
However, the subjects conformed much less if they had an "ally" In some of his experiments, Asch instructed one of the confederates to give correct answers. In the presence of this nonconformist, the real subjects conformed only one fourth as much as they did in the original experiment.
There were several reasons: First, the real subject observed that the majority did not ridicule the dissenter for his answers. Second, the dissenter's answers made the subject more certain that the majority was wrong. Third, the real subject now experienced social pressure from the dissenter as well as from the majority.
Many of the real subjects later reported that they wanted to be like their nonconformist partner (the similarity principle again). Apparently, it is difficult to be a minority of one but not so difficult to be part of a minority of two.
Some of the subjects indicated afterward that they assumed the rest of the people were correct and that their own perceptions were wrong. Others knew they were correct but didn't want to be different from the rest of the group. Some even insisted they saw the line lengths as the majority claimed to see them.
Asch concluded that it is difficult to maintain that you see something when no one else does. The group pressure implied by the expressed opinion of other people can lead to modification and distortion effectively making you see almost anything.
From http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/psychology/social/asch_conformity.html
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| Authored by: dodgermask On Wednesday, December 07 2005 @ 10:51 AM PST |
Now jim, I'm probably what you would call a "non conformist" I stick to what I feels right even when many people I love and respect feel a different way. I want to ask you a few questions.
have you ever been in a situation where perhaps you thought you had the right answer but then you found out you were wrong. Perhaps on a math test you answered one way but when the teacher or prof went over the test you realized that "oops" you were wrong? Or perhaps maybe once or twice in your life, you've changed your opinion on something as new information was presented to you? Or even better; maybe, just maybe at one point in your life didn't get something or agree with something til it was articulated a certain way?
I know I have. The fact that you can make a comparision between these tests where one answer was obviously right and to situations on fuuse where there is no right answer because they're opinions says something to me, it says that you feel like you have the right answers and that the vast majority of us are simply conforming with the majority. Now if that is the case, Please tell us, or atleast me the answers, you can do it in a private message I really wouldn't mind. But if this is not truely how you feel, perhaps you should find a better case study and quit playing alagory of the caves games with us.
You find a study on having someone who's prolife go into a room with 10 pro-choice people who do nothing and but belittle and harass prolife people in their responces to are you prochoice or prolife, and I'll listen a little more, but this is a perfect example of using a metaphore that's close enough to confuse people, but not accurate enough to have a point.
and also on a complete side note because I'm addressing you, you took my choice of sleeping or leaving AR/AO work out of context, used it as an example, and had absolutely no conversation with me as to why I did it, and I don't appreciate it.
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YARRRRR I'm a Pirate![ Reply to This ]
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| Authored by: BartFrost On Thursday, December 08 2005 @ 08:10 AM PST |
I don't get your point. Are you saying we shouldn't work to create a stronger community? A more effective lobbying group? Because if everyone stayed "non-conformist" in UU communities, then we create conflict. And if conflict is to be lovingly resolved, someone must change.
And are you saying that we should accept ignorance of racism and other oppressions in UU communities? Not even help people recognize their power?
I've contemplated it once, because there is always one person who will never accept the power he has. Which is why we should work all the harder to educate. And not worry about conformity or non-comformity.[ Reply to This ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous On Thursday, December 08 2005 @ 10:52 AM PST |
This is weak even for you. First off this website is not a credible site. Allow me to explain.
"The age-of-the-sage.org Website first went on line in May 2000. Since that time it has greatly expanded in content and is now receiving a highly gratifying 500,000 plus page-visits per year. The principal researcher is Brian J. Hayes who actually sincerely practised a mystical spirituality circa 1978-1983 during which years the core mystical and poetical insights contained on these pages were identified or discovered."
Brian J. Hayes is first off a Mystical Spirituality practitioner who I can find no information on. So this is a website mostly based on a man who can't even be questioned about his beliefs. I would have been fine if that were the only problem with this site.
This is a spirituality website. What does this have anything to do with Social Psychology? I'm not even sure if I can trust this website's description of the experiment. Not to mention they have no documentation to back up any of their "findings." If they had taken this study from a psychological journal they would have mentioned exact citation, which they have convienently left out.
See now I greatly like the work of Solomon E. Asch. He was a pretty good guy, but here's a thing you didn't know. He has been quoted in saying in relation to the experiment mentioned above and other similar experiments, "Most social acts have to be understood in their setting, and lose meaning if isolated. No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function." Guess what? You took a study out of context and tried to use it for you own oppinions and needs. For shame.
If your going to use a study in Psychology as evidence atleast know what your using.
If you want some credible sources for Social Psychology you may wish to look at a real scientific/research based website like http://www.socialpsychology.org/
, but that's just a suggestion.
Finally, I would like to say that to my knowledge you are not a Psychologist. So I'm just curious, but could you please explain to me exactly how you are able to back up your claims that Unitarian Universalists are conformists?
Chris Zahn
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No body's romancin' cuz it's to early for dancin'... but here comes the music.[ Reply to This ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous On Thursday, December 08 2005 @ 10:54 AM PST |
If you are interested in Solomon Asch I might suggest looking at the foundation that he set up.
http://www.psych.upenn.edu/sacsec/
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No body's romancin' cuz it's to early for dancin'... but here comes the music.[ Reply to This ]
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| Authored by: Semiconductor On Wednesday, December 21 2005 @ 04:57 AM PST |
Jimmy C, I appreciate this post and support it. I think that the responses make good points as well (ie: dodgermask's: since sometimes our ideas are wrong, it does make sense to question one's opinion when it suddenly seems in the minority.)
but this post does resonate with me personally... just from my own experience, that feeling of not wanting to be embarassed, not to have the finger pointed at me... it's more powerful than I want it to be. and I have felt how sometimes my opinions seem to buckle or shift under social pressure... it can be very disconcerting! my strategy is basically to try to be aware of it.
there may be definite evolutionary reasons (who knows, maybe it was intelligent design!) why humans subvert belief systems to the social context. individualism or non-conformity may not have been a good adaptive stragety 'back in the caveman days,' when survival of the individual was much more closely linked to the survival of the group.
-Greg
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"There is no what it is like to be a zombie."
-David Chalmers[ Reply to This ]
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| Authored by: Jimmy C On Wednesday, December 21 2005 @ 06:20 AM PST |
I often think of Asch's experiments on conformity when working with UUs or even people at work. Conforming to group expectations is a huge part of who we are and what we do. Fitting in with the main reason given by subjects in Asch's experiments for conforming to majority opinion.
Conformity of thought is the hallmark of our Anti-Racism programming. Diversity of thought withing Anti-Racism programming in UU youth and young adult circles is not tolerated.
One person who wrote about this on FUUSE in regards to their personal experiences at UU young adult AR programming then had to defend their position against a huge onslought of ridicule. Their position was not respected and eventually they caved into the group pressure with an
"OK, OK, fine." type of response.
What that preserved for that person was a sense that they could continue to be an "included" member of the group.
This is the worst aspect of UU AR programming today.
I think Greg is correct in pointing out that there are good reasons for behaving this way. Our behavior relative to the group we are in had a large impact on our chances for survival when these behaviors developed in more tribal communities.
But, UUism is not a tribe, UUism is not a cult. The extent to which AR programming encourages a differences of opinion about racism itself and how to go about anti-racism efforts is the measure of the extent to which AR work will grow out of being a cultish or tribal effort within UUism and have a chance to have a real impact in the real world.
not included,
Jim Sechrest
"non-conformist" is my middle name.
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You better lose yourself in the music, the moment.
You own it. You better never let it go.
You only get one shot... -Eminem[ Reply to This ]
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| Authored by: z514656345 On Thursday, July 29 2010 @ 01:08 AM PDT |
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