Social conformity is the act of modifying your behavior in a social situation, usually to ‘fit in’ with a group, to avoid confrontation, or because you believe someone might have more trustworthy information than yourself. There are many examples of social conformity in everyday life. For example, there are different groups of students who will conform to dress norms that fit in with their social group. Someone may change their opinion on a movie, or simply pretend because their friends have a different opinion. Conformity happens in many cases, it may be a conscious decision or not, and can often be subtle.

The most prominent piece of research of social conformity is Asch’s original study in 1951 where he got a participant and 4 actors in a room to answer a seemingly simple question. The participant always answered last and had to answer out loud. When the actors answered, they unanimously gave an incorrect answer. When the participant answered, 38% of them changed their answers to match the group’s opinion.  With this famous study, the idea of people changing their behavior to fit into a group was clearly established. Since then, the results of many studies reflect that social conformity is a common occurrence but that it is not consistent as also shown by the Asch study. There are also many factors that are shown to impact the level of social conformity such as age, time, culture, gender, etc.

Why people conform

Social conformity is extremely common. As showcased in the earlier research, people will tend to change their behavior based on others’ behavior. However, as to why there are many possible reasons a person may conform. One of the reasons is to fit within a group, so they change their behavior to fit with certain norms. This type of social conformity is called normative conformity. The other type of social conformity is when someone changes their behavior because they believe someone else may know more than them, or if they are wrong. This is called informative conformity.

Informative conformity is probably these easier to understand out of the two. The reason for conforming is rather simple. Every person wants to be correct, wants to have more information on that which they do not know. So, if they believe that someone else knows more than them, they are likely to follow their words or advice. For example, if someone more experienced than you tells you you’re doing something wrong, you are likely to follow those words, because they are spoken by someone with more experience. This is the same reason someone may listen to the advice of a group of people as well. Using the logic of majority rules, they may decide that if more people believe so, they must be right, so they change their behavior to match it. This makes logical sense, as having the correct information on any topic or area can be highly beneficial in everyday life, from both a modern and evolutionary standpoint. In this sense, it makes sense that people would conform to an idea or alternate information.

Normative conformity is when people conform to a social norm. People do this because they want to fit in and be part of a group. For example, if all of someone’s friends are smoking, and the person feels excluded, the person might start smoking in order to ‘fit in’ to the group. This type of conformity is also showcased in the Asch study mentioned earlier. The participants in the study tried to fit in with the group by giving an obviously incorrect answer. The answer to the question was extremely obvious each time, and yet the participants answered wrong to match the other people in the room. To make sure the participants did not actually think the others were correct, there were control conditions in which participants answered without outside influence. In these cases, people always got their answers correct. Normative conformity is the one most people refer to when talking about social conformity. It stems from people’s need to belong, to be part of a social group. In evolutionary theory, this idea makes sense, as humans are inherently social animals, with a need to be in groups. If someone was detached from the group, they would soon perish. So, the need to belong translated into modern society to become social conformity