Jenness's Theory Of Conformity

Introduction- We are all social beings, with the need for a sense of community being a basic necessity in our nature. The study of social psychology looks into this need, dealing with social interactions, their origins and their effects on individuals. This essay will strive to introduce the key psychologists who explored this topic, their theories and the research that they conducted.

2. Conformity- A huge area within social psychology is conformity, which is the study of how people comply to standards or expectations to be considered socially acceptable. The rules that cause people to conform are known as social norms, and have a major influence on our behaviour. While some may argue that conformity takes away social freedom from individuals,
Studies- There have been a number of studies that have explored how people behave in the presence of others, the first being Jenness (1932). It focused on participants estimating the number of beans in a bottle. Firstly, Jenness requested his participants to individually guess the number of beans and then divided the participants into groups, allowing them to come to a single number as the group estimate. Finally, the researcher once again asked individuals participants for an estimate and discovered that nearly all of the individual results had been altered to be closer to the group norm, therefore displaying some level of conformity. This experiment was ambiguous, meaning that there was no right or wrong answer, and the results were seen as unclear. It was also criticised for having a low ecological validity, as the participants were not in familiar surroundings and therefore could have been behaving
Mori and Arai tried to update the Asch study by including a range of participants of different ages and gender, and also by avoiding the need for actors to be used. Researchers used the ‘Mori’ technique, which is where participants wear filter glasses that allow them to see different things while watching the same film. This meant that everyone was a genuine participant - however one had been set a different type of filter glasses, meaning that they perceived a different line to be matching the length of the target line. For female participants, the results reflected those of Asch, with conformity to the group being around one third. However, it was found in the new study that the male participants conformed less and were not swayed by the majority view. The researchers explained that in society, each gender has different social roles and expectations which could be the reason for the different results. Another contrasting factor in this study was that the participants knew each other, compared to the strangers used in previous conformity studies. Mori and Arai believed that they should explore how we conform to our friends as conforming to strangers is a rare occurrence in every day life. This therefore updates the findings from the Asch study and raises the ecological validity of the