Differences in Conformity among Friends and Strangers

Abstract

Two studies employed a variation of Asch's 1952 social influence paradigm to assess whether the tendency to conform is the same in a group of close friends as in a group of strangers. In Exp. 1, groups of 4 college students listened to a tape of static noise and attempted to determine whether a tone had been played along with the noise. Three experimental confederates, who were either friends of the naive subject or strangers, responded verbally with the wrong answer on 12 of 16 trials. Subjects in a group of strangers conformed to the incorrect group norm more frequently than subjects in a group of friends. In Exp. 2, two groups of 2 or 6 college students watched a beam of light and were asked to determine whether it had moved. Again, confederates who were either strangers or friends of each subject responded verbally with wrong answers. A 2 × 2 analysis of variance gave no main effects for group size or group type, but the interaction was significant, indicating that subjects were no more likely to conform in the presence of one stranger than one friend but were significantly less likely to conform among 5 friends than among 5 strangers.