Rule and Custom as Individual Variations of Behavior Distributed Upon a Continuum of Conformity

Abstract

Since conformity is a fact of central importance for sociology and the other social sciences, a knowledge of the facts of conformity phenomena is essential. Such societal concepts as folkways, mores, and fashions are vague and obscure and leas to confusion and inaccuracy. Specific questions essential to clear understanding of conformity are whether uniformity and conformity exist in the behavior of individuals under observation, in what respect people conform, to what degree, what proportion of the individuals conform, the nature of "conformity-producing agents," etc. The J-curve hypothesis of conformity rests upon the following conceptual basis. Instead of regarding conformity in the dichotomous "all-or-none" manner, the approach here suggested is one more consistent with general scientific procedure, namely, to measure degrees of conformity on a continuum. In this context continua are classified under two types, empirical and nonempirical, and the latter is subdivided into a personality continuum and a telic continuum (measuring purpose fulfilment). A "field of conformity" is defined when there is a generally accepted, though not necessarily explicitly stated, rule and purpose in the situation, and when 50 per cent or more of the population fall upon the first step of a telic (conformity) continuum whose variable is degrees of fulfilment of this rule and purpose. The two major formulations of the J-curve hypothesis are: (1) the distribution of degrees of conformity upon their appropriate continuum is in the form of a curve of positive acceleration toward the mode and (2) in any conformity field the distribution of measurable variations of the behavior upon a relevant empirical, or nontelic, continuum is in the form of a steep unimodal,double J-curve, in which the mode is likely to be off center and the slopes are likely to be asymmetrical.