Abstract
Humans have a tendency to forgo their own attitudes or beliefs in order to better align with the interests of a majority, a behavioral process known as conformity. Social conformity has been widely studied among adults and adolescents, whereas experimental studies on the impact of peer influence among young children have been relatively limited. The current study aims to investigate both short-term and sustained conforming behaviors among children in situations of relatively low social pressure. Forty-one children aged 5 to 6 years rated the attractiveness of 90 faces presented serially followed by witnessing a group rating in the absence of peers. Subsequently, second judgement was made after 30 minutes (Experiment 1). Results show that 6-year-old children tended to conform to their peers when group ratings differed from their own ratings, while younger children did not. In Experiment 2, children were required to make the second judgment one day after exposure to group ratings. Similarly, children aged 6 years exhibited a sustained conformity effect even after one day. Our findings suggest that 6-year-old children spontaneously change their private opinions under implicit social influence from peers.
Highlights
Humans have a tendency to forgo their own attitudes or beliefs in order to better align with the interests of a majority, a behavioral process known as conformity
To investigate whether judgment changes based on conformity reflect private acceptance or public compliance, we performed a follow-up study among another 37 children aged 6 years with one day (24 hours) delayed re-rating after exposure to group ratings
Our study extends beyond previous studies by showing that 6-year-old children spontaneously conform to others and change their own private opinions even with low social pressure
Summary
Humans have a tendency to forgo their own attitudes or beliefs in order to better align with the interests of a majority, a behavioral process known as conformity. Since Asch’s classical perceptual line-judgment paradigm, researchers have studied the phenomenon of social conformity extensively[3,10,11,12,13,14,15,16] In his original experiment, a naive adult participant in a room with seven confederates, who had unanimously agreed about their decisions on the “critical trials”, were instructed to state aloud which comparison line (A, B or C) was most like the target line. Pasupathi examined individual conformity for judgments of geometric shapes and emotional facial expressions in participants ranging from 18 to 91 years of age, and observed lower rates of social conformity in older participants than in their younger counterparts, especially for judgments of emotional facial expression[16] These studies have indicated an inverted U-shaped developmental curve for conformity with peers across the span of an individual lifetime[14,20]. Children switched much more when the peer demonstrators were still present than when they were absent, suggesting that children adjusted their behavior at least in part for social motivations[26]
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