To agree or not to agree: Personal dissent amid social pressure to conform.

Abstract

A multivariate study of the effect of self-concept on dissent and conformity was conducted using a new experimental paradigm that reflects with greater fidelity important facets of everyday social influence situations. From a self-presentational perspective, private self-consciousness, individuation, and self-esteem were predicted to be directly related to dissent and inversely related to conformity. Public self-consciousness, social anxiety, shyness, and self-monitoring were predicted to be directly related to conformity and inversely related to dissent. The relationship of self-concept to dissent and conformity was predicted to be stronger when peer opinion was unanimous than when it was divided. Groups of participants expressed their opinions about 20 scenarios that described problems in human relations. Some of the participants could hear three other people (confederates) agreeing on a solution to each problem, and they could either conform or they could dissent by choosing other available solutions or generating one of their own. The results supported the predictions (with the exception of the selfmonitoring variable). The study clearly indicates that to understand social influence, research must explicitly study both the characteristics of the experimental situation as they relate to the opportunity to conform and dissent, and individual differences as they contribute to the meaning these acts have for experimental participants.

Going along versus going alone: When fundamental motives facilitate strategic (non)conformity.

“…Conformity pressures operate both when topics are subjective (e.g., Allen, 1975;Santee & Maslach, 1982) and objective (e.g., Sherif, 1936). However, there is a key difference between the two types of content: A subjective quandary by definition does not have a verifiably correct answer, whereas an objective predicament does.…”

Influence of primed social roles on gender differences in conformity

“…This suggests that closer attention should be paid to the exact pattern of means in relation to an appropriate comparison group in order to discern whether differences are being driven by a higher likelihood of women going along with the influence agent or higher likelihood of men going against the influence agent. Additional research examining conformity and dissent suggests that both conformity and dissent are related to social anxiety, individuation, and self-esteem (Santee & Maslach, 1982). This suggests that conformity may be less about the power of the situation and also may be more related to individual differences than previously postulated.…”

“…Individuals who experience gender role conflict, resulting from gender role incongruence, have been previously shown to experience psychological distress and poor psychological wellbeing (Lui, Rochlen, & Mohr, 2005;Sharpe & Heppner, 1991;Zamarripa, Wampold, & Gregory, 2003). Furthermore, conformity behavior has been shown to increase when individuals are publically self-conscious, experiencing social anxiety, or are selfmonitoring (Santee & Maslach, 1982), all behaviors that may be linked to psychological distress.…”

Self-monitoring and conformity revisited

“…Using the Asch's experimental paradigm, with line lengths to compare, Mizuno and Hashimoto (1989) found no overall effect of self-monitoring on conformity, but reported that high SM individuals made different judgments under different levels of social pressure, while low SM individuals showed no such changes. However, Santee and Maslach (1982) found no relation between the SM score and conformity under the condition where participants heard others' judgments prior to expressing their own. Among their speculations for explaining the null result were the measurement issues that have often been raised about the Self-Monitoring Scale (cf., Snyder & Gangestad, 1986).…”