Conformity.... :D

Hye everyone...what's up..hope everything is going good.. Well, I'm glad to be writing again..Today i'm going to write about an interesting topic that I had read in my Social Psychology book last semester. It's about conformity. Actually, last semester my lecturer had assigned us with a group project where we need to come out with a video that shows an experiment on any of the topic that we have read in our Social Psychology experiment. I and my group members had several topics on mind but we finally decided to choose conformity because it is a quite interesting topic and we were sure the experiment could turn out well. so, here we go..allow me to share what is conformity is all about and what kind of experiment that we did to test out this conformity thing.



First of all, let us see what does conformity means. Conformity refers to any change in behavior caused by another person or group; the individual acted in some way because of influence from others. It also refers to the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to group norms. hence, it is a type of social influence that results in the change of behavior or belief in order to fit in a group. conformity often occurs due to real or imagined group pressures. (McLeod, S. A. (2007). What is Conformity? Retrieved from http://www.simplypsychology.org/conformity.html). 

There are several popular experiments that have been conducted back at those times to test conformity. one of the most popular experiment conducted was the Asch Conformity Experiment. 

during the 1950's, a psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a series of lab experiment to test out conformity. in the experiment, participants were told that they would be participating in a 'vision test' and brought into a room with several other people, however, the participant didn't know that the rest of participants except for him are confederates. during the experiment the participants are presented with a set of lines and they have to match those lines with another set of lines that have the same length. each of them have to say out loud their answers. initially the participant and the confederates would be telling the correct answers. after some time the confederates would purposely give wrong answers to see whether the participants agrees with them or not. even though initially, the participant stays firm with his or her own answer, but eventually they tend to conform and follow what the others say and continues to answer wrongly too.this shows conformity had occured due to group pressure.  the video presented above shows the experiment that was conducted. to get further information on this topic you can try this links below: 

1) http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/psychology/social/asch_conformity.html 
2) http://psychminds.com/solomon-aschs-experiment-conformity/



so based on these ideas, our group decided to test it out on our university students. but we wanted to try it out differently and in a hilarious way. so what we did, we came with this 'invisible rope' experiment. in these experiment, two of our group members would be pretending to hold a rope across a narrow walkway (the rope doesn't exist..just a imaginary one). some of us would be acting as the confederates. whenever, we see people approaching the walkway, our confederates would walk through the way first and pretend to cross over the rope as if it exists. we would see if the people do the same or just ignores since they know the rope doesn't exist. the results was quite astounding. what we found out is that, when there is no confederates walking in front of them and when they don't see anyone crossing the rope, they tend to ignore and walk through it. but when people see others crossing the rope, they tend to do the same, even though they know there is no such rope that exist.

here is the video of our experiment. hope u enjoy. so that's all from me for now..see yah in my next post..stay happy always.. :D