Conformity as a function of age in psychological research

Conformity as a Function of Age

Conformity

To Conform or Not to Conform & #8230; That is the Question

One of the enduring questions about human nature and human behavior is why some people are likely, and even eager, to conform, while others are far more likely to maintain an attitude of independence and autonomy. A large amount of psychological research has been conducted in an attempt to determine what differentiates these two populations -- those likely to conform and those likely to choose a path of non-conformity. Of course, life is not quite so tidy in this area. Few if any people are fully conformist or non-conformist; their actions and attitudes shift over time and in relationship to different topics.

In addition to basic personality types and specific topics, psychologists have also studied how certain attributes of different individuals and populations may affect their tendency toward greater or lesser conformity. The research highlighted in this paper focused on one particular attribute and how it might be related to conformity. The results found that in fact age (the chosen independent variable) did not predict a tendency toward or away from conformity in a significant way.

Conformity is the desire or tendency to make one's behavior or attitudes the same as other people for the purpose of fitting in. The urge to conform arises from a number of different causes but most of these are related to the fact that people tend to doubt themselves if they are in the minority, especially if they have any doubts about the rightness of their own position.

Previous Research Documented Differences in Age Cohorts

Pasupathi (1999), for example, found that older adults are more resistant to conformity when they feel that they are correct. The corollary is that the less sure adults are about their opinions or actions the more likely they are to want to ally themselves with other people. That is, the more likely they are to want to conform.

Pasupathi (1999) concluded:

Older adults conform less than younger adults when faced with conformity pressure and that this conformity difference may be particularly marked for emotional stimuli. Further, older adults' confidence in their responses is less influenced by conformity pressure than the confidence of younger adults. Older adults may conform when the confederates appear to have a correct answer and resist conformity pressure when confederates appear to give an incorrect answer, although this speculation goes beyond the present data. (Pasupathi, 1999)

We believed that our research design was sufficiently similar to the research that Pasupathi designed that our findings would be similar and that the older adults in our simple would be significantly less likely to conform.

Studies on other age cohorts have proven to be less tidy, with researchers finding that while age and conformity are related to each other in what appear to be causal ways, this relationship is highly variable.

Key to the research that we pursued for this project was based on a hypothesis supported by previous research, which is that people become less likely to conform as they get older. Possible reasons for the reduction over time of the importance for individuals that they feel that they conform to others is that as we age we are less likely to be focused on making new friends. The desire to be aceptable to others (either as friends or as possible romantic partners) tends to be reduced over time, and as it is reduced a major push towards conformity is either significantly reduced or eliminated.

The question of how social pressure functions has been a central question for social psychologists for several generations since Asch (1951) found that he could get people to doubt what was before their own eyes (literally) if a large enough ratio of the group that they were in claimed that a shorter line was really a longer line.

Another reason that we believed that the urge to conform would fall off as an individual ages is that the older we are in general the more knowledge we have about the world. The amount of knowledge that we have (even setting aside the amount of wisdom that might accompany this) tends to make people more sure of themselves and thus less subject to want to change themselves to match others.

We determined to test the above ideas about a relationship between age and the urge to conform. Our hypothesis was the following: Older adults (40+ yrs) will conform less than younger adults (18-25 yrs) because older adults have greater self certainty and are less concerned with what others think of them.

Our research design was as follows. We first selected UIC students and faculty through a randomly process before categorizing them into two groups: Young adults (18-25) and middle-aged adults (40-60). The methodology was based on observations of the individuals. They were not aware of the fact that they were being observed. Because of this, we did not need to obtain their consent (since they were engaged in activities that they would have been pursuing anyway and in a public place).

Because of the fact that the research subjects were not aware of the fact that they were in fact research subjects, we believe that they were not unduly influenced by the methodology although the research design (detailed below) made the simultaneous presence in the same place of the researchers and their subjects necessary.

Results

The results were surprising. A statistical analysis of our sample demonstrated that the older adults in our sample were no less likely to conform than were the younger adults in our sample. The results of the study were as follows:

The results prompted several conclusions with implications for further research.

Discussion

Future research project would not rely so heavily on assumptions about demographic attributes made by the researchers. We as researchers posited that we could accurately determine a subject's race, gender, and age. There was no accommodation made for any error that we might have made except for the fact that we made our division into age cohorts into highly differentiated ones. By placing the higher end of the younger group and the lower end of the older group so far from each other we hoped to avoid any ambiguity.

However, by omitting a large age cohort (the one that would have been slotted between the two age groups that we identified) we created an unintentional element of ambiguity for there were people who might well have been a part of that discounted group. By making assumptions about subjects' race and gender we also may have been forced to overlook important distinctions that we were unware of. Because race and gender are in large measure subjectively determined, our dependence on purely objective definitions of these categories may have resulted in our missing key data.