Name:______________________________________ Date:______________________

Activity 6.1: Exploring Your Own Conformity

Instructions: Consider the various situations in which you conform. Identify four personal examples of your own conformity and answer the following questions for each one:

A. Briefly describe (in a sentence or two) the situation in which you conform.

B. Is your motive for this conformity informational or normative social influence?
Briefly justify your answer.

C. Are any situational influences (for example, ambiguity, group size, culture) or conformity present in this example? Explain your answer.

D. Do you consider this example to be a positive or a negative example of conformity?
In other words, is this conformity beneficial to you or not?

Example 1:
a. I took on a new role at my job over the summer, high rise window cleaner. The training period was brief, 4 days.

b. I had to conform to the way I was seeing other people work and do things in the chair (bosuns chair).

c. I think ambiguity might have been present. Where I was ambiguous on who to tie off my rope or something similar, but thought it best to just go with what the rest of the group was doing.

d. It was positive. I have a suspicious that most informational conformity tends to be beneficial and positive.

Example 2:
a. In middle school I demanded my mom buy me a Starter jacket. Starter jackets were all the rage back in the early nineties, they were cheap polyester jackets with a NFL team on them. I didn’t even like football.

b. This one was definitely normative social influence. All the cool kids had one and I needed one to be cool.

c. Ambiguity, group size, culture (high school culture?). Well I was trying to figure out how to be cool, and I just knew that the “cool” kids had these jackets so I thought if I had one I’d be cool too.