There are three social influences that vary in the degree to which they place pressure on an individual. These three influences are conformity, compliance, and obedience. On a continuum of social influence, from least pressure/implicit pressure to most pressure/explicit pressure placed on an individual, one would find conformity, followed by compliance, and then obedience.
The focus of this blog is compliance, which is defined as yielding to a direct request, usually from a peer, and conformity, which is defined as yielding to group pressures when no direct request is made (Kassin et al., 2008). We comply with requests on a daily basis, often without realizing it. One such example happened to me a few weeks ago. I was with my friends Lola (who seems to be becoming a recurring character in my blogs), Rosalind, and Bertie, and we had gone to Goodwill to look for costumes for a theme party. After we chose our costumes, we headed to the check-out where we saw that the cashier was a fellow Southwestern student. None of us knew his name, but we all recognized him as being someone we saw around campus.
Rosalind was the first one of us to make a purchase, and after her costume had been rung up, the cashier asked her if she would like to make a $1 donation to Goodwill. She complied with his request, as did I when he made the same request of me. Lola and Bertie, who paid next, also yielded to the cashier's direct request and donated $1 to Goodwill.
So, considering this situation in terms of social influence, both compliance and conformity were at play. Beginning with compliance, we each felt the pressure to comply with the donation request because it came from a peer. However, there was also the interesting addition of conformity to the situation as soon as Rosalind had complied with the request in making her donation. Not only did Lola, Bertie, and I experience compliance, but we also experienced conformity. When the cashier asked us to donate the $1 to Goodwill, we were influenced by compliance and the fact that he is a peer, and we were also influenced by conformity because we had just seen Rosalind make a donation. We felt the need to comply with this request from a peer, and to conform to the group pressures created by Rosalind's donation to the good cause.
I cannot even remember now what that good cause to which we donated was...but the point is that social influence is always right under our noses!
Kassin, S., Fein, S., & Markus, H. R. (2008). Conformity. In Social Psychology (7th ed., pp. 224-236). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
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I have a story like that but I was actually part of it from the inside. I volunteered for a HUGE non-profit organization in Dallas when I was in high school. We were having a huge fundraiser and so all of us volunteers were of course placed at different locations to ask for donations. What I didn't expect was that two other people were coming with me to my donation spot. Why may you ask were these individuals accompanying me to my location? Because they were there as confederates to encourage other passerby to donate. What would happen is that the other two people would shop inside directly in front of the window or pretend like they were walking to their car. When they saw a large group of people walking towards the store or leaving the store (whether all of them knew each other or not) the two confederates would appear, I would ask one for a donation who would comply and then the other for a donation who would also comply as well. This technique worked wonders for my donation bucket. Because other shoppers saw these two (one right after the other donate and comply with my request) other shoppers felt the need to conform to what they just saw. It worked great!
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