Social Psychology Insights

People conform because they want to fit in, because they look to others for guidance, or because both motives are at work. Psychologists call the desire for social acceptance normative social influence and the tendency to treat other people’s judgments as evidence informational social influence. The result can range from going along in public to adopting a group’s belief as your own. Compliance, identification, and internalization describe three ways that change can happen. Deutsch and Gerard, 1955 · Kelman, 1958

What is conformity?

Conformity is a change in behavior, judgment, or belief in response to real or perceived group influence. Imagine you arrive at a busy café and see several customers waiting near the door. You were about to walk up to the counter, but you join them. Nobody gave you an instruction. You inferred from their behavior that they were waiting to order, and that inference changed what you did. If you had already planned to wait near the door for a friend, standing in the same spot would tell us little about the group’s influence on you.

The word perceived matters. People can adjust to what they think a group expects even when its members have never discussed the expectation. A student might keep an objection to herself because she interprets the rest of the class’s silence as agreement. Several classmates might be doing the same thing. Their visible behavior gives her a reason to assume they agree, even though their private views may differ.

Conformity can involve both ordinary conventions and consequential decisions. Following the direction of foot traffic in a crowded station helps people move without having to negotiate every encounter. At work, taking a team’s silence as agreement can allow a flawed plan to go unchallenged. In both situations, what other people do shapes what an individual sees as appropriate. The consequences depend on whether the group’s practice is useful and whether people can question it when circumstances change.

Why do people conform?

Normative social influence: wanting to fit in

Normative social influence occurs when someone adjusts to a group’s expectations to gain approval, maintain acceptance, or avoid a negative reaction. A norm is a shared expectation about behavior. Some norms are stated openly. Others become apparent through recurring behavior or reactions, such as who gets laughed at when they break an unwritten rule. Deutsch and Gerard, 1955

Consider a group of friends who regularly pick a restaurant together. One person dislikes the usual choice but says it sounds great because previous objections drew teasing. Their private preference stays the same. What changes is the preference they express. Even a small social cost, such as having to defend a simple opinion in front of friends, can make agreement feel easier in the moment.

Approval can matter even in groups that welcome disagreement. A new member of a reading group might stick to its usual discussion format because it feels considerate to give others a turn. In a competitive group, a member might follow an unwritten rule because breaking it could cost them a role they value. The meaning of fitting in varies with the group, the relationship, and the consequences people expect.

Informational social influence: looking to others for guidance

Informational social influence occurs when someone uses other people’s judgments or actions as evidence about what is true or what to do. It can be especially relevant when the situation is unfamiliar or hard to interpret. If you start a class and discover that everyone else brought a particular workbook, you might infer that you missed an announcement. You are using their behavior to answer a factual question. Deutsch and Gerard, 1955

The quality of that evidence depends on how the group reached its judgment. If several classmates checked the syllabus independently, their agreement has a different basis than if they all took their cue from the same group-chat message. Both situations can look identical when you walk into the room. The number of people who agree only tells part of the story.

Informational influence can lead to a provisional choice. You might borrow a workbook for the day while checking what the instructor actually assigned. It can also lead to a durable change in judgment. If classmates show you where the assignment appears on the course calendar, you may revise what you believe about the requirements. In each case, social information prompted the change. The second case gives you a reason you can check for yourself.

Can both motives operate at once?

Imagine a junior designer in a meeting where several senior colleagues endorse a layout. She thinks a button will be hard to find. She also knows the senior designers have run more usability tests than she has. Their experience gives her an informational reason to reconsider. The prospect of challenging them in front of the whole team gives her a normative reason to stay quiet.

A private conversation might change the second part of the situation. If she feels comfortable raising the concern one-on-one but still wants to see the test results, her hesitation in the meeting probably had a social component. Her interest in the results shows that the informational question is still open. An observer who hears only her public agreement would have little basis for deciding how much each motive mattered.

What are the three types of conformity?

Social psychologist Herbert C. Kelman described compliance, identification, and internalization as three processes of social influence. His framework looks at what makes a person adopt a response and what sustains it. Someone might keep doing the same thing because the group rewards it, because it expresses a valued identity, or because they believe in it on its merits. Kelman, 1958

Type of conformity	Definition	Everyday example
Compliance	Going along to gain a favorable reaction or avoid a negative one, while your private view may stay the same.	You tell your roommates you like their choice of movie because you want to avoid an argument.
Identification	Adopting a group’s behavior or attitude because membership or a relationship helps define who you are.	As a new member of a running club, you begin staying with slower runners because looking after the group is part of being a club member.
Internalization	Adopting a belief or practice because it makes sense to you or fits your values.	After your classmates explain why sharing meeting notes helps people who were absent, you start doing it in other classes as well.

Compliance: going along in public

In Kelman’s framework, compliance is tied to an expected reaction from the people exerting influence. A worker might speak enthusiastically about a new project during a team call because the group rewards visible support. In private, the worker might still think the project is poorly planned. The public response makes sense in light of how colleagues are likely to react.

Compliance can be deliberate and brief. Suppose friends agree to split a bill evenly. One person ordered far less than everyone else but goes along to keep the conversation pleasant. They may make a different choice when eating with another group. Whether the same behavior recurs depends partly on whether the situation brings back the same incentives. The person’s view of what would be fair can remain steady throughout.

Identification: acting as a member of a group

Identification happens when a person adopts a way of acting or thinking because a relationship or group membership matters to their sense of self. Think of a volunteer who joins a community garden. Other members share seedlings with new gardeners. The volunteer begins doing the same because generosity feels like part of being the kind of gardener they admire and want to become.

The volunteer can sincerely enjoy sharing, including on days when the other gardeners are absent. The group’s role is in what the practice means to them. If they later move away and join a different gardening community, the old practice might fade or become less central. It could also take on a more personal meaning and continue wherever they garden. The reason they give for sharing tells us more about the process than the number of seedlings they give away.

Internalization: making a belief your own

Internalization occurs when a person accepts an idea or practice because they find it convincing or consistent with their values. Consider a student who learns a method for checking whether an online claim accurately represents its source. At first, the student uses it in class because the other students recommend it. After discovering that the method helps them spot misleading summaries, they begin using it when reading on their own.

The practice has a reason that travels beyond the original group. The student can explain why it helps, apply it in a new setting, and adapt it when the same steps would be impractical. Internalization describes how a belief or practice becomes personally accepted. A sincerely held belief can still be mistaken, and better evidence can still change it.

How do the reasons for conformity connect to the three types?

A student’s experience in a study group shows how the two frameworks fit together. At first, the student brings written notes because everyone else does and they want to avoid looking unprepared. The motive is normative, and the response is compliance. Later, the student starts thinking of preparation as part of being a dependable member. Bringing notes now expresses an identity, which makes identification a better description of what sustains the behavior.

The same student might notice that making notes forces them to catch gaps in their understanding before a discussion. If they decide the method works and keep using it after the group disbands, the practice has become internalized. The group offered information about a way to study, and the student’s own experience gave them a reason to keep it.

This example follows one possible sequence. Someone could adopt the practice immediately after a convincing demonstration. Another person could bring notes for an entire semester solely because they want to avoid awkward comments. Several reasons can also coexist. A student may keep preparing because it helps them learn and because they value being someone their group can rely on. The distinction is useful when you want to understand which reasons would still apply if the group or setting changed. Deutsch and Gerard, 1955 · Kelman, 1958

What did Asch’s conformity study find?

In a report published in 1956, psychologist Solomon Asch described a series of experiments that used a simple visual task. Participants saw a standard line and three comparison lines. They had to say aloud which comparison matched the standard in length. The other people in the room appeared to be fellow participants, but Asch had arranged for them to give the same wrong answer on selected trials. This put the participant in the position of answering after hearing a group agree on a visibly different line. Asch’s original report, 1956

In the main experiment, the group’s wrong answer was echoed on 36.8% of the trials where the group gave an incorrect answer. In the control condition, errors accounted for 0.7% of the corresponding judgments. The percentages refer to answers across trials. A participant could agree with the group once, disagree on the next trial, and contribute to both patterns. The correct answer remained the more common response even in the presence of a unanimous wrong majority. Asch’s original report, 1956

Imagine seeing that line B matches and then hearing the people ahead of you all say line C. You could start wondering whether you overlooked something. You could also be sure about line B and feel uncomfortable being the only person to say it. Asch’s experiment measured what people said in that particular setup. The public answers alone cannot establish which motive drove every response or whether a participant would have given the same answer later in private. The study shows how much a unanimous group changed judgments in a task where participants could inspect the evidence themselves. Asch’s original report, 1956

When does conformity help, and when can it cause problems?

Conformity helps when a shared convention makes it easier to work together. In a busy volunteer kitchen, newcomers might copy the way experienced volunteers label containers. Using the same labels makes it easier for the next shift to find what it needs. A consistent routine can also give newcomers enough structure to get started while they learn the reasons behind it.

The same tendency can cause problems when the group treats visible agreement as proof that a choice has been examined. Imagine a project team choosing between two dates for a launch. Everyone voices support for the earlier date, but each person has a different concern they assume someone else has already considered. The group ends up with a decision that appears to have broad support and with questions that have never been discussed. Individual approval, informed judgment, and agreement spoken aloud can come apart.

One practical way to understand a group’s decision is to ask how its members arrived at the same answer. People may have examined the issue independently, followed a shared convention, or repeated what the first confident speaker said. Those routes produce similar behavior in the room. They give an observer different reasons to trust the outcome.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between conformity and obedience?

Obedience involves responding to a direct instruction from someone with authority. Conformity involves adjusting to a group’s behavior or expectations, which can happen without anyone issuing an order. An employee who uses a checklist because a manager explicitly tells them to is obeying an instruction. An employee who starts using it after seeing that the rest of the team relies on it is conforming to a group practice. Both influences can apply when a manager requires a practice that coworkers also expect everyone to follow.

Can people conform to a group they have never met?

Yes. A person can take cues from a group through its visible practices and reactions. Someone who is new to an online forum might notice that regular contributors show their sources when they make factual claims. They may begin adding sources to their own posts because that is how contributors earn a helpful response or because the practice makes the discussion easier to follow. The group can influence their choices through its public behavior alone.

Is pluralistic ignorance the same as conformity?

Pluralistic ignorance is a mistaken belief about what other people privately think. For example, members of a club might privately dislike a tradition yet each assume most of the others want to keep it. They may then participate because they believe the group expects it. The mistaken impression is pluralistic ignorance. Joining in because of that impression is conformity. When people can express their views independently, the group may discover how much private agreement there was all along.

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