Article summary - conformity - mob psychology

The title of the article Name: Institution: Date: Abstract This study is on how the participants in a crowd behave: whether they do what the crowd does or it is from their own behavior. The article for the study was carefully chosen to conform to the topic of conformity of a mob. Introduction A study by Louise Pendry and Rachael Carrick looks into why participants in a group seem to be influenced by priming them with categories associated with conformity or anarchic behaviors. In the study, the participants were primed with two categories: accountant prime and ‘punk’ prime with baseline of no prime, where they took part in a variant of Asch (1951) conformity program. Results show that prime participants conformed more significantly than accountant prime and was also observed that ‘punk’ primed group participants’ performance was close to ‘solo’ condition. Indication is that, conformity pressures never affected estimates for ‘punk’-primed participants. Method Two methods were used for the research in the article: ‘accountant’ prime’ and ‘punk prime’ and a baseline ‘no prime’. Forty-eight both male and female undergraduate between eighteen and twenty-one years were participated on a voluntary basis using a single factor of experimental condition: accountant prime and ‘punk’ prime or no prime or solo as the design. All participants had no background information in psychology. For the prime materials, 12 participants were asked to list as many groups as they could as either conformist or non-conformist and 12 groups were generated and given 10 participants who rated the extent to which they were considered conformists or non-conformist on a 7-point scales of 1 not at all conformist to 7 very conformist. A variant of the Asch paradigm to test our predictions was used. Since conformity in Asch-type studies may be decreasing, we decided to use more ambiguous aural discrimination task in which participants had to count a large number of randomly made sounds and subsequently report their estimates in a group setting. Results Confederates’ mean estimate was 123 beeps while actual number was 100 beeps on the tape recording and hence means closer to real number was taken as evidence of non-conformity whereas mean estimate closer to confederates’ was an indicative of conformity with the group mean. The primary variable was participants’ estimate of number of beeps they had heard which were then submitted to a single factor. It revealed a significant effect of experimental condition of 9.97. The post hoc t-tests indicated the estimates given by participants in ‘punk’ and accountant prime conditions significantly by 5.23 with punk-primed participants’ conformity being less than that of account-primed. The authors said that it was worthy to note that ‘punk’ prime produced slightly stronger effects than accountant prime and that priming effects are usually strongest when link between category and behavior are unambiguous. Weaker effects of accountant prime indicate weaker strength of association between account and the behavior conformity. Discussion It was put forward that the priming manipulations employed in the study may have been interfered with traditional conformity processes. Priming partici...