Conformity And Informational Influence

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Whether a deliberate strategy or an unconscious anchoring process, people rely on others to form their judgments. Deutsch and Gerard (1955) called this tendency ―informational influence‖ and contrasted it with the ―normative influence‖ illustrated in the Asch study. Recall that participants in the Asch experiment would often publicly report an answer with which they disagreed privately. Informational influence, on the other hand, occurs when people use the judgments of others to reduce their own uncertainty. It results in a new opinion—public and private—that incorporates the beliefs of others.
Conformity, in my opinion, is an enthralling and perplexing subject for countless reasons. One reason being that we live in a world that encourages