- Normative social influence
- Conforming to be liked or accepted by a group, even when you privately disagree. Driven by the need to belong and the fear of social rejection or ridicule. Produces public compliance — visible agreement with the group — without necessarily changing private beliefs. Most powerful when there is a desire for social approval and when public behaviour is observable.
- Informational social influence
- Conforming because you genuinely believe others have more accurate knowledge. Particularly powerful in novel, ambiguous, or crisis situations where you are uncertain what to think or do. More likely than normative influence to produce genuine private attitude change alongside public compliance.
- Asch's line paradigm
- Solomon Asch's classic design (1951): real participants judged which of three comparison lines matched a standard line — an unambiguous task with an obvious correct answer. When confederates unanimously gave the wrong answer, 75% of real participants conformed on at least one trial; around 25% never conformed at all. Asch showed that a single dissenter (one confederate who gave the correct answer) dramatically reduced conformity rates, demonstrating that social support sharply lowers the cost of independent judgment.
- Sherif's autokinetic effect
- Muzafer Sherif (1935) exploited a visual illusion — a stationary light in a dark room appears to move — to study how group norms form. When participants estimated the movement alone, their estimates varied widely; placed in groups, estimates converged on a shared norm that persisted even when participants were later tested alone. This is informational influence: the task was genuinely ambiguous, so participants used each other as a reference for reality.
- Minority influence (Moscovici)
- Serge Moscovici showed that a minority can shift the private views of a majority if it is consistent (maintains its position without wavering), committed, and flexible in its style without compromising its position. Unlike majority influence — which produces rapid but often superficial public compliance — minority influence is slower but produces deeper, more lasting private attitude change through a process Moscovici called conversion.
- Public compliance vs private acceptance
- A key distinction in conformity research. Public compliance is overt agreement with a group without private attitude change — a person says or does what the group expects while privately holding a different view. Private acceptance (also called internalisation) is genuine attitude change — the person actually comes to believe what the group believes. Normative influence typically produces compliance; informational influence and minority influence are more likely to produce internalisation.