{"id":62972,"date":"2014-06-23T09:00:28","date_gmt":"2014-06-23T14:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=62972"},"modified":"2014-06-28T18:11:10","modified_gmt":"2014-06-28T23:11:10","slug":"is-americas-personality-changing-a-decline-in-the-willingness-to-conform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2014\/06\/23\/is-americas-personality-changing-a-decline-in-the-willingness-to-conform\/","title":{"rendered":"Is America’s Personality Changing? A Decline in the Willingness to Conform"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Generation Me<\/em><\/a> and The Narcissism Epidemic<\/em><\/a>, psychologist Jean Twenge argues that we’re all becoming more individualistic. \u00a0One measure of this is our willingness to go against the crowd. \u00a0She offers many types of evidence, but I was particularly intrigued by her discussion of the afterlife of a famous experiment in psychology.<\/p>\n

In 1951, social psychologist Solomon Asch placed eight male Swarthmore students around a table for an experiment in conformity<\/a>.\u00a0 They were asked to consider two cards, one with three lines of differing lengths and another with one line.\u00a0 He asked each student, one by one, which line on the card of three was the same length as the lone line on the second card. Each group looked at 18 pairs of cards like this<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"1.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Asch was only interested in the last student\u2019s response. \u00a0The first seven were confederates. In six trials, Asch instructed all the confederates\u00a0to give the correct answer.\u00a0 In twelve, however, the other seven would all choose the same obviously<\/em> wrong<\/em> answer.\u00a0 Asch counted how often the eighth student would go against the crowd in these cases, breaking consensus and offering up a solitary, but correct answer.<\/p>\n

He\u00a0found\u00a0that\u00a0conformity was surprisingly common. \u00a0Three-quarters of the study subjects incorrectly went with the majority in at least one trial and a third did so half the time or more. \u00a0This was considered a stunning example of people’s willingness to lie\u00a0about what they are seeing with their own eyes in order to avoid rocking the boat.<\/p>\n

But then there was Vietnam and anti-war protesters, hippies and free love, the women’s and gay liberation movement, and civil rights victories. \u00a0By the 1960s, it was all about rejecting the establishment, saying no, and envisioning a more authentic life. \u00a0Things changed. And so did this experiment.<\/p>\n

By the mid-1990s, there were 133 replications of Asch’s study. \u00a0Psychologists Rod Bond and Peter Smith decided to add them all up. \u00a0They found<\/a> that the tendency for individuals to conform to the group fell over time.<\/p>\n

One of the abstract take-away points from this\u00a0is that our psychologies — indeed, even our personalities — are malleable. \u00a0 In fact, the results of many studies, Twenge\u00a0writes, suggest\u00a0that\u00a0“when<\/em> you were born has more influence on your personality than the family who raised you.\u201d When encountering claims of\u00a0timeless and cultureless truths about human psychology, then, it is always good to ask ourselves what scientists\u00a0might find\u00a0a\u00a0few decades later.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted at Pacific Standard<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Generation Me and The Narcissism Epidemic, psychologist Jean Twenge argues that we’re all becoming more individualistic. \u00a0One measure of this is our willingness to go against the crowd. \u00a0She offers many types of evidence, but I was particularly intrigued by her discussion of the afterlife of a famous experiment in psychology. In 1951, social […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":63144,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[253,274,3920,675,37],"class_list":["post-62972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-history","tag-methodsuse-of-data","tag-nation-united-states","tag-psychology","tag-social-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/06\/21.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62972"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62972\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63155,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62972\/revisions\/63155"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}