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Conformity

A central goal of leadership theory and research is to understand the factors that dispose others to follow the vision or ideals, suggestions (explicit or implied), expectations, or demands of a leader. In other words, leadership theory attempts to identify the factors that affect someone's capacity to attract and influence followers. The psychologist Martin Chemers defined leadership as “a process of social influence in which one person is able to enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task” (2000, 27). Chemers's emphasis on social influence opens the study of leadership to the theories and rich empirical storehouse of experimental social psychology, which for decades has focused on the variables that advance or retard the process of social influence.

Conformity without Pressure

Research on social influence, or conformity, has been a part of the social psychological landscape since 1936, when Muzafer Sherif, one of the central figures of twentieth-century social psychology, made use of the autokinetic effect, an illusion that relies on a pervasive human perceptual shortcoming, to study the process of norm formation and, ultimately, the processes underlying conformity. The autokinetic effect requires a perceiver to fixate on a small pinpoint of light in an otherwise completely dark room. After focusing on the light for a short time, it appears to move. The movement, however, is completely illusory. Making use of this illusion, William Hood, a student of Sherif, provided an example of social influence that is not based on threats or interpersonal pressure and reconnaissance. Their study paired a naïve participant with a confederate. Their task was to estimate the length of light movement over a series of trials. In the initial phase of the study, the confederate made a series of judgments of the extent to which the light moved, while the naïve participant simply observed. These confederate-based judgments were either consistently high or consistently low (relative to a control group's). Then the confederate was dismissed and the naïve participant was asked to make an independent series of judgments. It turned out that the judgments of participants who were paired with confederates who made high estimates were significantly higher than those of participants paired with low-responding accomplices.

Participants followed the lead of the confederates even though the confederates were not present. Noteworthy leaders who similarly induced others to follow their vision and ideals without threat or surveillance include Mother Teresa, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Compliance Under Pressure

Of course, successful leadership often relies on a real or implied threat. Solomon Asch, another giant of 20th century social psychology, provided a classic example of the effects of social pressure on simple judgments. In his 1955 research, participants viewed a stimulus line and a set of three comparison lines. Their job was to judge which of the three comparison lines matched the stimulus. The judgments were exceptionally easy. However, when participants were paired with three or more experimental accomplices who gave obviously incorrect answers on six (of twelve) judgment trials, more than 75 percent of them agreed with an erroneous judgment at least once. Analyzed another way, about one-third of all influence attempts were successful, even though the correct answer was transparently obvious and in spite of the fact that the errant judgments did not represent the participants' true perceptions. In postexperimental interviews, many participants admitted that they merely had gone along with the confederates to avoid conflict or in order not to appear stupid to their (supposed) peers.

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