The social psychological study of conformity examines the pressures on individuals to conform to the expectations of a group, society, organization, or leader.

The classic experiments were conducted by Solomon E. Asch, an American gestalt psychologist who undertook a series of small-group studies on the social pressures to conform. His subjects were asked to answer a basic puzzle (for example on the length of a line) when others provided a manifestly incorrect answer. Many subjects felt under pressure to give the same incorrect answer; however, the majority resisted pressures to conform, and even those who acquiesced offered reasonable explanations for doing so, despite subsequently expressed doubts about their behaviour (Asch 1952).

Asch argues that the results conform his view of human nature, which is of human beings as creative and rational organisms, in contrast to the tradition that views them as passive and responding only to environmental pressures.

Durkheim’s Classic Contribution

Emile Durkheim is rightfully considered to be one of the founders of modern sociology. This French sociologist began his academic career in the late 1800s, a time when sociology was not widely accepted in Europe or elsewhere as an independent scientific discipline. Durkheim devoted his life’s work to the advancement of this new field of study. In his first two major books originally published in the early 1890s, The Division of Labor in Society (1933) and The Rules of Sociological Method (1938), Durkheim outlined what he saw to be the distinctive theoretical problems and methodological strategies of sociological inquiry. In the latter book, he identified the analysis of “social facts” as the unique subject matter for the science of sociology. Social facts, according to Durkheim, are phenomena that are properties of societies rather than of individual members of societies. The rates of divorce, crime or suicide in a society or the nature of a society’s legal system are examples of social facts that Durkheim considered to be external to individuals. Most important, Durkheim argued that social facts could only be explained sociologically; that is, by reference to other social facts: “The determining cause of a social fact should be sought among the social facts preceding it and not among the states of the individual consciousness” (1938: 110).

Durkheim applied these general principles to a particular research problem in his third major book, originally published in 1897, Suicide (1951). He deliberately focused on the seemingly individualistic phenomenon of suicide in order to demonstrate the power and distinctiveness of sociological inquiry. What better or more dramatic way is there to build a strong case for sociology than to look beyond the individual—to society—for the causes of suicidal behavior? Using a vast body of data from official records on suicides in different parts of Europe, Durkheim documented marked variations between countries in suicide rates. This evidence, Durkheim argued, shows that “each society has a definite aptitude for suicide” (1951: 48) – a social fact that is external to the individual members of a given society. Additional analyses of these data convinced Durkheim that the suicide rate of a given society could not be explained by racial characteristics, psychological abnormalities, or other extrasocial causes, and that, “by elimination, it must necessarily depend upon social causes” (1951: 145). Throughout the remainder of Suicide, Durkheim attempted to prove that “certain states of (the) social environment” (1951: 299) are the determining causes of different patterns of suicide rates.