SS-16 Using political affiliation to study in-group and out-group behavior

Social conformity occurs when many people change their beliefs or behaviors to better fit with the characteristics and beliefs of the group. This conformity can take many forms, it could be a person going along with the group decision even if they disagree, pretending to like something to fit into the group, or coming to believe something is true because their group believes it. The consistent finding in the literature is that people are more likely to conform to the norms and behaviors of their own group (in-group) than to a group to which they do not belong (out-group). While other studies have shown that cultural background, age, gender, and personality can influence conformity, the current study wanted to determine if stated political affiliation (Democrat/Republican) would also influence one’s willingness to either conform or not to the group. Participants were presented with a series of 50/50 green and blue color distributed pixelated squares on a computer. They were first asked to identify if the image was more green or more blue, and then they were asked to submit their confidence rating of their decision on a Likert scale from 1 (not confident) to 5 (very confident). After each presentation, the participants were prompted with a statement that either stated the opposing party or their political party picked the opposite color that they previously selected (e.g., if they selected green, they were told the group had selected blue). The participants were then asked again about the distribution of blue and green in the image and asked if they wanted to change their response. It was hypothesized that the participants would be more likely to change their response (i.e., conform) for the in-group (same political party) and less likely to change their response for the outgroup (opposite political party).