Conformity Report

For this assignment, I decided that I would go out and deliberately violate a social norm, in order to take a close look at what happened, and the way I felt. In order to do this, I enlisted the help of a friend of mine from New York who was in town recently. When I took him back to the airport, we kissed each other good-bye. (Nothing serious, mind you... I wasn't quite up to being that adventurous.) A simple, platonic kiss good-bye might not seem like such a big issue to most people. What was unusual about this was the obvious fact that we were both male.

I had thought about this little incident a bit in advance, and anticipated that there would not be much problem. Even if people disapproved, or speculated about what sort of "lifestyle" we might be engaged in, I felt certain that no one would really say anything, much less approach us. My friend would have a good story to tell his not-so-heterosexual friends in Manhattan, and I would have my Social Psychology assignment out of the way.

I figured that I could withstand a few odd looks for rewards like that. Instead, when it came time to say good-bye, and the moment was upon me, my stomach knotted up. I still knew that, on a rational level, the people around me would either not notice, pretend not to notice, or simply make some expression of distaste and then turn their attentions elsewhere. In spite of this, I was extremely nervous and self-aware. I found myself worrying whether I would be seen by anyone that knew me, even though I knew that the odds against it were very high. At a very basic level, I knew that my behavior could potentially cause people who knew me to change the ways in which they interacted with me. Even though no one I knew was actually present, I was feeling a strong pressure to conform. This pressure was strong enough that I hesitated noticeably, and it was difficult for me to carry out this experiment.

I don't think it had anything to do with my friend - he was perfectly comfortable with the idea. He is bisexual, and lives in Manhattan. His normal social environment is quite different from that here in the South, at least regarding norms dealing with sexual behavior. On the other side of the coin, I live in Atlanta. I don't really know anyone here who isn't heterosexual. In fact, I work for Cobb County, which is strongly religious and politically conservative. Both our experiences and our reference groups are very different. I'm sure this can account for the ease with which he carried out this simple act that had my heart pounding at the thought of it.

Apparently, the norms that we feel compelled to conform to are very well internalized. This would suggest that these social norms would be capable of influencing our behavior, even when no one from our social group, or even no one at all, was around. Fortunately for the me (and the experiment), I was able to do this simple task.

I had to admit that my friend's attitude and willingness carried me quite a bit of the way. I later identified this feeling with the results of Asch's experiments on conformity that found a noticeable difference between the responses where there was a unanimous majority and one lone dissenter. Perhaps I was able to experience consciously the support that could be gained from having one other person adopting your position. There is even another possibility. Doing something out of the ordinary, and therefore standing out in the crowd could also function as a form of asserting uniqueness. At this moment, I am not quite sure how these effects factored into my own behavior, but it seems very likely that they could have contributed.

Afterwards, I noticed one person staring at us. As soon as she saw that I noticed her, she turned away and went about doing something else. The expression on her face was one that I interpreted as both disapproval and condescension. At that moment, I felt angry that she would behave that way, and I was glad that I had made that small gesture to my friend. This seems to be a form of reactance - I felt good for doing something that this other person disapproved of, while I thought that there was nothing wrong with it. This good feeling could condition me into breaking this social norm more quickly in the future. I suppose that I would be doing this to affirm my sense of freedom, namely to show affection to my friends, regardless of the social norms about such behavior.

Unfortunately, I feel that I have a long way to go before I will be comfortable doing things like this. Objectively, this was not a very significant act. Even so, it proved to be quite a task for me to violate this social norm, even though I had armed myself in advance both with intellectual arguments to support this action, and by anticipating how I might feel. This experiment has left me with more questions than answers. Since I was both the subject and the experimenter, it is very difficult for me to untangle a lot of the motivations and stimuli that were influencing my behavior. However, it has made me quite personally aware of several phenomena associated with conformity, and has also reminded me that my conscious thoughts aren't the only things that are guiding my behavior.

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