Procesamiento de información y conformidad

Resumo

Whereas several studies carried out by social psychologists have demonstrated that experimental conformity is, to a great degree, a product of the type of stimulus used and the familiarity of the subjects with the task, cognitive psychologists have found that categories have an internal structure, whose organization depends on the degree with which every element represents the image we have of the category. These data had given rise to the hypothesis that conformity is a function of the level of stimulus typicality, the bigger score is obtained with the less typical and the lower score with the prototypical. Four investigations were carried out; the first three were utilized to obtain the category members and its ranking, according to typicality. The fourth investigation manipulated the content of the semantic categories (bird, flower and furniture), the typicality value of the items (three internal distances), and the information that experimental subjects had about the fictitious pressure group (control, no information, previous experience, national identify and attitude similarly). The results lent support to the relation between conformity and typicality, unaffected by the influence of the other manipulated variables.