In a new study published in Current Psychology, researchers have discovered that people tend to conform to group opinions on moral dilemmas during online video meetings, similar to the way they do in face-to-face interactions. This finding, which extends the classic understanding of social conformity into the digital era, suggests that our moral judgments are influenced not only by our beliefs but also by the views of others in online settings.
Asch’s Legacy and the Study’s Inspiration
The study draws inspiration from Solomon Asch’s famous conformity experiments conducted in the 1950s. Asch’s work fundamentally altered our understanding of social influence by demonstrating how people often conform to a group’s incorrect opinion, even against their own better judgment. His experiments involved asking participants to match the length of lines in a group setting, where confederates intentionally gave wrong answers.
Astonishingly, a significant number of participants conformed to the group’s incorrect judgment, showcasing the powerful influence of group pressure. This new study sought to explore if Asch’s findings about conformity in perceptual judgments would also apply to moral judgments in the context of modern digital communication.
“As a moral psychologist, I am generally interested in the malleability of moral judgments, and group pressure was a potential factor playing a role here,” said study author Mariola Paruzel-Czachura, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania and associate professor at the Institute of Psychology at the University of Silesia in Katowice.
“Apart from that, when I heard about Asch’s study for the first time, I fell in love. That day, I decided that I wanted to be a psychologist. To be honest, I forgot this for many years, and later, when we finished this project, I realized that for me everything started with Asch.”
Methodology: Replicating Asch in the Age of Zoom
The study was designed to replicate the essence of Asch’s experiment in an online setting using the Zoom video communication platform. A total of 120 Polish participants were recruited and were randomly assigned to either the experimental or control group.
In the experimental group, each participant joined a Zoom call with four actors (confederates) pretending to be regular participants. These confederates were instructed to give predetermined responses to a series of moral dilemmas presented on the screen. The dilemmas were carefully selected from previous research and designed to provoke moral reasoning. They ranged from relatively straightforward ‘filler’ scenarios, where the moral answer was obvious, to more complex dilemmas that required participants to weigh conflicting moral values.
The dilemmas included extreme moral transgressions, in which one person was sacrificed for the “greater good.” For example, one dilemma involved employing your own daughter in sexually explicit films to earn money for your family while another involved torturing the son of a suspected terrorist to prevent a bombing.
In the experimental group, participants were asked to answer these dilemmas in a standard sequence, following the confederates who were instructed to provide predetermined answers. This setup was intended to create a scenario where the participant might feel pressured to conform to the group’s opinion. The control group participants, on the other hand, responded to these dilemmas individually, without the influence of confederates.
Key Findings: Moral Conformity in an Online Setting
In half of the experimental dilemmas, a significant conformity effect was observed, where participants tended to align their moral judgments with the unanimous but immoral responses of the confederates. Interestingly, no significant conformity effects were found in the filler dilemmas, as expected. This outcome confirms that the moral conformity effect, known to exist in face-to-face interactions, persists in the digital communication space, particularly in video interactions.
“Although we hypothesized observing moral conformity, as theory and past studies supported our prediction, I guess deep down in my heart, I was not expecting to see the effect,” Paruzel-Czachura told PsyPost. “You know, it is like when you are reading about conformity or other social psychology experiments, and you have this feeling that, wow, no way people really did it. I need to see it with my own eyes to believe it!”
“I was one of these researchers. So, I thought we would receive the null results. Who would say that selling your daughter to be a prostitute is morally good if that would help you to feed other family members? No one, I thought. Even when others would say this is a morally good choice. I suspected that people would be more independent and individualist. And I was wrong.”
The findings indicate “that group pressure may be a very dangerous weapon in manipulating people about what is right and wrong,” Paruzel-Czachura said. “On the one hand, it is good that we have others; we can seek moral advice or follow them. On the other hand, if we follow the wrong group, we may be morally lost.”
Limitations and Future Directions
But the study, like all research, includes some limitations. For example, the study only examined sacrificial moral dilemmas. Examining other types of dilemmas could potentially yield different results. Another area for future research highlighted by the study is the exploration of moral conformity in different cultural contexts, particularly non-White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) populations. The study’s predominantly Catholic sample raises questions about how religious beliefs might influence online moral conformity, suggesting the need for further investigation in more religiously diverse groups.
“I have thousands of ideas for moving forward with this project,” Paruzel-Czachura said. “We need to know who is more conformist, how to stop it, what moral issues people are less sensitive to, if there are any cultural differences in moral conformity, etc.”
“I had a great team here, and when you have a dream team, all work is easy and fast,” she added. “I loved writing with Dries Bostyn; he is an excellent writer, and I loved working with Dominika Wojciechowska. She was very hard-working and well-organized.”
The study, “Online Moral Conformity: how powerful is a Group of Strangers when influencing an Individual’s Moral Judgments during a video meeting?” was published June 1, 2023.
