Peter Smith

Peter Smith

Peter Smith is Emeritus Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Sussex and the co-author, with Rod Bond, of the 1996 meta-analysis of 133 Asch-type conformity studies across 17 countries. His wider work is on the same question in general form: whether findings in social psychology travel across cultures, and where they stop travelling. The conformity meta-analysis is that question answered for one of the discipline's best-known effects.

Who they are

Smith is a cross-cultural social psychologist at Sussex. The standing problem in his field is that a great deal of social psychology was established on a narrow sample of participants and then reported as though it described people, and his work asks in each case how far a given finding actually reaches.

The 1996 meta-analysis with Rod Bond, who is first author, applies that question to Asch's line-judgment task. Pooling 133 studies from 17 countries, the two found that conformity is higher in samples from collectivist cultures than from individualist ones, and that within American samples the rate has declined since the 1950s. The effect is real, well replicated and not a constant, and the difference between those last two statements is the contribution.

That result is what allows this site to hold conformity as something a group produces rather than something people simply are. It is also why the concept sits at mixed in the vault: the underlying effect replicates, and the popular reporting of it routinely runs backwards, treating a rate that demonstrably varies by time and place as a fixed property of human beings.

Key papers

Bond, R., & Smith, P. B. (1996). "Culture and Conformity: A Meta-Analysis of Studies Using Asch's (1952b, 1956) Line Judgment Task." Psychological Bulletin, 119(1), 111-137. Rod Bond is first author. One hundred and thirty-three studies across 17 countries; conformity higher in collectivist countries and declining in American samples since the 1950s.

Smith has published widely on cross-cultural social psychology beyond this paper. The vault records only the meta-analysis, so only the meta-analysis is listed here, and this page does not claim to be his bibliography.

Key ideas

The question is whether a finding travels. That is the discipline Smith works in, and it is a prior question to almost everything social psychology reports.

Applied to conformity, the answer is that it travels unevenly. Higher in collectivist samples, lower in individualist ones, and falling over time in the country where the task was run most.

An effect can replicate and still not be a constant. Those two things are confused often enough that the distinction is worth stating on its own.

Sources

  1. Bond, R., & Smith, P. B. (1996). "Culture and Conformity: A Meta-Analysis of Studies Using Asch's (1952b, 1956) Line Judgment Task." Psychological Bulletin, 119(1), 111-137.
  2. Asch, S. E. (1951, 1956). The line-judgment experiments the meta-analysis pools.
  3. University of Sussex profile page and LinkedIn profile, both stating Emeritus Professor of Social Psychology at Sussex. Affiliation and post.
  4. Vault note: [[Peter Smith]].