Rod Bond

Who they are

Bond is a social psychologist at the University of Sussex whose contribution to this site is one meta-analysis, and it is the one that turned a famous demonstration into a measurable variable.

Solomon Asch's line-judgment experiments of the 1950s are among the most reproduced images in the discipline: a participant sits with confederates who confidently give an obviously wrong answer about which line matches, and a substantial proportion of participants go along with them. What the experiment had never established, because a single study cannot, is whether the rate it produced was a fact about people or a fact about a particular group of people at a particular moment.

With Peter Smith, Bond pooled 133 studies using Asch's task across 17 countries and asked that question directly. Conformity was higher in samples from collectivist cultures than from individualist ones. And within the United States, where the task had been run repeatedly for four decades, the rate had fallen since the 1950s. The effect is real and it replicates well. It is also not a constant.

This site holds the concept at mixed rather than robust, and the reason is not that the finding is shaky. It is that the finding is routinely reported backwards, as evidence that people are helplessly conformist, when the meta-analysis shows the opposite is also true: the pressure is real, and its strength is a property of a setting that people build and can rebuild. That is the sentence worth carrying out of this work into any argument about groups, institutions or speaking up.

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. One hundred and thirty-three studies across 17 countries. Conformity higher in collectivist countries, and declining in American samples since the 1950s. Bond is first author.

The vault records no other paper of his that this site cites, and the section is short for that reason rather than by omission.

Key ideas

Conformity is a variable, not a constant. That is what the meta-analysis established, and it is the thing the famous demonstration on its own could not.

The rate moves with culture. Higher in samples from collectivist countries, lower in individualist ones.

The rate moves with time. American conformity on the same task has declined since the 1950s, which means the number in the textbook is a fact about a decade.

Because it moves, it can be renegotiated. A group's pressure to agree is something people construct, and this is the evidence that it can be constructed differently.

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