Conformity Within the Campbell Paradigm: Proposing a New Measurement Instrument

Conformity – people’s propensity to comply with the norms and expectations of others – is an important driver of behavior. In this research, we develop a measure of people’s level of conformity which is grounded in an innovative paradigm from attitude research. By relying on relatively easy-to-answer questions about past activities, the new scale addresses some of the conceptual and methodical shortcomings of existing conformity measures. Using a sample of 1,398 people, we calibrated individuals’ claims about how they have conformed with norms, conventions, and the expectations of others in the past. Even though some conformity items seem somewhat gender sensitive, all 33 of them nevertheless form a fairly reliable Rasch scale (rel = .67). Convergent and discriminant validity were corroborated with substantial overlaps with traditional conformity, social desirability, and conscientiousness measures, and with a moderate negative correspondence with people’s desire for uniqueness. Incremental and explanatory validity was provided in a quasi-experiment (n = 152) on evaluations of commercials