sex, and task difficulty as predictors of social conformity (unpublished master's thesis

E present investigation was concerned with the relationship of conforming behavior with age. An answer was sought to the ques-tion: Do age, sex, and task difficulty act as predictors of social conformity in a laboratory perceptual judgment task? The operational definition of conformity underlying most empirical research in this area, including the present study, is "... the public and/or private agreement of an individual with an opinion or judgment which he had not held before it was presented to him " (Sampson, 1964). Concern was focused on the type of con-formity referred to by Willis (1964) as "move-ment conformity. " In the case of movement conformity, the individual responds to a present influence by changing his behavior to coincide with new demands. Movement conformity re-fers to a modification of behavior of what ostensibly represents an individual's preferred tendency to a socially prescribed standard. Since the time of the pioneering work of Sherif in 1935, it has been demonstrated re-peatedly that knowledge of the reactions and responses of others can influence behavior in the direction of conformity. Susceptibility exerted in this way is not unique to any spe-cific type of task but is found for a wide variety of tasks including violation of prohibitions and acceptance of requests (Barch, Trumbo, &amp