Psychologists' social representations of conformity: Conformity – birth or death of individuality

When discussing conformity, modern social psychological literature draws its conclusions mostly from the classical sources written by the mid twentieth century authors such as Muzafer and CarolynSherif, Leon Festinger, Solomon Asch, Morton Deutsch, and Harold B. Gerard. A detailed scrutiny of these texts, however, reveals that many of today's widely accepted "findings" from that era are in fact not supported by the classical literature. Surprisingly, this analysis also shows that from the three metatheoretical orientations that coexisted at the time, namely the social-interactionistic, the interindividual, and the individualistic, only the latter survived to the present time, despite the fact that the authors pertaining to this orientation never really dealt with conformity, let alone defined it. Today, as a consequence, conformity is generally understood as a clash between the individual and society, although it is not at all clear which theoretical positions and empirical data could support such a view. It seems rather obvious that conformity will sooner or later have to be based on a new theoretical perspective and redefined