IS CONFORMITY A GENERAL OR A SPECIFIC BEHAVIOR TRAIT?

Although sociologists have long concerned themselves in one way or an- other with conformity, neither they nor psychologists have made systematic paper and pencil studies of conforming behavior. The chief weakness of the paper in any study of behavior is that the symbolized responses of a subject in a test situation may not truly indicate his response in a situation calling for non-symbolized action. This weakness does not render paper and pencil studies worthless, however. In order to determine the cross-sectional consistency of individual conformity, each subject's number of conformity answers out of the twenty-five situations was totaled. Each male individual's score was then placed in his appropriate category for age, community, and occupation, and the arithmetic mean and median computed for each grouping. In the absence of any technique in the present study to parcel out these possible factors, it is assumed for the present that part of the variation in the amount of cross- sectional consistency of conformity responses displayed by individuals of various groupings is due to the effect of prevailing ideologies and conduct norms on individual behavior.