von Weichs Vivica, Krott Nora Rebekka, Oettingen Gabriele
Institute of Psychology, Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg, Germany.
Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict & Violence (IKG), Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2021 Jun 2;12:546178. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.546178. eCollection 2021.
The self-regulation of conformity has received little attention in previous research. This is surprising because group majorities can exert social strong pressure on people, leading them to overlook the pursuit of their own goals. We investigated if self-regulation by mental contrasting with implementation intentions (MCII) can reduce people's tendency to conform and facilitate their own goal-pursuit despite deviant majority influence. In a computer-based logical reasoning task, we exposed participants to a conformity manipulation, where we presented bogus diagrams showing the supposedly correct answers of a majority ingroup. Compared to participants who were not given a self-regulation strategy (Studies 1, 2, and 4) or who were in an active control group (Study 3), MCII helped participants to self-regulate conforming behavior in trying to solve the task and to independently solve the logical reasoning task, as indicated by increases in correct answers in the task. The findings suggest that MCII is an effective strategy to regulate people's tendency to conform and supports them to attain their goal despite deviant majority influence.
在以往的研究中，从众行为的自我调节很少受到关注。这令人惊讶，因为群体多数成员会对人们施加强大的社会压力，导致他们忽视对自身目标的追求。我们研究了通过心理对比与执行意图（MCII）进行自我调节是否能降低人们的从众倾向，并在多数派偏离影响的情况下促进他们对自身目标的追求。在一项基于计算机的逻辑推理任务中，我们让参与者接受从众操纵，即展示虚假图表，显示多数内群体的所谓正确答案。与未被给予自我调节策略的参与者（研究1、2和4）或处于积极对照组的参与者（研究3）相比，MCII帮助参与者在试图解决任务时自我调节从众行为，并独立解决逻辑推理任务，任务中正确答案的增加表明了这一点。研究结果表明，MCII是一种有效的策略，可调节人们的从众倾向，并支持他们在多数派偏离影响的情况下实现目标。
