Conformity of Witnesses with Low Self-Esteem to Their Co-Witnesses

Conformity is a process whereby people change their beliefs, attitudes, actions, or perceptions to more closely match those held by groups to which they belong or want to belong or by groups whose approval they desire. It has important social implications.

In this paper, the authors investigated the conformity of Japanese female students with varying self-esteem levels in a co-witness memory experimental paradigm. Twenty-four Japanese female student pairs (18- to 26 years old; average 20.8 years old) participated as witnesses to watch a video clip of a simulated criminal event together. All the participant pairs were volunteers from a women’s university in Japan. Utilizing a presentation trick, two different versions of the video clip were presented simultaneously on the screen, but the viewers were allowed to observe only one without their being aware of the duality. Conformity responses were detected through analysis of the answer patterns showing change from their own to their partner’s in pre- and post-memory tests. The authors also assessed self-esteem and divided the participants into three groups (LE, HE, HE-LF) according to their levels.

The results showed that the LE group participants conformed almost three times more often than the other group participants. The differences were statistically significant (F_{(2, 45)} = 8.355, p < 0.01; multiple comparison revealed at 5% significant level, LE > HE-LF, HE). These results supported the hypotheses of this paper that low-esteem participants would conform to others, but high-esteem ones would not. The authors also analyzed further the relationships between the memory modification patterns and the sub-categories of self-esteem and compared the frequencies of each memory modification pattern of the high versus low score groups of each sub-scale of self-esteem scores. The results indicated that participants with low Self-Actualization scores tended to change their answers either to the partners’ ones (conformity responses) or to something else after the discussion. We did not find any notable differences related to the participants’ Self-Fulfillment scores.

In conclusion, the findings of this paper suggested that participants with low levels of self-esteem tended to conform to their co-witness more often than those with high self-esteem scores and that personality traits would be crucial factors in conformity. Besides, further studies should be needed to examine the personality traits other than self-esteem using cowitness memory experimental paradigms.

Article by Tomoka Tainaka, et al, from Japan.

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