Status and Conforming Judgment

Abstract

Thirty-four employees of the Florida Forest Service served as subjects in this study that was designed to determine if conform ing judgment tendencies of an employee were related to the em ployment status of the Ss. The design provided Ss who were tested with people who were of higher status as well as Ss who were tested for conformity with Ss who were of lower employee status than the S. Asch's vertical line test was utilized to measure conformity. An analysis of variance technique was utilized to determine the significance of the difference between the con forming behavior of the Ss. The results of the study suggested that conformity may be related to status. Ss tested with confed erates who were of lower employee rank conformed at a sig nificantly lower rate than did the Ss who were tested with con federates who were of higher rank (thus higher status). Corol lary findings revealed no significant relationships between con formity and age and between conformity and years of service in the FFS.