Abstract

It has been found generally that the magnitude of conformity to peers in the collectivistic societies is greater than that in the individualistic societies. This paper was to replicate this phenomena in the Korean adolescents through comparison of conforming behaviors of two groups who have different cultural dispositions from each other. In this study, we devided high school students (Experiment 1) and college students (Experiment 2) into allocentrics (who have collectivistic cultural dispositions) and idiocentrics (who have individualistic cultural dispositions) according to their scores on the INDCOL scale (Singelis, Triandis, Bhawuk, & Gelfand, 1995) and observed their choices whether to yield to pressure from peers or not. As anticipated, allocentrics conformed more than idiocentrics, and the formers perceived pees as more similar to them than the latters did. On the basis of these results, it was discussed that allocentrics and people in the collectivistic societies conform more, because they regard the behaviors and opinions of their peers who are similar to them as reference points, according to which they judge the appropriateness of their own responses.