HLTH 8247 Week 3 Committee Conformity Case Example

Conformity Case: A Drug-Policy Committee Approves a New Anticoagulation Protocol Without a Voiced Objection While Three Members Hold Private Doubts, Read for Normative Pressure Versus Informational Influence

Student Name

Walden University

HLTH 8247: Social Psychology

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Conformity Case: A Drug-Policy Committee Approves a New Anticoagulation Protocol Without a Voiced Objection While Three Members Hold Private Doubts, Read for Normative Pressure Versus Informational Influence

The Meeting

A pharmacy and therapeutics committee at a hospital drawn from no single institution met to approve a new protocol for starting and dosing an anticoagulant in patients admitted with atrial fibrillation. The protocol had been drafted by the cardiology service and presented by its chief, who spoke for twenty minutes and closed by saying the cardiologists were "fully aligned." The chair asked for comments. None came. The protocol passed unanimously by voice vote. Over the following week, three members told colleagues privately that they had doubts: a hospital pharmacist worried about dosing in patients with poor kidney function, a hospitalist thought the protocol's bleeding-risk screen was too brief, and a nurse manager doubted that the night staff had been consulted about workload.

Two Kinds of Influence

Deutsch and Gerard (1955) distinguished two reasons people go along with a group. Informational influence is accepting others' judgment as evidence about reality: the group seems to know something you do not, so you change your mind. Normative influence is going along to meet others' expectations or avoid disapproval, while privately keeping your own view. The two produce the same public behavior, agreement, but differ in what happens inside.

Asch's line-judgment studies showed normative influence in a pure form. Participants judged which of three lines matched a standard, a task with an obvious answer, after hearing a unanimous majority of confederates give a wrong answer. Many participants conformed on at least some trials, though most answers across all trials remained independent, and when a single other person dissented, conformity dropped sharply (Asch, 1956).

Reading the Committee's Silence

Some of the silence may have been informational. The cardiology chief knows more about anticoagulation than most committee members, and a member who had no strong view could reasonably defer to that expertise. Deference of this kind is not a failure; it is how committees use specialist knowledge.

But the three members who later voiced doubts did not change their minds. They kept their concerns and shared them only outside the room. That pattern is the signature of normative pressure: public agreement with private dissent. Several features of the meeting would have strengthened it. The protocol came from a powerful department and was presented by its head. The chief's closing words framed agreement as the group norm before discussion began. The voice vote made any objection public and individual. And no one spoke first. Asch's finding that one dissenter breaks the effect suggests that the first objection is the hardest, because it must be made against an apparently unanimous room.

Is a Committee Like Asch's Task?

The comparison has limits. Asch's task had a clear right answer, while the anticoagulation protocol involves judgment and evidence on which experts can disagree. Committee members also know each other and will meet again, which raises the cost of disagreement beyond what a stranger in a laboratory faces. Pooling 133 studies of the line task, Bond and Smith (1996) found that conformity varied across cultures and had fallen in the United States since the 1950s, which suggests that the strength of such pressure depends on context. The committee case shares the structure of Asch's situation, a unanimous public front and a costly first dissent, more than its content.

Conformity or Groupthink?

Groupthink describes a cohesive group that suppresses dissent to preserve harmony and reaches poor decisions through a defective process. This committee shows one symptom, self-censorship, but not others, such as an illusion of invulnerability or pressure applied directly to dissenters. Calling it groupthink would overstate what happened. It is better described as normative conformity in a single meeting.

What the Case Suggests

The private doubts were substantive: kidney dosing, bleeding screens and staffing are real issues for an anticoagulation protocol. The committee could reduce normative pressure by asking members to submit written concerns before the meeting, by calling on specific members such as pharmacy and nursing for comment, or by using a secret ballot for a first vote. Each would make the first dissent easier.

References

Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 70(9), 1-70. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0093718

Bond, R., & Smith, P. B. (1996). Culture and conformity: A meta-analysis of studies using Asch's (1952b, 1956) line judgment task. Psychological Bulletin, 119(1), 111-137. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.119.1.111

Deutsch, M., & Gerard, H. B. (1955). A study of normative and informational social influences upon individual judgment. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 51(3), 629-636. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0046408