1. Majority influence is the pressure that comes from most of the people around you holding one view or doing one thing.
   1. You conform to it by bringing your own behaviour or opinion into line with theirs, without anyone having ordered you to.
   2. That is what separates it from obedience, where a named authority figure gives you a direct order.
2. How likely you are to conform is not fixed, and what moves it splits into your personality and the situation you are in.

Personality

1. Every personality factor works through the same question, which is how far you are willing to put the group's judgement above your own.
2. Self-esteem decides how badly you need the group's approval.
   1. Low self-esteem makes their approval matter more, so you conform more readily.
   2. High self-esteem means you can bear standing out, so you hold your own line.
3. Confidence and independence work the same way, since someone comfortable being the odd one out resists the majority while someone anxious to please goes along with it.
4. What you already know about the task matters, because expertise gives you your own grounds for an answer and leaves the majority less to work on.

The situation

1. The size of the majority changes the pressure, because one person disagreeing with you is far easier to shrug off than a room of them.
   1. The effect flattens off, so adding more people to an already sizeable majority makes much less difference than the first few did.
2. Unanimity is the sharper factor, because a majority that agrees completely with itself is much harder to stand against.
   1. A single other person breaking ranks makes it far easier for you to break ranks too.
3. Whether your answer is public or private matters, and conformity falls when nobody can see what you chose.
4. How difficult or unclear the task is pushes conformity up, because when you cannot tell what the right answer is you treat the group's answer as your best guide.

When personality and the situation pull against each other

1. The two sets of factors act at the same time, so a confident person facing a large unanimous group answering in public may still conform.
2. Haney, Banks and Zimbardo (1973) is this topic's evidence that a situation can override what people are like, since men screened as normal and healthy and then randomly assigned to guard and prisoner roles came to behave as their role demanded.

Turning this into marks

1. Name the factor and say which way it pushes conformity, so a harder task raises it because you treat the group's answer as your best information.
2. When you are given a scenario, quote the detail from it, such as the vote being taken by a show of hands rather than in secret.
3. The mark most often lost is offering a personality factor when the question asked about the situation.