‘Prescriptive’ and ‘proscriptive’ conformity as a result of childhood training

✍ Scribed by Theo Herrmann

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1971
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 82 KB
• Volume: 1
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0046-2772
• DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.2420010111

✦ Synopsis

Prescriptive' and 'proscriptive' conformity as a result of childhood training THE0 HERRMANN Conformity in general is seen as a combination of 'prescriptive' and 'proscriptive' variants (Gebotskonformismus vs. Verbotskonformismus). In this sense, extreme prescriptive conformity means that an individual will consistently choose responses which are desirable, required, or 'correct'. Conversely, given extreme levels of proscriptive conformity, an individual will not select response alternatives which are recognized as undesirable, prohibited, or 'wrong'. It is postulated that the two variants of conformity can vary independently, or are at least very weakly correlated. Individual behavior can thus, presumably, be described in terms of a two-dimensional system of conformity.

Education and training as modes of parental reinforcement are seen as involving both parental support and parental severity. Support refers to the tendency on the parent's part to reinforce positively any desired (requested, 'correct', etc.) responses actually selected by the child, Severity, within the present framework adopted by this author, refers to the parent's use of negative reinforcement in dealing with undesirable (forbidden, 'wrong') responses on the part of the child. The behavior dimensions characterized by parental support and severity have been defined via appropiate scales; they appear to be sufficiently independent from each other (cf. Herrmann et al., 1968).

We will furthermore argue that the acquisition of ccnforming attitudes may be seen as a transposition of the two-dimensional system of parental reinforcement to the twodimensional conformity system of the child. This conceptualization results in the