The question
Is there a difference in conformity scores between Millennials and Gen Z?
Why it matters
Conformity — adjusting your beliefs or behavior to match others — is a core topic in social psychology, and researchers have long known that things like group size, social norms, and culture shape it. What's less settled is whether the generation you grew up in also predicts how conformist you are. Millennials and Gen Z came of age in very different environments (Millennials with the early internet and the 2008 financial crisis; Gen Z fully immersed in social media from childhood), so comparing them offers a way to test whether those different formative experiences leave a lasting mark on conformity. It also has practical relevance — if social media upbringing really does heighten conformity, that matters for understanding peer influence, marketing, political polarization, and youth mental health.
Method
- Hypothesis — Gen Z participants would report significantly higher conformity scores than Millennials, given their greater exposure to social media and peer-normative online environments from an early age
- Setup — 60 participants total — 30 Millennials (born 1981–1996) and 30 Gen Z (born 1997–2012), recruited via convenience sampling through university social media. Independent-groups comparison (each participant belongs to only one generation).
- Procedure — Completed anonymously and voluntarily online via a Google Form; no deception, free withdrawal.
- Measurement — The Conformity Scale (Mehrabian & Stefl, 1995), a validated self-report questionnaire producing a single continuous score, with higher scores indicating greater conformity/compliance.
Findings
Gen Z scored significantly higher on conformity than Millennials, and this was a large effect.
- Mean conformity: Gen Z M = 79.70 (SD = 3.45) vs. Millennials M = 67.33 (SD = 9.20) — a 12.37-point gap.
- Because Levene's test showed unequal variances, F(1, 58) = 32.56, p < .001, a Welch's t-test (which doesn't assume equal variances) was used instead of a standard t-test.
- The difference was statistically significant: t(36.98) = −6.90, p < .001, Cohen's d = 1.78 (large effect).
- Gen Z scores were also much less variable (SD = 3.45) than Millennials' (SD = 9.20), suggesting more homogeneity within that group.
Analysis
The hypothesis — that Gen Z would show higher conformity than Millennials, due to growing up immersed in social media's peer-normative environments — was supported. Twenge's (2017) argument that social media platforms (likes, follower counts, algorithmic content) actively reinforce dominant social norms, plausibly amplifying conformity pressures for a generation raised inside that system. Millennials, by contrast, reached adulthood before social media was ubiquitous, which may have let them develop more autonomy from peer influence. The tighter spread of Gen Z scores is read as a sign of more homogenized conformity behavior in that cohort, consistent with a shared, strong socializing influence (social media) acting on everyone in the group similarly.
Limitations
- Because this is a correlational, cross-sectional comparison (generation vs. conformity score), the design can't separate a true generational/cohort effect from an age or developmental-stage effect — Gen Z participants are younger, and youth itself (not just "being Gen Z") is linked to greater susceptibility to peer influence (Arnett, 2013). Social media use is inferred, not directly measured, so it's really an assumed mechanism rather than a tested one.
- Only 30 per group via convenience sampling from a university population — small and not representative of the broader population, limiting generalizability. A larger, more demographically diverse sample (different countries, education levels, socioeconomic backgrounds) would strengthen the conclusions.
- : The study relies entirely on a self-report scale, which is vulnerable to social desirability bias (people may under- or over-report conformity depending on what they think looks good). Future work could add behavioral measures of conformity (e.g., an Asch-style task) alongside self-report, and directly measure social media use/exposure rather than assuming it based on generational membership — ideally in a longitudinal design that could track the same people over time to disentangle cohort effects from developmental/age effects.
What's next
