Research Advances in Conformity to Peer Pressure: A Negative Side Effect of Medical Education

Curricula in medical education are intended to impart the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that students will require as physicians to meet patient needs. There are additional unarticulated and implicit messages that inherently emerge in medical education. This paper examines one such message: conformity to peers, whereby individuals repeat inaccurate information reported by peer group members. Empirical evidence from 60 years of social-psychological research demonstrates that this phenomenon of conformity occurs across experimental tasks, cultures, and over time. It has yet to be systematically studied in medical education. Emerging studies from the University of Calgary, Canada, and in collaboration with King Saud bin Abdulaziz University will be reviewed in conjunction with the various constructs used to represent the phenomenon of conformity to determine relevant themes about student experiences and their implications for education.