In 1951 Solomon Asch conducted an experiment to investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform.

Asch used a lab experiment to study conformity, whereby 50 male students in the USA participated in a ‘‘vision test’’. He told them it was a vision test. Asch put a naive participant in a room with seven confederates. The confederates had agreed in advance what their responses would be when presented with the line task. The real participant was led to believe that the other seven confederates were also real participants like themselves. Each person in the room had state aloud which comparison line (A, B or C) was most like the target line. The answer was always obvious. The real participant sat at the end of the row and gave his answer last. There were 18 trials in total, and the confederates gave the wrong answer on 12 trials. 12 trials were critical ones. His experiment also had a control condition where there were no confederates, only a “real participant.”

Over the 12 critical trials, about 75% of participants conformed at least once. If we know that 75% of people are more afraid of public speaking than death, for the reason that they want to be part of a group. We can conclude that, at least once, 75% of people will accept the views of the group, whatever they think.

On average, about one third (32%) of the participants who were placed in this situation went along and conformed with the clearly incorrect majority on the critical trials.

Only 25% of participants never conformed.

In the control group, with no pressure to conform to confederates, less than 1% of participants gave the wrong answer.

When they were interviewed after the experiment, most of them said that they did not really believe their conforming answers, but had gone along with the group for fear of being ridiculed or thought “peculiar”. A few of them said that they really did believe the group’s answers were correct.

Apparently, people conform for two main reasons:

  • because they want to fit in with the group (normative influence) and
  • because they believe the group is better informed than they are (informational influence).

There are limitations of the study.

  • Asch deceived the student volunteers claiming they were taking part in a ‘vision’ test. However, deception was necessary to produce valid results. He devised what is now regarded as a classic experiment in social psychology.
  • How often are we faced with making a judgment like the one Asch used, where the answer is plain to see?

Asch replied that he wanted to investigate a situation where the participants could be in no doubt what the correct answer was. He could explore the true limits of social influence.

  • Some critics thought the high levels of conformity found by Asch were a reflection of American, 1950’s culture and told us more about the historical and cultural climate of the USA in the 1950s then they do about the phenomena of conformity.
  • Participants were not protected from psychological stress which may occur if they disagreed with the majority.

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