Asch Conformity Experiments
The Asch Conformity Experiments were a series of studies conducted by psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s. The experiments demonstrated the power of social influence and conformity, showing that individuals often yield to group pressure, even when they know the group is wrong. The findings have had a significant impact on our understanding of social behavior and group dynamics.
8 Key excerpts on "Asch Conformity Experiments"
eBook - ePub- Kevin Wren(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The following study is an example of this. Solomon Asch and normative social influences Study Another psychologist called Solomon Asch (1951, 1952, 1956) conducted a series of experiments that were much more tightly controlled than those of Sherif. (See article 2 in the key research summaries in chapter 6. Read this now.) His procedure became the standard for most replications by others investigating variables in conformity such as gender and culture, as we shall see later. Evaluation The summaries of Asch’s results are misleading though. A closer examination of all of Asch’s results shows that despite an overall yield to group pressure, i.e. normative influence, there are many individual differences. Some participants did not conform, conformity was not consistent in all participants, and the range of responses was wide. These variations are important since they point to the possibility that Asch may have been testing a number of aspects of conformity or a much more complex situation than was first thought, as we will discuss below. Asch’s interviews with his participants after the experiments showed that many of them were clearly anxious. This stemmed partly from their desire to be in harmony with the rest of the group (the confederates of Asch), which meant they had to deny the evidence of their own eyes. They also thought it could be damaging to be a dissenter. Asch reports that many of the non-yielders ‘longed’ to agree with the majority. One of Asch’s strongest non-yielders remarked: ‘It is more pleasant if one is in agreement.’ Another described his feelings as: ‘I felt disturbed, puzzled, separated like an outcast from the rest. Every time I disagreed I was beginning to wonder if I wasn’t beginning to look funny.’ Like Milgram, this aspect has ethical implications. Was Asch ‘right’ to misinform his participants and subject them to such feelings? In Asch’s experiments normative influences were at work...
eBook - ePubThink Like a Psychologist
Get to Grips with the Workings of the Human Mind
- Anne Rooney(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Arcturus(Publisher)
...CHAPTER 3 Don’t you have a mind of your own? You know what you think, don’t you? It’s surprising how easy it is to persuade people to change their ideas. Imagine this: you’re watching a TV talent show and everyone else is rooting for a performer you dislike. Are you going to buck the trend and criticize the favourite? Or will you go with the flow, and maybe even decide the guy’s not so bad really? After all, if your friends like his act, perhaps you’re missing something…. Psychology experiments suggest we are less resistant to the pressure to conform than we might believe. We will go along with other people’s views even when there is no material cost in not conforming. So just why are you putty in their hands? The Asch conformity experiment In 1951, the Polish-born social psychologist Solomon Asch (1907– 96) carried out a groundbreaking experiment in conformity at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. In the main part of the experiment, a subject was placed with seven people who were presented as volunteers, but were actually confederates of Asch who were working to an agreed script. The group was shown two cards. One displayed a single line. The other showed three lines of differing lengths, one of which matched the line on the first card. The group was asked to say which of the three lines, labelled A, B and C, matched the single line. This test was repeated many times. For the first set of trials, Asch’s confederates gave the correct answer. Thereafter, they all gave the same wrong answer. All the confederates gave their answers first. Asch was interested to see whether the volunteers would be swayed by the wrong answers given by others. In a control experiment, a volunteer had to give answers without other people being present and therefore with no pressure to conform. In the control, the volunteer gave an incorrect answer less than 1 per cent of the time...
- Paul Seager(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Teach Yourself(Publisher)
...We may sometimes go along with the majority for a quiet life, even though we know what they are doing is wrong. Solomon Asch, in a famous experiment (referred to as the ‘Line Judgement Task’), showed this to be the case. Participants in a group of seven were asked to make judgements about which line out of a choice of three matched a target line (see below). Unbeknownst to the real participants, the other six people in their group were confederates (see Chapter 1) of the experimenter who were instructed to give incorrect answers in 12 out of the 36 trials. The naïve (real) participant was always situated in seat 6, therefore five confederates gave their answers before them. In the 24 control trials, all was well and the participant simply gave the correct answer in line with everyone else. However, in the 12 experimental trials, the participant was confronted with five other people who were giving an obviously incorrect answer. Asch was interested to see what they would do: would they remain independent, or would they conform to the majority and give an answer that they knew to be incorrect? Asch’s line judgement task The results of Asch’s study showed that out of the 12 experimental trials, 28 per cent of participants gave eight or more incorrect answers, 37 per cent gave at least one incorrect answer, and only 25 per cent of participants did not conform at all (i.e. they gave the correct answer despite the disbelieving stares from the confederates). Asch was understandably dismayed by his findings which indicated that supposedly intelligent people gave wrong answers just to avoid the social disapproval of others (this was confirmed through debriefing interviews with the participants after the experiment had concluded)...
eBook - ePubSocial Psychology
Revisiting the Classic Studies
- Joanne R. Smith, S Alexander Haslam, Joanne R. Smith, S. Alexander Haslam(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
...And having obtained such intriguing results, Asch and others set about conducting a series of further studies to examine in greater detail the context and features of the task that led to more or less conformity. As they are typically understood in textbooks, the studies themselves are seen as evidence of what is termed normative influence. This analysis suggests that the fear of standing out as different motivates people to compromise their motivation to be accurate and to conform to an obviously incorrect majority. As it turns out, any fears participants might have had about expressing their deviant opinion were well-founded. In one variant of the line-judgment study, Asch inverted the typical paradigm. This time there was just one confederate who was instructed to call out the wrong answer and the confederate was surrounded by several true participants. Here the (unfortunate) confederate was openly and loudly ridiculed. As a further demonstration of the power of normative influence, Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard (1955) created a situation in which participants could witness the (incorrect) responses of the majority but were allowed to record their own responses privately (thus eliminating fear of ridicule and, by extension, the power of normative influence). In this variant, the level of conformity plummeted (see also Abrams et al., 1990; Insko et al., 1983). Interestingly, however, conformity was not reduced to zero. For some participants, the power of the situation was enough to convince them that the majority answer was the correct answer after all. In other words, the study provides evidence not only of normative influence (i.e., ‘going along’ with others) but also of informational influence (i.e., being convinced by others). Other follow-ups focused on other conditions that affect conformity levels. Perhaps unsurprisingly, resistance was enhanced when the majority gave answers that were more blatantly incorrect (Asch, 1955)...
eBook - ePub- Richard Gross, Rob McIlveen(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Asch interviewed each participant after the experiment: those who agreed with the majority most of the time gave various reasons for their behaviour. For example, that the group was actually correct, that they did not want to spoil the experimenter’s results, and that they went along with the majority to avoid creating disharmony and conflict. Participants who did not conform gave the following reasons for maintaining independence: confident their judgement was correct, and thinking the majority was correct but could not agree with them since that was not what they saw. The Asch experiments are frequently misrepresented as demonstrating high levels of conformity. Friend, Rafferty and Bramel (1990) draw attention to the fact that in the original study, almost two-thirds of the naïve participants resisted group pressure to conform (Asch, 1951). In spite of this, a review of nearly 100 American Social Psychology texts published between 1953–85, showed that the emphasis was, and continues to be, consistently on the experimental participants who made 37 per cent errors over the 12 critical trials. The critique by Friend et al. (1990) also alerts us to the dilemma as to whether 37 per cent of conforming responses constitutes a high or low level of conformity. Asch had intended to demonstrate independence and was himself surprised by the results. As the correct answer was so obvious, he expected that naïve participants would not be swayed by majority influence (Campbell, 1990). The Asch paradigm is costly in terms of time and the number of confederates needed, and requires good acting from the confederates. Crutchfield (1955) devised an alternative experimental model: he had five participants sit in separate booths, side by side...
eBook - ePub- Kenneth S. Bordens, Irwin A. Horowitz(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...You can jump up, whip out your pocket measuring tape, rush to the front of the room, and measure the lines. This is directly testing your perceptions against reality. However, you probably won’t do this, because it will violate your sense of the operative social norm—how you should act in this situation. The other way is to test the accuracy of your perceptions against those of others through a social comparison process (Festinger, 1954). Asch’s paradigm strongly favors doing the latter. Given that participants in these experiments probably will not measure the lines, what do they do about the conflict between information from their own senses and information from the majority? CONFORMITY IN THE ASCH EXPERIMENTS Asch’s experimental paradigm placed the participant’s own perceptions into conflict with the opinions of a unanimous majority advocating a clearly incorrect judgment. When confronted with the incorrect majority, Asch’s participants made errors in the direction of the incorrect majority on over 33% of the critical trials. Therefore, Asch showed a conformity rate of 33% on his line-judgment task. Almost all participants knew the correct answer. When they did the same task alone, the error rate (mismatching the line with the standard) was 7.4%, one fourth the error rate when other participants were present. Yet many changed their opinions to be in conformity with the group judgment. So, even with a simple perceptual task, an individual may abandon his or her own judgement and go with the majority. Why would we do this? As we see next, there are different reasons why people conform or remain independent. PATHS TO CONFORMITY AND INDEPENDENCE Based on his results and interviews with participants, Asch classified them as either yielding (conforming) or independent (nonconforming) (Asch, 1951). Of the yielding participants, some (but relatively few) gave in completely to the majority...
- Jessica Kuper, Jessica Kuper(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Crutchfield mechanized the Asch procedure by standardizing on a group of five and substituting ‘electronic’ for live stooges. All five were naive subjects, each believing himself to be subject number five. This greatly increased the efficiency of data collection without significantly reducing the level of conformity. Deutsch and Gerard increased the individual's independence in the Asch situation by either increasing the salience of self to self (by requiring subjects to note down their own responses before hearing the responses of the others) or by decreasing the salience of self to others (with anonymous responding). Milgram's experimental studies of obedience were as controversial in the mid 1960s as Asch's studies had been in the early 1950s. Milgram identified the conditions conducive to the carrying out of instructions coming from a legitimate source of authority (i.e. the experimenter). In response to Asch's studies, Moscovici has developed a theory of minority influence. He is concerned with identifying how it is that minorities, over time, come to influence the majority. Whilst his theory is based on laboratory evidence, Moscovici is more broadly interested in how creative individuals (like Freud, Einstein or Darwin) manage to convert the majority to their own way of thinking. He is thus more interested in studying creativity and change than in studying the maintenance of the status quo. Robert M. Farr London School of Economics and Political Science References Asch, S. E. (1956), ‘Studies of independence and submission to group pressure: 1. A minority of one against a unanimous majority’, Psychological Monographs, 70. Crutchfield, R. S. (1955), ‘Conformity and character’, American Psychologist, 10. Deutsch, M. and Gerard, H. B. (1955), ‘A study of normative and informational social influences upon individual judgment’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 51. Milgram, S. (1974), Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, London. Moscovici, S...
eBook - ePubPersuasion
Social Influence and Compliance Gaining
- Robert H. Gass, John S. Seiter(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs, 70, entire volume. Asch, S. E. (1966). Opinions and social pressure. In A. P. Hare, E. F. Borgatta, & R. F. Bales (Eds.), Small groups: Studies in social interaction (pp. 318–324). New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Baldry, A. C., & Pagliaro, S. (2014). Helping victims of intimate partner violence: The influence of group norms among lay people and the police. Psychology of Violence, 4, 334–347. doi: 10:1037/a0034844 Baron, R. S. (2000). Arousal, capacity, and intense indoctrination. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 4 (3), 238–254. Barreto, M., & Ellemers, N. (2000). You can’t always do what you want: Social identity and self-presentational determinants of the choice to work for a low-status group. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26 (8), 891–906. Bedi, A. (2021). No herd for black sheep: A meta-analytic review of the predictors and outcomes of workplace ostracism. Applied Psychology, 70 (2), 861–904. https://soi.org/10.1111/apps.12238 Bleize, D. N. M., Anschutz, D. J., Tanis, M., & Buijzen, M. (2021). The effects of group centrality and accountability on conformity to aggressive norms. Computers in Human Behavior, 120. Advanced online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2021.106754 Bond, R. (2005). Group size and conformity. Intergroup Relations, 8, 331–354. Bond, R., & Smith, P. B. (1996). Culture and conformity: A meta-analysis of studies using Asch’s (1952b, 1956) line judgment task. Psychological Bulletin, 119 (1), 111–137. Book, L. A., Tanford, S., Montgomery, R., & Love, C. (2018). Online traveler reviews as social influence: Price is no longer king. Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research, 42 (3), 445–475. https://doi.org/10.1177/1096348015597029 Boster, F. J. (1990). Group argument, social pressure, and the making of group decisions. In J. A. Anderson (Ed.), Communication yearbook 13 (pp. 303–312)...
