Conformity: Stanley Milgram And Solomon Asch

In 1951, Solomon Asch carried out several experiments on conformity. The aim of these studies was to investigate conformity in a group environment situation. The purpose of these experiments was to see if an individual would be swayed by public pressure to go along with the incorrect answer. Asch believed that conformity reflects on relatively rational process in which people are pressured to change their behaviour. Asch designed experiments to measure the pressure of a group situation upon an individual judgment. Asch wanted to prove that conformity can really play a big role in disbelieving our own senses.

Conformity is a concept that has been heavily researched in the field of social psychology. Conformity is defined as a change in behavior, beliefs, and attitudes due to group pressure perceived as real (encompassing the presence of others) or imagined (encompassing the pressure of social standards) (Myers, 2010, p. 192). The concept of conformity is a powerful influence on the tendency for people to arrange their thoughts, perspectives, and ideas with others, especially when in a group. This takes away from a person’s individuality because they want to feel accepted by others and therefore, a person will accomplish this basic need of approval through conforming.

Social influences shape every person's practices, judgments, and beliefs. (Asch 306) In "Opinions and Social Pressure", Solomon Asch examines how individuals tend to conform to a group or majority. He does this by explaining the results of his experiment that he devised to observe to what extent conformity occurs. In her essay titled "Group Minds", Doris Lessing claims that as a society we have enough knowledge about conformity to do something about it, yet we choose not to. Although Doris Lessing and Solomon Asch both suggest that people desire independence yet yield to conformity, Asch's experiment adds specificity to Lessing's claims. Lessing speaks generally about groups and the effect they have on conformity, whereas Asch's experiment

Human beings are defined as ''social animals'' because in every aspects of life they live together, they form a variety of groups and improve relationships with each other. Interaction with others is a natural result of living in society. In the process of interaction, society and its rules has a social impact on each individual. If people face with any kind of social impact such as group pressure, great part of them show conformity by changing their behaviors, ideas, decisions in expected way. A person conforms if he or she chooses a course of action that a majority favors or that is socially acceptable. Some kind of conformity is natural and socially healthy but obeying all the norms, ideas, and decisions without thinking or accepting

Stanley Milgram, established a new course of study in the psychology of obedience. The purpose of his experiment was to have an idea of to see how people react the autocritical standard; during his experiment, he recorded how people will behave when given a source of power. Milgram gained this idea after the World War II. He believed that some people had the ability to essentially block out human thoughts of morals, ethics, and sympathetics when assigned to a job. The core issue that Milgram faced was finding a way to create a situation to test his theory; because behavior is such a complicated aspect of psychology to test, Milgram had to properly execute the experiment without physical harm from one person to another.

This is the first reason why people often refuse to believe what they are seeing in the Asch experiment. People will often simply go along with the group, even if it is going directly against their own judgment. For example, you are drinking at a party only because it is what everyone else is doing. The second reason has to do with the information. If many people think or do something, their actions and thoughts convey what is the correct information for you to have.

Baumrind fairly claims the “laboratory is not the place” to conduct studies of obedience as the laboratory tends to increase the number of variables above what is desired (Baumrind 90). Science Magazine defends Baumrind’s claim by conducting an experiment directed toward answering the question of the reproducibility of previously conducted psychological experiments. The data collected shows a significant decrease in the strength of the data collected and the number of experiments deemed reproducible was much smaller than those which were reproducible (“Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science”). If the experiment’s results are correct, then Baumrind has fairly contested the integrity of the results of the experiment conducted by Milgram since his results have a stronger chance of not being reproduced in a laboratory than of being reproduced in a laboratory. Milgram adds credibility to his article by mentioning the population from which the subjects were drawn. Initially, Milgram enlists Yale undergraduates to volunteer for his study which led to results consistent with his study, but severely taints the credibility of his experiment. He then modifies his experiment and enlarges to volunteer population to include that of anyone living in the city (Milgram 80-81). His

In this experiment, the inclination of people to conform was put to the test. One “real” participant in the experiment, and many

On average, about thirty-two percent of the participants conformed to pick the blatantly wrong answer and over the twelve trials seventy-five percent of the students conformed at least once, and twenty-five didn’t conform at all. Many of the participants afterward admitted they conformed to give the wrong answer because they wanted to avoid being ridiculed and some thought the group really was correct. Is was the results of this experiment that led Asch to conclude that whenever people conform it’s to either fit in or because they believe that since they’re in the minority their conclusion is incorrect. Another influential experiment concerning conformity is the Stanford Prison Experiment. Conducted in 1973, Phillip Zimbardo wanted to determine if brutality in prison systems was due to the

This experiment found that when a group of two other people refused to obey the conditions of the experiment, then the third person would most likely do the same.  It was found that, “The presence of others who are seen to disobey the authority figure reduces the level of obedience to 10%” (McLeod 588). A similar finding is noted in Solomon Asch’s “Opinions and Social Pressure”, where it was found that when someone is among their peers, they are more likely to conform to the group opinion. Asch acknowledges that social pressure plays a large role because the individual “must declare his judgments in public, before a majority which has also stated its position publicly” (Asch 599). This confirms the idea that an individual is more likely to conform when they are being judged by their

Solomon Asch 's (1951) conformity experiment is the study of people adapting their behaviours in order to follow the social normalities. This experiment entails a group of people who are actors and know about the experiment, and one person who is unknowing of the experiment, which are all in the same room. The group is shown a pair of cards; card A has a line on the card, and card B has three lines varying in length on the card, the similarities of the lines are obvious. The group individually, saying out loud picks one of the three lines on card B that matches the length of the line on card A. Everybody picks the correct line, this happens for a few rounds, then when shown another pair of cards the first actor chooses the wrong line on card B. The rest of the actors choose the same line the first actor chose, this tests to see if the unknowing participant will choose the same answer as the group (McLeod, 2008). The person who is unknowing of the

Sean Clark 10/25/16 Mrs. Jundt PSY 150 Milgram Experiment The Milgram Experiment is an experiment that tests someone's obedience when they are to directly harm others by another person. It was conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1961 at Yale University to to see if the people who operate Nazi concentration and death camps were just following their own orders. The experiment forced people to continue following someone’s orders even if they were harming someone.

Before Milgram’s findings, the fact that people were inclined to obey to authority figures was already realized. He just confirmed this belief. Milgram followed effective steps by using precise procedures. He made sure that the experiment reflected features of an actual situation in which a person would obey to an authority figure: offering compensation (monetary reward in this experiment), being under pressure (Prods 1 to 4 in this case), and mentioning that the person who obeys can withdraw. These features can also be seen in a situation where a soldier is commanded to fire, for instance. A soldier will get a monetary compensation, is under pressure to obey because he chose to be part of the military, and he knows that he can resign at any time. Milgram created an experiment so precise and detailed that more than enough evidence was demonstrated.

In pyschology conformity can be descibed as an indiviual’s tendency to follow the unspoken rules or behaviours of the social group to which he/she belongs to or wants to be apart of. Many psychologists including , Jenness (1932), Sherif (1935) both experimented in psychology, investigating conformity and group pressure. However, perhaps the most famous conformity experiment was done by Solomon Asch (1951) and his line judgment experiment. (McLeod 2007)

ABC’s Primetime did an experiment to see if people would change their test answers when hearing others say their own answers, “David and Graham, unlike the others, gave the right answers, even when the group didn’t.” All of them except for David and Graham were following the same trend of getting those particular answers, which turned out to be wrong. The reason people would go with the group that gets it wrong is because being in a group gives a sense of security, you feel safer. They doubt themselves and think that if everybody says this one thing, it must be right, but that isn’t always the