A Call to Conformity: Alexander Robbins Essay

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.

People who feel the need to fit in, weather it 's because of society or themselves, are very prone for following the crowd and giving into peer pressure. When someone is a follower they tend to also have a low self importance making them even more prone. If you have a friend that is a bit of a follower try to help them out and make sure they aren’t making bad choices to gain friends. Trust me those are not the friends someone would

In the article title “Individuality vs. Conformity: The Healthy Middle?” by an anonymous high school student it says that there are only two thing that a typical high school student wants to typically achieve in their short high school life (par. 1). One of these things is to fit in (par. 2). The second one is to be different (par. 3). How could you do this?. You could choose to be individual or just conform. However I really maintain the idea that what we should really do it's to stay in the middle so we won't forget who we really are and still be liked by different groups of people.

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

All of the yielding subjects underestimated the frequency with which they conformed. Asch also considered which aspect of the majority was most influential—the size of the majority or its unanimity? The experiment was then modified by adding between one to 15 persons in opposition to the individual. The results showed a clear trend; with just one in opposition there was little change in answers. When the opposition increased to two the pressure suddenly became substantial with subjects accepting wrong answers 13.6 percent of the time.

People don't always conform for the same reason's, in 1958 Kelman identified three main forms of conformity, each of which could produce conforming behaviour but in different ways. The first of these and the most superficial is Compliance: Going along with the majority in order to avoid rejection or in order to gain rewards such as social acceptance or approval. The distinguishing feature of compliance

Some factors that are found to increase conformity include: attractiveness of others in the group, complexity or difficulty of the task, and group cohesiveness. Asch created this experiment to deepen our understanding of the human psyche. This look into the human mind has shown us that we look for acceptance in other human beings. When under an anonymous shroud, the amount of correct responses increase. That being said, if there is no risk in being thought of as dumb or idiotic according to the choice, people are more likely to go through with their first choice

There is a fundamental human need to belong to social groups especially if people were to live and work together, it is likely that they need to agree on common beliefs, values, attitudes and behaviours in order to get along and fit-in. Thus, we learnt to conform to rules of other people, the more people see others behaving in a particular way or making particular decisions, the more likely people will feel obliged to follow the suit. This is called conformity and can be defined in different ways, Aronson, Wilson & Akert (2014) stated it is the changing of one’s behavior due to the real or imagined influence of other people. According to Deutsch and Gerard (1955), social influence should be distinguished into two types, the informational social influence and normative social influence. The occurrence of social influence has implied to many real life events, which has drawn many researchers to attention. This has lead many researchers to design distinct experiments to try and understand the cause of the conformity, whether conformity is situation dependent, and whether we are able to resist social influences.

In this article, entitled, “Conformity to Peer Pressure in Preschool Children,” author, Michael Tomasello focused on a study of preschool children influenced by peer pressure. The article was about examining children to determine the level to which they are subject to peer pressure, indicated by sensitivity to peers during their school years. Children are often encouraged or persuaded to make decisions or judgments based upon the decisions and judgments of their peers we should distinguish when a child feels undue pressure or needs help making their own decision or judgement independent of peer pressure.

Berns revealed that group opinion had the potential to change participants’ perceptions of what they saw. In terms of evolution, this makes sense: there is immense survival benefit to living in a community and tremendous disadvantage to going against the group. Clearly, conformity can have extraordinary influence on the actions of individuals within society.

How do people conform to social pressures? Will they go along with other’s opinions, or will they stick to their guns and trust their own judgments? To determine the effect of socials pressure on decision making, an experiment was performed to test the hypothesis; If a person is presented with visual information in a group setting and asked questions about their perception of what they see, will they truthfully respond if others in the group unanimously choose the wrong answer? A study titled “A Minority of One Against a Unanimous Majority”, Solomon E. Asch designed an experiment to test the power of social forces to understand the extent of influence they have on psychological function. (Asch)

In addition, the researchers wanted to manipulate the pressure of social opinions by changing the time between the two selection periods. The first time participants selected their

The purpose of the Asch experiment was to demonstrate the power of conformity in groups. Experiments led by Solomon Asch of Swarthmore College asked groups of students to participate in a “vision test”. In reality, all but one of the participants were confederates or accomplices of the experimenter, and the study was really about how the remaining students would react to the confederates’ behavior. Conformity, group size, and cohesiveness. Asch found that one of the situational factors that influence conformity is the size of the opposing majority. In a series of studies, he varied the number of confederates who gave incorrect answers from 1 to 15.

Following a study known as the Asch Line Study, it was easy to see that a person will yield to group pressure to fit in with their peers. The Asch Line Study aimed to see if social pressure from a majority group could make a person conform. During the test, the subject was brought into a small room with what they believed was seven other participants. The experimenter would then tell them that they are there for a study on visual judgment as they lay two cards before them. On the left was a card containing one vertical line and on the right was a card containing three lines of varying length. One at a time the participants would say which of the three lines on the right card matches the left card, and this was repeated several times with different cards. Unanimously the “participants” would all choose what was obviously the wrong answer to see if the actual participant would feel pressured into knowingly choosing the wrong line. Consequently, the overall data from 12 critical trials they found that on average 32% of the participants conformed to the majority with the clearly wrong answers (McLeod “Asch”). While the candidate would privately admit to disagreeing with the views of the group, they will still conform during the trials out of fear of rejection from their peers.