Asch Conformity

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.

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

Because humans crave attention of others, they live their life and conform to whatever the majority of the people around them says. Asch’s Conformity Experiment, which was when they hired eight actors and one test subject and gave them all a test and told the eight actors to say the wrong answer, they found that the test subject would usually conform to the majority vote even if it was wrong. This showed us that people would usually conform to the majority answer on a test, even if it was wrong. Even in high school, students conform to make themselves look cool and conform to things even if they know it’s wrong. Asch’s experiment and american high schools prove to us that humans don’t want to stand out and we just want to fit in and get attention.

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

Solomon Asch’s study on conformity displays a common occurrence of our behavior, when interacting with others. A experience of mine were I conformed to an idea, due to everyone else choosing that idea occurred during a debate in one my history classes. The debate was based around Genghis Khan and whether his actions and legacies make him an evil or good person. During each round of the debate one of the opposing sides would present an idea fighting for their side, which for the team opposing me was that he was an evil person. They presented the idea that Khan never established a social order within his empire. For my sides rebuttal they chose to provide evidence of increased social order after his conquering, but did not necessarily bring up

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.

This article is about conformity and how it can influence the way someone thinks about a certain topic or towards a certain situation. The psychologist Asch wanted to understand just how strong the need to conform actually is, and how it influences a person’s behavior. His method of testing this was a small group of people, about eight, sitting next to each other and an experimenter flashes two cards. One card had a single line on it and the second had three lines of various sizes, labeled A, B and C. Each person in the group was to pick a line from the choices on the second card that they thought was the same length as the line on the first card. The first couple of rounds went on and everyone was picking the same obvious answers, but a little way

Remember when you were in class doing some class work, a group of classmates is discussing about it and they all agree on the answer of a certain question, a minute ago you were certain that your answer to that question was the correct one, but now you feel insecure and decide to change it to have the same answer as everybody else, what happened? According to Solomon Asch’s conformity experiment, what explains this common behavior is the normative social influence which leads to conformity.

Conformity may be a phenomenon that is strongly influential, and this can be supported by the studies discussed previously, however what they did not consider cultural differences. And this statement can be supported by Smith and Bond’s (1996) study; they carried out a meta-analysis of Asch’s studies. They examined changes of conformity over time, because the American culture developed throughout the years. Another area they examined was the impact of cultural values on conformity, specifically the differences in individualism-collectivism (Smith and Bond, 1996). They carried out a meta-analysis of 133 conformity studies that used the Asch paradigm. The meta-analysis showed that more conformity was obtained in collectivistic countries like

Solomon Asch was a psychologist that conduced numerous expirments designed to illustrate the increasing conformity within social groups. The experiments also invesigated the effect the number of people present within the group had one the conformity rate. Asch hypothesized, “ that the majority of the people would not conform to something obviosly wrong; however, when surrounded by (other) individuals all voicing an incorrect answer, 75% of them(the participant) will conform to the groups answer” (Watzlawick 1976)

Unlike Asch’s experiment I am going to test different age groups: grade school adolescent boys and high school junior boys. The testing will be done in groups of 10, 9 associates of the experimenter and 1 test subject. The 9 associates will remain the same for each set of trials, only the test subject will change. A total of 10 different test subjects will equate to 10 sets of trials. A control group of 10 with no associates will complete the vision test with no social pressure. Each group will complete the vision test (refer to figure 1) 5 times, and the wrong answer will be given every even trial. For example the correct answers will be given by the associates trials 1, 3, and 5. The wrong answers will be given in trials 2 and 4. The hypothesis is an individual will modify their answer to a vision test to conform to the response given by the majority. The null hypothesis: an individual will not modify their answer to a vision test to conform to the responses given by the

Due to this study, it reveals the power of social influence at a young age. Consequently, children who are generally exposed to a negligent role model can emerge as inadequate citizens. Conversely, youth who are raised by virtuous people are likely to also encourage respectable behavior. Moreover, not only does social influence alter a child’s actions, but it can also trigger an adult to unanimously agree with the majority to avoid presenting the unpopular opinion. This form of compliance is proven by Solomon Asch, a well known social psychologist. In his conformity experiment, Asch investigated how pressure from the majority can sway a person’s perception of what is correct; he asked 50 students to perform a “vision test” by determining which two lines were equal in length. Asch also made the correct answer obvious, however, only one individual was an actual participant, while everyone else unanimously agreed on the incorrect answer. The results of the study reveal how the majority opinion can adversely affect a person’s

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)

Asch Conformity Experiment: The Asch conformity tests are frequently construed as proof for the energy of conformity and normative social impact. That's, the readiness to adapt openly to achieve social reward and steer clear of social punishment. Others have contended that it's rational to make use of other individuals' choice as evidence. Like the second perspective, the Asch conformity tests are reported as evidence for that self-categorization theory of social influence. From that perspective the Asch answers are construed as results of depersonalization procedures whereby the partakers are required to be prepared to contain similar viewpoints (Hayes, 2000).

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.