Comparing Asch's And Miligram Experiments

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.

The acts of conforming and obeying shape us significantly, whether we are conscious of it or not. They do so in ways that psychologists Solomon Asch and Stanley Milgram attempt to explain through their research. Asch touches base on the topic of conformity and discusses the ways in which group behaviors and social norms can influence the decisions an individual makes. On the other hand, Milgram’s focus is on obedience, and he studied it by measuring average, everyday people and their willingness to obey authority figures, even if it involves actions that go against their personal beliefs and morals. They have provided evidence through experiments, and with this information, it becomes easier to understand the world of politics, and how these

Conformity refers to the likelihood that an individual will follow the unspoken rules or behaviors of the social group to which they belong. In the short video clip titled “Asch Conformity Experiment”, we learned that people can feel pressured into abnormal behavior because of the unanimity of the majority.

In Milgram’s study a participant was told to administer a shock to a person if they answered a question incorrectly. They were told to do this by the experimenter who was wearing a white coat and was portrayed as an authority figure. The participant therefore felt that the responsibility for his actions were being placed on to the experimenters shoulders, rather that their own. The main reason an individual will obey; will be due to the direct response from the high status of the authority figure. Many people would do something that they may not usually do if they were asked to do it by a person in a uniform such as a policeman or a doctor. It is also that they believe they will not be held responsible for their actions as they were only obeying a figure with a higher authority than themselves. Another reason that people may obey another is if there is no clear cut reason why they shouldn’t. If they are told to do something which is considered reasonable by another person, they may obey because there seems no logical reason why they shouldn’t.

This report will compare two experiments; Asch 's conformity experiment and Milgram 's obedience experiment. The two experiments will be compared for validity and their ethics. In addition, this report will take into consideration Zimbardo 's Stanford Prison experiment and the Lucifer Effect. To analyse how obedience and conformity theories can be used as an example of why good people can turn bad. This report will also look at how obedience and conformity can be applied to the criminal justice system.

The ASCH experiment demonstrated that humans conform easily, and it is scary to know that. Humans do not want to feel left out or alone. In groups or large numbers of people, we

Being that conformity was an important topic, many researchers conducted studies that had consistently supported the theory that the more people there are in a group, the more likely a person is to conform. Researchers Stanley Milgram, Lionnel Dannick, Leon Mann, James W. Newton, and Eddie Tong, carried out different observational experiments that produced similar results about the power of conformity. Stanley Milgram’s study on conformity was an observational study in which confederates stopped and would stare up at a window of a building for 60 seconds. Judges recorded all of the people who walked by, and counted how many citizens looked up or stopped and looked at the window. The results from his study indicated that when there were more confederates in a group, people were more likely to

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.

The milligram experiment is a widely criticised experiment that focused on obedience and authority, by Stanley Miligram (1963). This paper looks at Gibson’s analysis of this experiment and will discuss the importance of context for studying social influence. The Milligram experiment focused on obedience, which is ingrained deeply in individuals. The experiment was to discover how far people obey orders when the experiment was an upsetting experience. It involved ordering subjects to carry out electric shocks to a victim, by a shock generator.

What do these studies show us about people, and their reasons for conforming? I believe that the individual's desire to be correct plays a key role in this type of conformity. People often rely on social cues around them, in a given situation, when making judgements. In a group situation, like that in the Sherif experiment, if an individual is unsure about something they will look at the judgements of others in order to determine the correct response. According to Blanton and Christie people

Asch’s experiment teaches us that conformity is most likely when the individual has to stand alone in group settings. Asch’s experiment teaches us that an individual will go against his own judgment when the group differs from the individual. Even when he knows he is correct, an individual will go with the group because of peer pressure.

A small group of high school sociology students were interested in conducting an experiment to observe if the social pressure from one's peers has the ability to influence individuals to conform their opinions. Conformity is the idea of matching your attitudes, beliefs and opinions to fit in with group norms to avoid being different. When asking a group of grade 8 and 11 students a set of questions using a blind vote students would voice their true opinions. However, when taking away the blind vote the grade 8 students would conform their opinions to match those of grade 11’s, because of both the social pressure and the age difference. The power of social pressure is enormous, continuing to take over society as decades bypass. The students

investigation is how the tendency to conform enacts automatic normative behaviors in social situations. Research is still quite unclear as to the relationship operates. One idea is conformity causing people to use a previous norm for situations. For instance, one library visit informed an individual to be quiet, so, without a reminder, the individual is quiet in the next library visited as well. The situations are similar if not exactly the same, so a previous norm is a viable option for the second situation, as it was preferred in the first.

Solomon Asch did an experiment on conformity, and 70% of the subjects chose wrong because they went along with what everyone else in the group said. The subjects that went against the group still felt weird about being alone in the answer they chose. Millgram, a scientist who learned from Asch, did an experiment to see how far someone would go in listening to orders. He told the subject he was teaching someone memory, and every wrong answer the learner would receive a shock. 2/3 of the subjects didn’t go all the way, but a majority of them listened to what they were told to do.

Obedience study” was a experiment help by Stanley Milgram, subjects were told that they were participating in a study on the effect of punishment on memory. One “participant” in the study - the “learner” (“Mr. Wallace” - real name Bob McDonough) was a confederate of Milgram and one was the true subject - the “teacher”. The teacher was told to shock the learner when the leaner gave a wrong answer. The “teachers” were given a shock of 45 volts to convince them that the shocks were real. The learner’s response to the questions is scripted. At 150 volts the “learner” is heard asking that the experiment stop. If the “teacher” denied continuing the experiment, the experimenter would say “Please continue”, “The experiment requires that you continue”, “It is