Critical Evaluation Of Jenness 1932 Study

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.

Edward Jenner and the Discovery of Vaccines Edward Jenner (1749-1823) trained in London, under John Hunter, and was an army surgeon for a period of time. After that, he spent his whole career as a country doctor in his home county, Gloucestershire (West of England). His research was based on careful case studies and clinical observation more than a hundred years before scientists could explain what viruses and diseases actually were. His innovative new method was successful to such an extent that by 1840 the British government had banned alternative preventive treatments against smallpox. [IMAGE]

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.

Perhaps the power of the need to feel accepted is most evident in the character of juror number two, a rather meek and hesitant individual, who during several occasions of being confronted by more strong-willed or hostile jurors, displays quick retreat in his subtle opinions.

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

Asch’s experiment was performed in 1951 and is now a classic experiment in psychology. Asch asked individuals a simple question and a high percentage answered correctly. Then Asch placed a participant in a room with seven actors who had predetermined incorrect answers. When asked in front of the group, 75% of people would give incorrect answers clearly because of they conformed to the actors around them. Asch then concluded that it is natural for one to conform to society in order to fit

The study of social psychology, particularly conformity, is very difficult to conduct both ethically and accurately in order to be able to obtain useful results. In the studies done by Milgram and Zimbardo, ethics were definitely breached but to what extent were these experiments useful, and which one offered the most insight into human behaviour?

Conformity – Asch conformity studies examined independence and conformity among individuals in a group setting.

Solomon Asch tested conformity at Swarthmore College in 1951 by putting a participant in a group of people whose task was to match line lengths. Each individual was expected to announce which of three lines was the closest in length to a reference line. But the participant was placed in a group of actors, who were all told to give the correct answer twice then switch to each saying the same incorrect answer. Asch wanted to see whether the participant would conform and start to give the wrong answer as well, knowing that he would otherwise be a single outlier.

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

Asch since his experiments are what pioneered the study of conformity. His study is considered a classic, and most of conformity studies based their study off of Asch’s experiments. Asch made a group of white, male college students study two separated cards that contained lines. One card was the base line, and the subjects had to choose from three similar line on the second card that matched the first card. Asch made his subjects report their findings out loud to the rest of the other subjects in the room. In all of his experiments, all but one subject were confederates, and that was the majority the lone subject had to face. The majority answered incorrectly throughout the experiments as Asch instructed them to do, and he study the experimental subject to see if he will conform to the incorrect majority. In his first experiments, a group of 7 to 9 students was used. The second experiment tested for the number of opposing subjects needed to reach a set rate of conformity. The final experiment tested the rate of conformity of the experimental partner if he had a supporting partner. The results of the first experiment showed that “the misleading majority’s wrong judgment [made the experimental subjects answer incorrectly] in 36.8 percent of the selections” (Asch 20). This was very interesting, and the rest of the other experiments showed different numbers as well. It only took three opposing subjects to make the experimental subject conform at 31.8% and beyond three subjects did not change the rate (Asch 21). A supporting partner made the experimental subject rate of incorrect answers reduced by one-fourth (Asch 22). This led me to look at other studies that explored conformity with different age groups and using females instead of males. For example, Walker and Andrade found in their experiments “that conformity decreases with age from childhood to maturity in the Asch (1956) situation” (371). Children tend to

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

One of the first empirical studies to illustrate conformity was conducted by Jeness (1932) where he asked individual students to estimate the number of beans in a bottle and discuss it to arrive at a group estimate. When they were asked

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.

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)