The experiment used 50 male students form Swarthmore College in which all were asked to participate in a vision line judgment test. Asch placed one of the students in a room with seven other men. The task was controlled by the fact that the seven other men were aware of the experiment and had agreed upon their responses to the task. The student however did not know this and was lead to believe the others were regular participants as well.
The task was simple. In front of the men were two pictures. One of which had one vertical line on it. The second however had three different length vertical lines labeled A-C, like so:
With the two pictures in front of them, the men were asked to state out loud which line (A, B, or C) was the same size as the line on the other piece of paper. The answer was obvious and the student was placed on the end of the row, concluding him to answer last.
The experiment consisted of 12 trials in which the controlled men answered wrong and 6 trials in which they answered correctly. This was designed to see if the uncontrolled participant would conform to the others in the room because of majority view.
The results showed that overall, throughout all trials 32% of the participants conformed with the obvious wrong majority vote. On the 12 trials in which the controlled group answered incorrect, 75% of participants conformed at least one time.
In a controlled trial with no pressure from the other participants, less than 1% of the participants gave the incorrect answer.
This study proved that even though people are clearly aware of the correct answer, if there is a majority pressure, most people will conform to the majority answer. So why did the participants conform? In a post- experiment interview many of the participant’s claimed that they knew the answer was wrong but conformed because they didn’t want to be ridiculed by the others. Others stated they didn’t believe they were conforming and honestly thought the answer was correct. This proves the two major influences in the psychology department: normative and informational. Normative influence is when the person wants to fit in with others in the group and informational is when they believe that the group has more information than them.
Would you conform to the majority? Hard to say, right?
Sites I Used:
http://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html
Wow I saw a BuzzFeed video that did a rendition of this study and all I have to say is incredible! We’d like to think we can overcome the power of peer pressure, but this study gives insight to the insecurities we may have in unfamiliar settings. Thanks for sharing!
I love this experiment. I’m a Psychology major so I have heard of this experiment a few times before. Watching videos of it is so funny to me because you can see the look of confusion on the participants faces as the confederates read off their incorrect answers. They know they’re right but they may not want to make themselves different from the group in any way.
I’ve previously learned about this experiment in Psych 100 class but it was interesting to read again and to find more details like certain percentages that go along with the results.