No matter where one goes, as humans, we are bound to the unspoken laws of normality that society has bestowed on its people.  Social Norm from a social scientist’s perspective is the tolerance towards actions, and can range from what a person wears to what the person says.  An example of someone deviating from the social norms is an individual who decides to break out into song at the local library; an environment intended to be quiet and academically enriching used for the purpose of entertainment. Albeit, the actual action can become an annoyance, but this is how breaking the social norm works by creating some type of annoyance, or performing an action outside of its intended use. Anthropologist Clifford Greetz discovered that many cultures have their own social norms to motivate people. While social norms is the level of conformity within society, and anything that deviates from the beaten path is frowned down upon.

In the early 1950’s, a Psychology major at Swarthmore College named Solmon Asch asked a group of students to participate in a vision test.  The students were then instructed to sit down in a room, and watch a piece of paper with three lines, one longer than the other. The students were requested to state the longest line out of the groupings, and all of the students came to the same conclusion. However, by the 5^th group of lines, the students started to call out the wrong answer, creating confusion within the group of students, and in the end, all the students arrived to the same conclusion of saying the shortest line was the longest. This famous experiment is called The Asch Experiment, also known as the conformity experiment.

The method used in this experiment was a rather simple one: implement 5 confederates, or participants who worked for the researcher, and ‘X’ amount of real participants. The confederates were instructed to give the correct answer up until the 5^th trial run and provide false answers. The experiment wanted to find out if people who are under pressure will fold under the majority even if the answer is incorrect. The results varied from the amount of confederates (Independent Variables), suggesting that the more confederates who gave the wrong answer, the higher the chance the participant will give the wrong answer as well.

There have been several experiments that test the conformity of an individual, from the 1961 Milgram Experiment to a game called “No Soap, Radio”(which will be explained later on). In the Milgram Experiment, a confederate’s posed as the ‘Victim’ with heart condition, and introduced to shocks, and the actual participant was the instructor, administering the shock. The Milgram experiment wanted to test how authoritative figures influenced decision making skills, and in this case, the person that was being experimented on was the instructor.