Chapter 65. Conformity: The Asch Experiment

1. One of the most important principles in psychology is the power of social influence. The behavior of other people affects our behavior, and we feel pressure to make our actions match those of the people around us. This is called conformity—adjusting our thinking or behavior to coincide with a group standard.

2. The pressure to conform is very strong in ambiguous situations. If you don't know what to do, the best advice is to watch what others are doing and then imitate them. For example, if you don’t know which fork to use for each course of a banquet, you would probably conform to the behavior of the people around you.

3. But what about unambiguous situations? Research by social psychologist Solomon Asch was the first to demonstrate that people will conform to a group's judgment even if that judgment is clearly wrong. In Asch’s famous experiment, groups of six or seven people were given a visual perception test. Each participant was asked to decide which of three comparison lines was the same length as a standard line, and then call out that judgment for the experimenter to record.

4. All but one of the participants in each testing group was paid by the experimenter to give the wrong answer on some trials, such as claiming that line 3 is the correct answer in this example. Surprisingly, more than two-thirds of the “real” participants gave in to group pressure on at least some of the trials. They denied the evidence from their own eyes, and conformed by agreeing with the group’s incorrect answer.

5. Asch found that the pressure to conform was greatest when the behavior was public and the group was unanimous. If even one other person defied the group, the "real" participant was empowered to give the correct answer rather than go along with the group's incorrect answer. If the “real” participant could answer privately, that person almost always gave the correct answer.

Here are the six participants in Asch's study. The experimenter has explained the instructions, and the participants are ready to begin the experiment. The person with the brown shirt (in position 5) is the only real participant—all the others are accomplices of the experimenter who have been instructed to give the correct answer for the first two trials, and the wrong answer for all remaining trials.

How would you respond when the other people in the group begin giving the wrong answer? Would you stand firm and ignore the others, or would you cave in to group pressure and conform to the group's judgment? For Asch, the next several trials were critical for finding the answer to these questions.

Asch found that, when the accomplices unanimously agreed on an obviously incorrect judgment, the real participants conformed to the group decision and reported the group's wrong answer more than one-third of the time. Apparently, the desire to be "like everybody else" was more powerful than the desire to be accurate.

The real participants had an error rate of 37 percent in this group setting, compared with an error rate of less than 1 percent when other participants were tested individually on this same task.

Even more striking, in the group setting, 74 percent of the real participants conformed on at least one of the critical trials!