In 1951 at Swarthmore College, Solomon Asch showed groups of eight male college students a reference line and three comparison lines, one matching in length. Seven of the eight were confederates instructed to unanimously give an obviously wrong answer on 12 of 18 critical trials, testing whether the one naive participant would give the correct answer or conform to the group's wrong one.
Facts
Key FindingParticipants conformed to the incorrect majority answer in about one-third of critical trials, demonstrating the power of group pressure on individual judgment even on an unambiguous perceptual task. 1 Method
Study DesignRandomized Controlled Trial 1 Participants Connections
Associated With
Asch's conformity experiments are the founding demonstration of majority-influenced conformity.
Conducted By
Source Wikipedia: Solomon Asch
In Branch
Open Questions
Source SimplyPsychology: Asch Conformity
In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Asch conformity experiments
Wikimedia Foundationstudy description
1951, conducted at Swarthmore College
Participants
Groups of eight male college students participated in a simple "perceptual" task.
lead section, study-design
In psychology, the Asch conformity experiments were a series of studies testing the Asch paradigm, directed by Solomon Asch, studying if and how individuals yielded to or defied a majority group and the effect of such influences on beliefs and opinions.
Wikipedia: Solomon Asch
Wikimedia FoundationConducted By: Solomon Asch, leadQuote, Conducted By: Solomon Asch, lead
He is most well known for his conformity experiments
Open Questions (1 open question)
Does the Asch conformity effect reflect a durable feature of human group behavior, or was it substantially a product of the cultural moment (1950s America) in which it was measured?
Perrin and Spencer's 1980 British replication found conformity had nearly vanished (one join in 396 trials), arguing the Asch effect was a child of its time. Bond and Smith's 1996 meta-analysis further found conformity rates differ across cultures and genders, with collectivist cultures showing higher rates than individualist ones.
What would resolve this Systematic cross-cultural and cross-era replication with standardized methodology, isolating cultural-moment effects from a stable underlying conformity mechanism.
Social psychology / cross-cultural psychologySimplyPsychology: Asch Conformity
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