Asch conformity experiments

Sep 25

ChRIS CLÉiRIGheducation and academia, general observations 2 Comments

The Asch conformity experiments were a series of studies published in the 1950s that demonstrated the power of conformity in groups. These are also known as the Asch Paradigm.

Experiments led by Solomon Asch of Swarthmore College asked groups of students to participate in “vision tests”.  In reality, all but one of the participants were confederates of the experimenter, and the study was really about how the remaining student would react to the confederates’ behaviour.

In the basic Asch paradigm, the participants — the real subjects and the confederates — were all seated in a classroom. They were asked a variety of questions about the lines such as how long is A, compare the length of A to an everyday object, which line was longer than the other, which lines were the same length, etc. The group was told to announce their answers to each question out loud. The confederates always provided their answers before the study participant, and always gave the same answer as each other. They answered a few questions correctly but eventually began providing incorrect responses.

In a control group, with no pressure to conform to an erroneous view, only one subject out of 35 ever gave an incorrect answer. Solomon Asch hypothesized that the majority of people would not conform to something obviously wrong; however, when surrounded by individuals all voicing an incorrect answer, participants provided incorrect responses on a high proportion of the questions (32%). Seventy-five percent of the participants gave an incorrect answer to at least one question.

Variations of the basic paradigm tested how many cohorts were necessary to induce conformity, examining the influence of just one cohort and as many as fifteen. Results indicate that one cohort has virtually no influence and two cohorts have only a small influence. When three or more cohorts are present, the tendency to conform is relatively stable.

The unanimity of the confederates has also been varied. When the confederates are not unanimous in their judgment, even if only one confederate voices a different opinion, participants are much more likely to resist the urge to conform than when the confederates all agree. This finding illuminates the power that even a small dissenting minority can have. Interestingly, this finding holds whether or not the dissenting confederate gives the correct answer. As long as the dissenting confederate gives an answer that is different from the majority, participants are more likely to give the correct answer.

2 Comments (+add yours?)

  1. Peter R. R. White
    Sep 26, 2011 @ 07:57:31

    Presumably in the Asch experiment, the subjects don’t actually “believe” in the incorrect observation (it’s just a matter of what they are prepared to say in public), or do they? Does the literature have anything to say on this.
    Of course, it’s all well and good if we are dealing with something so ontologically straightforward as the length of a piece of string. But what about when agreement is around, for example, an evaluative assessment, or about whether language has a deep grammatical structure which is transformed into a surface structure via, say, the rule of “move alpha”, or, indeed, whether language operates with a multi-stratal content plane. Does the Asch experiment have anything to say at all about the role of confederates in such much more epistemically fraught “agreements”. Presumably no experimentation in a lab would be possible.

  2. eldon
    Sep 26, 2011 @ 20:06:23

    …the famous experiments by Professor Soloman Asch of the University
    of Pennsylvania, in which groups of seven to nine college students
    were shown two cards. On the first was a single vertical line, on the
    second three vertical lines of varying lengths. The students were
    told that this was an experiment in visual perception and that their
    task was to identify the line on card 2 which was of the same length
    as the line on card 1. As Asch describes the course of events:

    The experiment opens uneventfully. The subjects announce
    their answers in the order in which they have been seated in the
    room, and on the first round, every person chooses the same matching
    line. Then a second set of cards is exposed; again the group is
    unanimous. The
    members appear ready to endure politely another boring experiment.
    On the third trial there is an unexpected disturbance. One person
    near the end of the group disagrees with all the others in his
    selection of the matching line. He looks surprised, indeed
    incredulous, about the disagreement. On the following trial he
    disagrees again, while the others remain unanimous in their choice.
    The dissenter becomes more and more worried and hesitant as the
    disagreement continues in succeeding trials; he may pause before
    announcing his answer and speak in a low voice, or he may smile in an
    embarrassed way.

    What the dissenter does not know, Asch explains, is that the other
    students have been carefully briefed beforehand to give unanimously
    wrong answers at certain points. The dissenter is the only real
    subject of the experiment and finds himself in a most unusual and
    disquieting situation: he must either contrdict the matter-of-fact
    opinion of the group and appear to be strangely confused or he must
    doubt the evidence of his own senses. Unbelievable as it may seem,
    under these circumstances 36.8 percent of the subjects chose the
    second alternative and submitted to the misleading group opinion.

    Asch then introduced certain modifications into the experiment and
    was able to show that the size of the opposition – that is, the
    number of people who contradicted the subject’s answers – was of
    crucial importance. If only one member of the group contradicted him,
    the subject had little difficulty in maintaining his independence. As
    soon as the opposition increased to two persons, the subject’s
    submission jumped to 13.6 percent. With three opponents, the failure
    curve went up to 31.8 percent, whereupon it flattened out, and any
    further increase in the number of opponents raised the percentage
    only to the abovementioned 36.8 percent.

    Conversely, the presence of a supporting partner was a powerful help
    in opposing group pressure; under these conditions the incorrect
    responses of the subject dropped to one fourth of the error rate
    mentioned above.

    …[..]…When subjects were let in on the scheme, they reported that
    during the test they had experienced varying degrees of emotional
    discomfort, from moderate anxiety to something akin to
    depersonalization…[…]…

    Others resorted to very typical ways of rationalizing or explaining
    away the state of disinformation that undermined their world view:
    they either transferred the fear to an organic defect (“I began to
    doubt that my vision was right.”), or they decided that there was
    some exceptional complication (eg, an optical illusion), or they
    became so suspicious that they refused to believe the final
    explanation, maintaining that it was itself part of the experiment
    and therefore not to be trusted…[…]…

    As Asch has pointed out, perhaps the most frightening factor in the
    subjects’ blind surrender is the deep-seated longing to be in
    agreement with the group…[…]…The willingness to surrender one’s
    independence, to barter the evidence of one’s senses for the
    comfortable but reality distorting satisfaction of feeling in harmony
    with the group is, of course, the stuff on which demagogues and
    dictators thrive.”

    from:
    ‘How Real is Real? Confusion, disinformation, communication’.
    Paul Watzlawick (pp. 86-87)
    1976. Vintage. New York

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