In the early 1950s, Solomon Asch, a psychology researcher at Columbia University, conducted a series of experiments that sought to understand how and why individuals might yield to or defy a majority group based on their individually held beliefs or opinions. Asch’s research studied the conformity effects of task importance, age, gender, and culture.

In his first series of experiments, Asch selected eight male college students to participate in a simple “perceptual” task. In reality, all but one of the participants were actors, and it was the lone subject who was actually the focus of the study. The actors knew the true aim of the experiment while the lone subject did not. The group of eight students would view a card with three lines on it, A, B, and C and were then asked one at a time to announce which of the three lines they believed to be the longest. The actors were given instructions before the experiment regarding how to respond, sometimes responding correctly while at other times responding incorrectly. Their incorrect responses were coordinated so that all seven actors would incorrectly respond in the same way.

The results were astounding. In 37 percent of the trials, the subject would incorrectly agree with the group even though they knew that what they were saying was incorrect. Only 5 percent of participants were always swayed by the crowd, while 25 percent of the sample were consistently defiant of the majority opinion. The rest of the subjects conformed to the majority opinion’s incorrect answer some of the time.

After the experiment, Asch interviewed the subjects to better understand their motivations for yielding or defying the group. Interestingly, one subject who consistently defied the group reported, “I do not deny that at times I had the feeling to go with it, I’ll go along with the rest, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it,” while one subject who consistently conformed said, “I suspected about the middle line – but tried to push it out of my mind.” As a group, those 5 percent of participants who always yielded all reported eventually not even noticing that they were giving an incorrect answer when they agreed with the group, a phenomenon Asch termed “distortion of judgment.” After a number of trials, these participants eventually concluded that they must be incorrectly interpreting the stimuli and that the majority must be right, leading them to answer incorrectly with the majority.

In a subsequent experiment, Asch tested the importance of uniformity of opinion in answer selection. Instead of having the group of actors all select the same incorrect answer, the actors equally selected the two possible incorrect answers. Asch theorized that it was the uniformity of opinion that was the true motivator of those participants who yielded. Surprisingly, with the disintegration of the uniformity of the group opinion, the subjects of the study selected the correct line 95 percent of the time even in instances when the rest of the group intentionally selected the two wrong answers with equal frequency.

Asch explained the results of the second experiment as having to do with the uniformity of group identity. In the first experiment, the lone participant had to stand against and defy a uniformed group of seven peers. Asch believed that not only was there significant unconscious social pressure to join the majority opinion but there may also be an unconscious evolutionary mechanism at work where humans naturally yield to the evaluations of larger social groups over their own individual assessments along the lines of “two minds are better than one.”

Find an error? Take a screenshot, email it to us at error@mytestingsolution.com, and we’ll send you $3!