The Asch Conformity Experiment: When Social Pressure Can Us
How many times have we heard it said that someone has no personality because they end up doing exactly the same as their group of friends. Psychology, a staunch enemy of simple and lazy explanations, examined during the last century what is the influence of the group on the individual.
The most popular and influential studies in this regard are probably those carried out during Solomon Asch’s research
This social psychologist studied the phenomenon of conformity, which is the tendency of the individual to modify his response to an object by bringing it closer to that expressed by a majority of individuals within a group, through an experimental situation. Do you think you could have resisted group pressure in that same situation?
Asch is not the first to investigate social conformity within a group There were others like Sheriff who twenty years earlier studied it using ambiguous stimuli. She formed groups of three people in a dark room with a single point of light projected on a wall. This point appears to move due to body movements, but having no reference points creates the illusion that the point moves on its own. These three participants must give an estimate of how much the point moves.
Two of the participants are placed because they give similar estimates alone, while the third gives different estimates. The result is that the latter brings his estimates closer to those of his other two classmates, given that the stimulus is ambiguous. Thus, in the face of uncertainty, the individual tends to use the opinion of the majority In this sense, Asch takes this study as a starting point and goes further by using an unambiguous stimulus.
Another precursor to Asch’s experiments is Leon Festinger’s theory. According to Festinger, judgments must have a basis on which their validity rests. When it comes to judgments about physical reality, to give a valid answer it is enough to examine the object. This means that the individual does not need to know the response of others to know if his own response is valid, unless it involves social judgments.
Asch’s experiments
Asch, who thinks that the phenomenon of conformity also occurs in the face of objective physical stimuli, and that Sheriff does not address these stimuli because his experiments are ambiguous designs his own research along these lines.
First experiment
In the original experiment, Asch forms a group composed of a student and several collaborators of the researcher who pose as subjects. The task consists of the researcher presenting a sheet on which three horizontal bars of different sizes are printed, and each subject must say out loud which of them is the tallest. The collaborators are prepared to answer correctly in the first trials, but as the situation progresses they begin to make mistakes and indicate a bar that is clearly not the highest.
The subject who does not know what is happening begins by answering correctly, just as he thinks, but as the others insist on indicating the wrong bar, his answers begin to be the same as those of the others. Thus, it is concluded that the phenomenon of conformity is observable in situations in which the stimulus on which a judgment must be made is objective.
When interviewing the subjects who had gone through the experiment, they explained that despite knowing with certainty what the correct answer was, they conformed to the expectations of others for fear of being ridiculed in some way. Some of them even they affirmed think the answers were really correct
Not satisfied with this result, Asch carried out similar experiments with minor modifications to see how it was possible to break the conformity in the responses. Under the same paradigm, he introduced a series of variations that showed very interesting results.
In one of the conditions, he introduced an “ally” into the group. Apart from the subject who knows nothing, another subject or a researcher is introduced who must give the correct answers independently of the others. It is observed that when the subject sees that he is not the only one who thinks differently from the rest, compliance decreases dramatically In some way, the presence of another minority opinion validates your own.
However, when this ally withdraws halfway through the experiment, the subject again suffers the effects of conformity. Although during the first half of the experiment he managed to resist social pressure, When it loses its source of validation, it returns to the majority opinion as a guide.
Furthermore, he observed that the greater the number of people in the group, the more powerful the conformity. In small groups, the minority opinion does not suffer as much pressure to change as when three or four more people are added. Other factors such as writing down the answer instead of saying it out loud and exposing oneself to criticism or ridicule, explicit or not, favor resistance to conformity.
Why does conformity occur?
The first explanations considered that social influence occurred through imitation of the behavior of others, which in turn was based on processes of suggestion and contagion that occur in group contexts. It is considered that this type of contexts facilitate the contagion and dissemination of ideas and imitation allows the individual to become social.
However, from Asch’s experiments, conformity comes to be explained by the asymmetry between the target and the source of influence. The subject or target recognizes the power of a source (a majority, for example) and depends on it to obtain the correct information in ambiguous situations and to know what rules he must follow to maintain a positive relationship with others.
When we talk about the subject focusing on the opinion of the majority to maintain a response adapted to reality because the situation is ambiguous, we talk about information dependence. On the other hand, when we say that the subject looks at the opinion of the majority to know what behavior he should follow to get the approval of others we talk about normative dependence.
In this way, while in Sheriff’s experiments information dependence has a greater presence because the stimuli are ambiguous, in Asch’s experiments the influence is more normative. Although the subject knows the correct information with certainty, he obtains information from the rest of the group about which answer is the one approved by the group and acts consistently with this.
