Asch’s conformity experiment: when social pressure gets the best of us.

A famous series of experiments in Social Psychology that tells us about peer pressure.

How many times have we heard that someone has no personality because he ends up doing exactly the same as his group of friends. Psychology, a staunch enemy of simple and lazy explanations, has examined during the last century what is the influence of the group on the individual.

The most popular and influential studies in this respect are probably those carried out during the research of Solomon Asch.

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 the group. expressed by a majority of individuals within a group, by means of an experimental situation.Do you think you could have resisted group pressure in that same situation?

Background prior to Asch

Asch is not the first to investigate social conformity within a group. There were others such as Sheriff who twenty years earlier studied it using ambiguous stimuli. He formed groups of three people in a dark room with a single point of light projected on a wall. This dot appears to move due to body movements, but having no reference points creates the illusion that the dot is moving on its own. These three participants must give an estimate of how much the dot moves.

Two of the participants are placed because they give similar estimates alone, while the third estimates differently. The result is that the latter brings his estimates closer to those of his other two peers, 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 sufficient to examine the object. This means that the individual does not need to know the answer of others to know if his own answer is valid, unless it is a question of 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 the one in his experiments is ambiguous.Asch, who thinks that the phenomenon of conformity also occurs to objective physical stimuli, and that Sheriff does not deal with these stimuli because the one in his experiments is 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. who pose as subjects. The task consists of the researcher presenting a sheet of paper on which three horizontal bars of different sizes are printed, and each subject must say aloud which of them is the tallest. The collaborators are prepared to answer correctly on the first few trials, but as the situation progresses they begin to make mistakes and indicate a bar that is clearly not the tallest.

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 where the stimulus to be judged is objective.

When interviewing the subjects who had gone through the experiment, they explained that despite knowing for sure what the correct answer was, they conformed to the expectations of others for fear of being ridiculed in some way. Some of them even stated they thought the answers were actually correct..

Subsequent experiments

Not content with this result, Asch carried out similar experiments with minor modifications to see how it was possible to break the conformity in the answers. Under the same paradigm, he introduced a number of variations that showed some 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, conformity decreases drastically.. Somehow, the presence of another minority opinion validates one's own.

However, when this ally is removed in the middle of the experiment, the subject again suffers the effects of conformity. Even if during the first half of the experiment he has managed to resist the social pressure, when he loses his source of validation, he returns to the experiment, when he loses his source of validation he reverts to taking the majority opinion as his guide. as a guide.

Furthermore, he observed that the larger 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 rather than saying it out loud and exposure to criticism or ridicule, explicit or not, favor resistance to conformity.

Why does conformity occur?

Early 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 contagion and the diffusion of ideas.and imitation allows the individual to become social.

However, from Asch's experiments onwards, 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 which rules to follow in order to maintain a positive relationship with others.

When we say that the subject looks to the opinion of the majority to maintain a response adapted to reality because the situation is ambiguous, we speak of informational dependence. On the other hand, when we say that the subject looks to the opinion of the majority to know what behavior to follow in order to obtain the approval of others, we speak of informational dependence. in order to obtain the approval of otherswe speak of normative dependence.

Thus, while in Sheriff's experiments informative dependence has a greater presence because the stimuli are ambiguous, in Asch's experiments the influence is more of a normative type. Although the subject knows with certainty the correct information, he obtains from the rest of the group information about which response is approved by the group and acts in a manner consistent with this.