Asch's conformity experiment

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 on the subject are probably those conducted during Solomon Asch's investigations.

This social psychologist studied the phenomenon of conformity, which is the tendency of the individual to modify her response to an object, bringing her 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?

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Pre-Asch Background

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

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 colleagues, given that the stimulus is ambiguous. Thus, in the face of uncertainty, the individual tends to use majority opinion. 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 the theory of Leon festinger. 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 is a matter of social judgments.

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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, he designs his own research along these lines.

First experiment

In the original experiment, Asch forms a group made up of a student and several collaborators of the researcher posing 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 aloud which of them is the tallest. The collaborators are prepared to answer correctly in the first trials, but to As the situation progresses, they begin to make mistakes and indicate a bar that is clearly not the most high.

The subject who does not know what is happening begins by responding correctly, just as he thinks, but as As the others insist on indicating the wrong bar, their responses begin to be the same as those of the the rest. 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 which was the correct answer, they conformed to the expectations of others for fear of being ridiculed in some way. way. Some of them even they affirmed think the answers were really correct.

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Next experiments

Not happy with this result, Asch carried out similar experiments with minor modifications to see how it was possible to break the conformity of the answers. Under the same paradigm, he introduced a series of variations that showed very interesting results.

In one of the conditions, he brought an "ally" into the group. Apart from the subject who does not know anything, 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 drops dramatically. In some way, the presence of another minority opinion validates one's own.

However, when this ally withdraws in the middle of the experiment, the subject suffers the effects of conformity again. Although during the first half of the experiment he managed to resist social pressure, when it loses its source of validation, it takes the majority opinion again as a guide.

In addition, he observed that the greater the number of people that make up the group, the more powerful the conformity. In small groups, minority opinion is not under as much pressure to change as when three or four more people are added. Other factors such as writing the answer instead of saying it out loud and exposing oneself to criticism or ridicule, explicit or not, promote resistance to conformity.

Why does compliance occur?

The first explanations considered that social influence was produced through an imitation of the behavior of others, which in turn was based on processes of suggestion and contagion that occur in contexts of group. It is considered that this type of context facilitate the contagion and dissemination of ideas, and imitation allows the individual to become social.

However, from Asch's experiments, conformity is 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 information correct in ambiguous situations and know what are the rules to follow to maintain a positive relationship with others.

When we speak of the subject looking at 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 at the opinion of the majority to know what behavior he should follow to get the approval of the others, we speak of normative dependence.

In this way, while in Sheriff's experiments the dependence informative because the stimuli are ambiguous, in Asch's experiments the influence is more of the normative. Although the subject knows the correct information with certainty, he obtains information from the rest of the group about which answer is approved by the group and acts in a coherent way with this.