Solomon Asch Conformity Experiment

In 1951, Solomon Asch, a Polish psychologist working in the United States, tested conformity by asking participants to judge the lengths of lines. Asch’s study examined the responses of 123 male American undergraduates to the test. The naïve participant was tested individually among a group of between six to eight confederates, or actors; however, the participant was unaware that the others were not genuine partakers.

Asch showed each group of participants two white cards at the same time; on one of the cards was the “standard line” and on the other were three “comparison lines”. He explained to them that one of these three lines was the same length as the standard line, and the other two were clearly different. The participants were the asked to state, aloud, which of the three lines matched the standard. Each confederate was instructed to give the same answer as each other, and for the first few trials, they all gave the correct answers, but as the experiment progressed, the actors started giving the wrong answers. Each participant took part in 18 trails, 12 of which were “critical trials”, where the confederates answered incorrectly. …show more content…
Overall, 25 per cent of the participants did not conform during any of the trials, meaning that 75 per cent conformed at least once. The term “Asch effect” was coined to describe the extent to which partakers conformed even when the situation was unambiguous. When interviewed after their trials, the participants mostly said that they conformed to avoid rejection