Solomon E. Asch The Stanford Prison Experiment

People conform everyday to the smallest things such as getting a water instead of a pop and following cake recipes. Solomon E. Asch, who is a social psychologist at Rutgers University, ran an experiment called Opinions and Social Pressure. Philip G. Zimbardo who is a professor of psychology at Stanford University, ran a study titled The Stanford Prison Experiment. Both of these experiments prove that by human nature, people are scared to go against the norm because they fear the feeling of being judged, different, and the mere idea of being alone.
In Solomon E. Asch Opinions and Social Pressure, subjects would either conform to the group's wrong decision or defiantly stand out. The subjects who did stand out however, had such a hard time doing …show more content…
Zimbardo’s study, The Stanford Prison Experiment, the only information the subjects were given was whether they were a guard or a prisoner for the study. Other than that piece of information, the subjects were left with nothing else than to keep the prisoners in line. Throughout the six days of the experiment Zimbardo observed that the prisoners acted out as a group but never on their own. The guards were also “deindividualized” by having to wear the same khaki uniforms and silver reflector sunglasses that made it easier for them to act with authority (Zimbardo 109). At first, the guards did not perform much authority because they did not think the prisoners would take them seriously. It was only until one guard decided to step up on his authority and start treating the prisoners cruel, for the other guards to do the same. Neither the prisoners or guards knew how to perform their roles exactly, but they still felt purposeful and conformed to their assigned roles. This lack of instruction caused chaos which lead to Zimbardo cutting this experiment short by only eight …show more content…
In Opinions and Social Pressure, subjects did not want to be “that person” that answers differently than the group. One subject was confident enough to go against the people that answered before him in one early round. However, after getting glares from the others the next round, he answered the same as the group to “avoid discomfort” (Asch Conformity Experiment). The guards in Zimbardo’s experiment faced a different kind of judgement. The guards worried that the prisoners would not take them seriously in their designated role. The mock guards felt like the stimulation would not be effective if they were not taken seriously. So, they felt the need to take their guard roles to the extreme by forcing the prisoners to pick thorns out of their blankets for hours and move cartons back and forth between closets (Zimbardo 111). However, if one goes back to the reasoning to why the guards acted so cruel, one can conclude that the guards acted out of fear of being judged as weak by the prisoners. The guards felt judged by their inferiors in Zimbardo’s experiment and the subjects felt judged by their peers in Asch’s experiment. The effect of this feeling caused the subjects to conform and act the same as a group attempting not to be the