asch conformity essay

Solomon Asch Conformity Line Experiment Study

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

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Solomon Asch experimented with investigating the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform .

He believed the main problem with Sherif’s (1935) conformity experiment was that there was no correct answer to the ambiguous autokinetic experiment.  How could we be sure that a person conformed when there was no correct answer?

Asch (1951) devised what is now regarded as a classic experiment in social psychology, whereby there was an obvious answer to a line judgment task.

If the participant gave an incorrect answer, it would be clear that this was due to group pressure.

Experimental Procedure

Asch used a lab experiment to study conformity, whereby 50 male students from Swarthmore College in the USA participated in a ‘vision test.’

Using a line judgment task, Asch put a naive participant in a room with seven confederates/stooges. The confederates had agreed in advance what their responses would be when presented with the line task.

The real participant did not know this and was led to believe that the other seven confederates/stooges were also real participants like themselves.

Each person in the room had to state aloud which comparison line (A, B or C) was most like the target line. The answer was always obvious.  The real participant sat at the end of the row and gave his or her answer last.

At the start, all participants (including the confederates) gave the correct answers. However, after a few rounds, the confederates started to provide unanimously incorrect answers.

There were 18 trials in total, and the confederates gave the wrong answer on 12 trials (called the critical trials).  Asch was interested to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view.

Asch’s experiment also had a control condition where there were no confederates, only a “real participant.”

Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the majority view. On average, about one third (32%) of the participants who were placed in this situation went along and conformed with the clearly incorrect majority on the critical trials.

Over the 12 critical trials, about 75% of participants conformed at least once, and 25% of participants never conformed.

In the control group , with no pressure to conform to confederates, less than 1% of participants gave the wrong answer.

Why did the participants conform so readily?  When they were interviewed after the experiment, most of them said that they did not really believe their conforming answers, but had gone along with the group for fear of being ridiculed or thought “peculiar.

A few of them said that they did believe the group’s answers were correct.

Apparently, people conform for two main reasons: because they want to fit in with the group ( normative influence ) and because they believe the group is better informed than they are ( informational influence ).

Critical Evaluation

One limitation of the study is that is used a biased sample. All the participants were male students who all belonged to the same age group. This means that the study lacks population validity and that the results cannot be generalized to females or older groups of people.

Another problem is that the experiment used an artificial task to measure conformity – judging line lengths. How often are we faced with making a judgment like the one Asch used, where the answer is plain to see?

This means that the study has low ecological validity and the results cannot be generalized to other real-life situations of conformity. Asch replied that he wanted to investigate a situation where the participants could be in no doubt what the correct answer was. In so doing he could explore the true limits of social influence.

Some critics thought the high levels of conformity found by Asch were a reflection of American, 1950’s culture and told us more about the historical and cultural climate of the USA in the 1950s than then they did about the phenomena of conformity.

In the 1950s America was very conservative, involved in an anti-communist witch-hunt (which became known as McCarthyism) against anyone who was thought to hold sympathetic left-wing views.

Perrin and Spencer

Conformity to American values was expected. Support for this comes from studies in the 1970s and 1980s that show lower conformity rates (e.g., Perrin & Spencer, 1980).

Perrin and Spencer (1980) suggested that the Asch effect was a “child of its time.” They carried out an exact replication of the original Asch experiment using engineering, mathematics, and chemistry students as subjects. They found that in only one out of 396 trials did an observer join the erroneous majority.

Perrin and Spencer argue that a cultural change has taken place in the value placed on conformity and obedience and in the position of students.

In America in the 1950s, students were unobtrusive members of society, whereas now, they occupy a free questioning role.

However, one problem in comparing this study with Asch is that very different types of participants are used. Perrin and Spencer used science and engineering students who might be expected to be more independent by training when it came to making perceptual judgments.

Finally, there are ethical issues : participants were not protected from psychological stress which may occur if they disagreed with the majority.

Evidence that participants in Asch-type situations are highly emotional was obtained by Back et al. (1963) who found that participants in the Asch situation had greatly increased levels of autonomic arousal.

This finding also suggests that they were in a conflict situation, finding it hard to decide whether to report what they saw or to conform to the opinion of others.

Asch also deceived the student volunteers claiming they were taking part in a “vision” test; the real purpose was to see how the “naive” participant would react to the behavior of the confederates. However, deception was necessary to produce valid results.

The clip below is not from the original experiment in 1951, but an acted version for television from the 1970s.

Factors Affecting Conformity

In further trials, Asch (1952, 1956) changed the procedure (i.e., independent variables) to investigate which situational factors influenced the level of conformity (dependent variable).

His results and conclusions are given below:

Asch (1956) found that group size influenced whether subjects conformed. The bigger the majority group (no of confederates), the more people conformed, but only up to a certain point.

With one other person (i.e., confederate) in the group conformity was 3%, with two others it increased to 13%, and with three or more it was 32% (or 1/3).

Optimum conformity effects (32%) were found with a majority of 3. Increasing the size of the majority beyond three did not increase the levels of conformity found. Brown and Byrne (1997) suggest that people might suspect collusion if the majority rises beyond three or four.

According to Hogg & Vaughan (1995), the most robust finding is that conformity reaches its full extent with 3-5 person majority, with additional members having little effect.

Lack of Group Unanimity / Presence of an Ally

The study also found that when any one individual differed from the majority, the power of conformity significantly decreased.

This showed that even a small dissent can reduce the power of a larger group, providing an important insight into how individuals can resist social pressure.

As conformity drops off with five members or more, it may be that it’s the unanimity of the group (the confederates all agree with each other) which is more important than the size of the group.

In another variation of the original experiment, Asch broke up the unanimity (total agreement) of the group by introducing a dissenting confederate.

Asch (1956) found that even the presence of just one confederate that goes against the majority choice can reduce conformity by as much as 80%.

For example, in the original experiment, 32% of participants conformed on the critical trials, whereas when one confederate gave the correct answer on all the critical trials conformity dropped to 5%.

This was supported in a study by Allen and Levine (1968). In their version of the experiment, they introduced a dissenting (disagreeing) confederate wearing thick-rimmed glasses – thus suggesting he was slightly visually impaired.

Even with this seemingly incompetent dissenter, conformity dropped from 97% to 64%. Clearly, the presence of an ally decreases conformity.

The absence of group unanimity lowers overall conformity as participants feel less need for social approval of the group (re: normative conformity).

Difficulty of Task

When the (comparison) lines (e.g., A, B, C) were made more similar in length it was harder to judge the correct answer and conformity increased.

When we are uncertain, it seems we look to others for confirmation. The more difficult the task, the greater the conformity.

Answer in Private

When participants were allowed to answer in private (so the rest of the group does not know their response), conformity decreased.

This is because there are fewer group pressures and normative influence is not as powerful, as there is no fear of rejection from the group.

Frequently Asked Questions

How has the asch conformity line experiment influenced our understanding of conformity.

The Asch conformity line experiment has shown that people are susceptible to conforming to group norms even when those norms are clearly incorrect. This experiment has significantly impacted our understanding of social influence and conformity, highlighting the powerful influence of group pressure on individual behavior.

It has helped researchers to understand the importance of social norms and group dynamics in shaping our beliefs and behaviors and has had a significant impact on the study of social psychology.

What are some real-world examples of conformity?

Examples of conformity in everyday life include following fashion trends, conforming to workplace norms, and adopting the beliefs and values of a particular social group. Other examples include conforming to peer pressure, following cultural traditions and customs, and conforming to societal expectations regarding gender roles and behavior.

Conformity can have both positive and negative effects on individuals and society, depending on the behavior’s context and consequences.

What are some of the negative effects of conformity?

Conformity can have negative effects on individuals and society. It can limit creativity and independent thinking, promote harmful social norms and practices, and prevent personal growth and self-expression.

Conforming to a group can also lead to “groupthink,” where the group prioritizes conformity over critical thinking and decision-making, which can result in poor choices.

Moreover, conformity can spread false information and harmful behavior within a group, as individuals may be afraid to challenge the group’s beliefs or actions.

How does conformity differ from obedience?

Conformity involves adjusting one’s behavior or beliefs to align with the norms of a group, even if those beliefs or behaviors are not consistent with one’s personal views. Obedience , on the other hand, involves following the orders or commands of an authority figure, often without question or critical thinking.

While conformity and obedience involve social influence, obedience is usually a response to an explicit request or demand from an authority figure, whereas conformity is a response to implicit social pressure from a group.

What is the Asch effect?

The Asch Effect is a term coined from the Asch Conformity Experiments conducted by Solomon Asch. It refers to the influence of a group majority on an individual’s judgment or behavior, such that the individual may conform to perceived group norms even when those norms are obviously incorrect or counter to the individual’s initial judgment.

This effect underscores the power of social pressure and the strong human tendency towards conformity in group settings.

What is Solomon Asch’s contribution to psychology?

Solomon Asch significantly contributed to psychology through his studies on social pressure and conformity.

His famous conformity experiments in the 1950s demonstrated how individuals often conform to the majority view, even when clearly incorrect.

His work has been fundamental to understanding social influence and group dynamics’ power in shaping individual behaviors and perceptions.

Allen, V. L., & Levine, J. M. (1968). Social support, dissent and conformity. Sociometry , 138-149.

Asch, S. E. (1951). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgment. In H. Guetzkow (ed.) Groups, leadership and men . Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Press.

Asch, S. E. (1952). Group forces in the modification and distortion of judgments.

Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological monographs: General and applied, 70(9) , 1-70.

Back, K. W., Bogdonoff, M. D., Shaw, D. M., & Klein, R. F. (1963). An interpretation of experimental conformity through physiological measures. Behavioral Science, 8(1) , 34.

Bond, R., & Smith, P. B. (1996). Culture and conformity : A meta-analysis of studies using Asch’s (1952b, 1956) line judgment task.  Psychological bulletin ,  119 (1), 111.

Longman, W., Vaughan, G., & Hogg, M. (1995). Introduction to social psychology .

Perrin, S., & Spencer, C. (1980). The Asch effect: a child of its time? Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 32, 405-406.

Sherif, M., & Sherif, C. W. (1953). Groups in harmony and tension . New York: Harper & Row.

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The Asch Conformity Experiments

What These Experiments Say About Group Behavior

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Emily is a board-certified science editor who has worked with top digital publishing brands like Voices for Biodiversity, Study.com, GoodTherapy, Vox, and Verywell.

What Is Conformity?

Factors that influence conformity.

The Asch conformity experiments were a series of psychological experiments conducted by Solomon Asch in the 1950s. The experiments revealed the degree to which a person's own opinions are influenced by those of a group . Asch found that people were willing to ignore reality and give an incorrect answer in order to conform to the rest of the group.

At a Glance

The Asch conformity experiments are among the most famous in psychology's history and have inspired a wealth of additional research on conformity and group behavior. This research has provided important insight into how, why, and when people conform and the effects of social pressure on behavior.

Do you think of yourself as a conformist or a non-conformist? Most people believe that they are non-conformist enough to stand up to a group when they know they are right, but conformist enough to blend in with the rest of their peers.

Research suggests that people are often much more prone to conform than they believe they might be.

Imagine yourself in this situation: You've signed up to participate in a psychology experiment in which you are asked to complete a vision test.

Seated in a room with the other participants, you are shown a line segment and then asked to choose the matching line from a group of three segments of different lengths.

The experimenter asks each participant individually to select the matching line segment. On some occasions, everyone in the group chooses the correct line, but occasionally, the other participants unanimously declare that a different line is actually the correct match.

So what do you do when the experimenter asks you which line is the right match? Do you go with your initial response, or do you choose to conform to the rest of the group?

Conformity in Psychology

In psychological terms, conformity refers to an individual's tendency to follow the unspoken rules or behaviors of the social group to which they belong. Researchers have long been been curious about the degree to which people follow or rebel against social norms.

Asch was interested in looking at how pressure from a group could lead people to conform, even when they knew that the rest of the group was wrong. The purpose of the Asch conformity experiment was to demonstrate the power of conformity in groups.

Methodology of Asch's Experiments

Asch's experiments involved having people who were in on the experiment pretend to be regular participants alongside those who were actual, unaware subjects of the study. Those that were in on the experiment would behave in certain ways to see if their actions had an influence on the actual experimental participants.

In each experiment, a naive student participant was placed in a room with several other confederates who were in on the experiment. The subjects were told that they were taking part in a "vision test." All told, a total of 50 students were part of Asch’s experimental condition.

The confederates were all told what their responses would be when the line task was presented. The naive participant, however, had no inkling that the other students were not real participants. After the line task was presented, each student verbally announced which line (either 1, 2, or 3) matched the target line.

Critical Trials

There were 18 different trials in the experimental condition , and the confederates gave incorrect responses in 12 of them, which Asch referred to as the "critical trials." The purpose of these critical trials was to see if the participants would change their answer in order to conform to how the others in the group responded.

During the first part of the procedure, the confederates answered the questions correctly. However, they eventually began providing incorrect answers based on how they had been instructed by the experimenters.

Control Condition

The study also included 37 participants in a control condition . In order to ensure that the average person could accurately gauge the length of the lines, the control group was asked to individually write down the correct match. According to these results, participants were very accurate in their line judgments, choosing the correct answer 99% of the time.

Results of the Asch Conformity Experiments

Nearly 75% of the participants in the conformity experiments went along with the rest of the group at least one time.

After combining the trials, the results indicated that participants conformed to the incorrect group answer approximately one-third of the time.

The experiments also looked at the effect that the number of people present in the group had on conformity. When just one confederate was present, there was virtually no impact on participants' answers. The presence of two confederates had only a tiny effect. The level of conformity seen with three or more confederates was far more significant.

Asch also found that having one of the confederates give the correct answer while the rest of the confederates gave the incorrect answer dramatically lowered conformity. In this situation, just 5% to 10% of the participants conformed to the rest of the group (depending on how often the ally answered correctly). Later studies have also supported this finding, suggesting that having social support is an important tool in combating conformity.

At the conclusion of the Asch experiments, participants were asked why they had gone along with the rest of the group. In most cases, the students stated that while they knew the rest of the group was wrong, they did not want to risk facing ridicule. A few of the participants suggested that they actually believed the other members of the group were correct in their answers.

These results suggest that conformity can be influenced both by a need to fit in and a belief that other people are smarter or better informed.

Given the level of conformity seen in Asch's experiments, conformity can be even stronger in real-life situations where stimuli are more ambiguous or more difficult to judge.

Asch went on to conduct further experiments in order to determine which factors influenced how and when people conform. He found that:

• Conformity tends to increase when more people are present . However, there is little change once the group size goes beyond four or five people.
• Conformity also increases when the task becomes more difficult . In the face of uncertainty, people turn to others for information about how to respond.
• Conformity increases when other members of the group are of a higher social status . When people view the others in the group as more powerful, influential, or knowledgeable than themselves, they are more likely to go along with the group.
• Conformity tends to decrease, however, when people are able to respond privately . Research has also shown that conformity decreases if people have support from at least one other individual in a group.

Criticisms of the Asch Conformity Experiments

One of the major criticisms of Asch's conformity experiments centers on the reasons why participants choose to conform. According to some critics, individuals may have actually been motivated to avoid conflict, rather than an actual desire to conform to the rest of the group.

Another criticism is that the results of the experiment in the lab may not generalize to real-world situations.

Many social psychology experts believe that while real-world situations may not be as clear-cut as they are in the lab, the actual social pressure to conform is probably much greater, which can dramatically increase conformist behaviors.

Asch SE. Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority . Psychological Monographs: General and Applied . 1956;70(9):1-70. doi:10.1037/h0093718

Morgan TJH, Laland KN, Harris PL. The development of adaptive conformity in young children: effects of uncertainty and consensus . Dev Sci. 2015;18(4):511-524. doi:10.1111/desc.12231

Asch SE. Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments . In: Guetzkow H, ed.  Groups, Leadership and Men; Research in Human Relations. Carnegie Press. 1951:177–190.

Britt MA. Psych Experiments: From Pavlov's Dogs to Rorschach's Inkblots . Adams Media. 

Myers DG. Exploring Psychology (9th ed.). Worth Publishers.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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6.5C: The Asch Experiment- The Power of Peer Pressure

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The Asch conformity experiments were a series of studies conducted in the 1950s that demonstrated the power of conformity in groups.

Learning Objectives

• Explain how the Asch experiment sought to measure conformity in groups
• The Asch conformity experiments consisted of a group “vision test”, where study participants were found to be more likely to conform to obviously wrong answers if first given by other “participants”, who were actually working for the experimenter.
• The experiment found that over a third of subjects conformed to giving a wrong answer.

In terms of gender, males show around half the effect of females (tested in same-sex groups). Conformity is also higher among members of an in-group.

• conformity : the ideology of adhering to one standard or social uniformity

Conducted by social psychologist Solomon Asch of Swarthmore College, the Asch conformity experiments were a series of studies published in the 1950s that demonstrated the power of conformity in groups. They are also known as the Asch paradigm. In the experiment, students were asked to participate in a group “vision test. ” In reality, all but one of the participants were working for Asch (i.e. confederates), and the study was really about how the remaining student would react to their behavior.

The original experiment was conducted with 123 male participants. Each participant was put into a group with five to seven confederates. The participants were shown a card with a line on it (the reference line), followed by another card with three lines on it labeled a, b, and c. The participants were then asked to say out loud which of the three lines matched in length the reference line, as well as other responses such as the length of the reference line to an everyday object, which lines were the same length, and so on.

Each line question was called a “trial. ” The “real” participant answered last or next to last. For the first two trials, the subject would feel at ease in the experiment, as he and the other “participants” gave the obvious, correct answer. On the third trial, all the confederates would start giving the same wrong answer. There were 18 trials in total and the confederates answered incorrectly for 12 of them. These 12 were known as the “critical trials. ”

The aim was to see whether the real participants would conform to the wrong answers of the confederates and change their answer to respond in the same way, despite it being the wrong answer.

Dr. Asch thought that the majority of people would not conform to something obviously wrong, but the results showed that only 24% of the participants did not conform on any trial. Seventy five percent conformed at least once, 5% conformed every time, and when surrounded by individuals all voicing an incorrect answer, participants provided incorrect responses on a high proportion of the questions (32%). Overall, there was a 37% conformity rate by subjects averaged across all critical trials. In a control group, with no pressure to conform to an erroneous answer, only one subject out of 35 ever gave an incorrect answer.

Study Variations

Variations of the basic paradigm tested how many cohorts were necessary to induce conformity, examining the influence of just one cohort and as many as fifteen. Results indicated that one cohort has virtually no influence and two cohorts have only a small influence. When three or more cohorts are present, the tendency to conform increases only modestly. The maximum effect occurs with four cohorts. Adding additional cohorts does not produce a stronger effect.

The unanimity of the confederates has also been varied. When the confederates are not unanimous in their judgment, even if only one confederate voices a different opinion, participants are much more likely to resist the urge to conform (only 5% to 10% conform) than when the confederates all agree. This result holds whether or not the dissenting confederate gives the correct answer. As long as the dissenting confederate gives an answer that is different from the majority, participants are more likely to give the correct answer.

This finding illuminates the power that even a small dissenting minority can have upon a larger group. This demonstrates the importance of privacy in answering important and life-changing questions, so that people do not feel pressured to conform. For example, anonymous surveys can allow people to fully express how they feel about a particular subject without fear of retribution or retaliation from others in the group or the larger society. Having a witness or ally (someone who agrees with the point of view) also makes it less likely that conformity will occur.

Interpretations

Asch suggested that this reflected poorly on factors such as education, which he thought must over-train conformity. Other researchers have argued that it is rational to use other people’s judgments as evidence. Others have suggested that the high conformity rate was due to social norms regarding politeness, which is consistent with subjects’ own claims that they did not actually believe the others’ judgments and were indeed merely conforming.

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Key Study: Conformity – Asch (1955)

Travis Dixon October 4, 2016 Uncategorized

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Background Information

Humans are social animals, formign groups and strong bonds naturally. As such, it’s not hard to see the many ways that belonging to a group is important. Conformity is one effect that can happen as a result of this need to belong. Conformity is when behaviour is modified in order to fit in with a larger group.

Methodology and Results

For the following experiments Asch used the same experimental paradigm using the line length cards (which has come to be known as the Asch Paradigm). It involves matching one line with one from a group of three.

Typical Experimental Condition

7 to 9 male college students get together in a room, but only one of them is a naïve subject – the rest are confederates. i.e. the subject thinks everyone is just there like him, but in actual fact they all know what is going on. They sit in a row at a large desk and face the experimenter who holds up cards like those in figure 1. The subject is near the end of the line, so by the time they have given their response they have heard the responses of most of the group. The first two “trials” the confederates give the right answer and it all appears a bit boring. On the third trial, however, they deliberately give the wrong answer. In total there are 18 trials, but only in 12 of these do the group deliberately give the wrong answer (when this happens it’s called a “critical trial”).

In Asch’s first experiment reported in his 1955 paper, there were 123 subjects from three different colleges. The results were as follows:

• When alone: almost 100% accurate (<1% error rate)
• When in the group, the subjects conformed 36.8% of the time

In the results above, there was a range of individual variability:

• About 25% of subjects never agreed with the group
• Some subjects always agreed with the group

The subjects were interviewed after each experiment so the researchers could find out more about why they went along with the group. However, these were not investigated extensively. In his report he makes some generalizations, saying confidence in one’s own opinion was one factor that would have influenced the rate of conformity. There were some who adopted the idea, “I am wrong, they are right” and so changed their answers accordingly. Other subjects changed their answers because they did want to spoil the researchers’ results.

Interestingly, all subjects who conformed underestimated the frequency with which they conformed to the group.

Asch wanted to explore two dynamics that he thought might influence conformity: group size and unanimity.

Experiment 2: Group Size

In this experiment this size of the “opposition” (i.e, number of confederates) ranged from 1 to 15. In this modification, when there was only one confederate the subjects did not change their answers but instead gave conflicting (and correct) responses. However, as the group grew the results changed:

• One confederate: almost 0% conformity
• Two confederates: 13.6% conformity
• Three confederates: 31.8% conformity

Interestingly, this positive correlation between group size and conformity rate only goes up until a group of four (i.e. three confederates, one subject). After more confederates are introduced the rate does not change and is around 30%. However, after 8 or more confederates the rate of conformity begins to drop.

Experiment 3: Unanimity

Unanimity is when all people are in agreement, so in this context it refers to the extent to which all confederates give the wrong answer. In this design, Asch introduced either another naïve subject or a confederate who was told to not give the wrong answer on the critical trials. The results showed that conformity rates dropped when this happened (the conformity rate was ¼ of that in the regular design). During post-experiment interviews it was revealed that subjects felt a sense of closeness and warmth with their “partner.”

Experiment 4: Dissent

Based on the results with a partner, Asch posed another interesting question: “Was the partner’s effect a consequence of his dissent, or was it related to his accuracy?” Dissent is going against what is commonly believed, so in this context it means breaking away from the group and giving different answers. To test the above question, Asch made more modifications. This time a confederate was told to be either a “compromising” or “extremist” dissenter.

• Compromising: going against the group but the difference in answers is close
• Extremist: going against the group and given a very different answer

Both conditions reduced conformity. Moreover, the extremist dissenter “produced a remarkable freeing of the subjects.” When there was an extreme dissenter conformity dropped to 9%.

Experiment 5: Gaining and Losing a Partner

At this point I think it’s important just to mention that all these modifications within the experiment were done on different subjects.

In this next design, Asch tested what would happen if a subject gains a fellow dissenter but then this partner decides to join the incorrect group. A confederate was told to answer correctly on the first 6 critical trials. During these trials, the subjects also had no problems going against the rest of the group and giving the correct answer. However, after 6 trials the dissenting confederate changed and began giving incorrect answers along with the rest of the group – and as a result so did the subject. Having lost the partner to the majority the subject’s conformity rate rose to a similar level as those in Experiment #1 (i.e. about 1/3).

Experiment 5b: Gaining and Losing a Partner from the Group

As a result of the questioning from the previous experiments (27 subjects in total), Asch decided to see what would happen if the partner left the room completely. It was announced at a certain point after giving the correct answer on a few trials the partner said he had an appointment with the dean and had to leave. While there were still errors made (i.e. the participant conformed), the rates were lower than when the partner joined the majority.

Experiment 6: Gradual Dissolution

Asch had all confederates begin by giving correct answers and gradually changing to incorrect ones. By the sixth trial all the confederates were now giving wrong answers. The results showed that as long as there was just one other person against the group the subject could stay independent. However, as soon as he lost all partners the conformity rates increased.

7: Degree of Inaccuracy

Asch hypothesized that if the group’s answers were wrong enough the conformity would disappear. However, even when the different in line lengths were 7 inches (18 cm) there were still participants who conformed.

The above studies provide some interesting insight into factors that influence conformity. Asch suggested the following factors might influence conformity and since this paper was published in 1955 these have been studied:

• Social and cultural factors (Bond and Smith)
• Personality and characte

Travis Dixon is an IB Psychology teacher, author, workshop leader, examiner and IA moderator.

The Asch Conformity Experiments

What Solomon Asch Demonstrated About Social Pressure

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The Asch Conformity Experiments, conducted by psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s, demonstrated the power of conformity in groups and showed that even simple objective facts cannot withstand the distorting pressure of group influence.

The Experiment

In the experiments, groups of male university students were asked to participate in a perception test. In reality, all but one of the participants were "confederates" (collaborators with the experimenter who only pretended to be participants). The study was about how the remaining student would react to the behavior of the other "participants."

The participants of the experiment (the subject as well as the confederates) were seated in a classroom and were presented with a card with a simple vertical black line drawn on it. Then, they were given a second card with three lines of varying length labeled "A," "B," and "C." One line on the second card was the same length as that on the first, and the other two lines were obviously longer and shorter.

Participants were asked to state out loud in front of each other which line, A, B, or C, matched the length of the line on the first card. In each experimental case, the confederates answered first, and the real participant was seated so that he would answer last. In some cases, the confederates answered correctly, while in others, the answered incorrectly.

Asch's goal was to see if the real participant would be pressured to answer incorrectly in the instances when the Confederates did so, or whether their belief in their own perception and correctness would outweigh the social pressure provided by the responses of the other group members.

Asch found that one-third of real participants gave the same wrong answers as the Confederates at least half the time. Forty percent gave some wrong answers, and only one-fourth gave correct answers in defiance of the pressure to conform to the wrong answers provided by the group.

In interviews he conducted following the trials, Asch found that those that answered incorrectly, in conformance with the group, believed that the answers given by the Confederates were correct, some thought that they were suffering a lapse in perception for originally thinking an answer that differed from the group, while others admitted that they knew that they had the correct answer, but conformed to the incorrect answer because they didn't want to break from the majority.

The Asch experiments have been repeated many times over the years with students and non-students, old and young, and in groups of different sizes and different settings. The results are consistently the same with one-third to one-half of the participants making a judgment contrary to fact, yet in conformity with the group, demonstrating the strong power of social influences.

Connection to Sociology

The results of Asch's experiment resonate with what we know to be true about the nature of social forces and norms in our lives. The behavior and expectations of others shape how we think and act on a daily basis because what we observe among others teaches us what is normal , and expected of us. The results of the study also raise interesting questions and concerns about how knowledge is constructed and disseminated, and how we can address social problems that stem from conformity, among others.

Updated  by Nicki Lisa Cole, Ph.D.

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Conformity - Asch (1951)

Last updated 6 Sept 2022

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Asch (1951) conducted one of the most famous laboratory experiments examining conformity. He wanted to examine the extent to which social pressure from a majority, could affect a person to conform.

Asch’s sample consisted of 50 male students from Swarthmore College in America, who believed they were taking part in a vision test. Asch used a line judgement task, where he placed on real naïve participants in a room with seven confederates (actors), who had agreed their answers in advance. The real participant was deceived and was led to believe that the other seven people were also real participants. The real participant always sat second to last.

In turn, each person had to say out loud which line (A, B or C) was most like the target line in length.

Unlike Jenness’ experiment , the correct answer was always obvious. Each participant completed 18 trials and the confederates gave the same incorrect answer on 12 trials, called critical trials. Asch wanted to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view, even when the answer was clearly incorrect.

Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the majority view. On average, the real participants conformed to the incorrect answers on 32% of the critical trials. 74% of the participants conformed on at least one critical trial and 26% of the participants never conformed. Asch also used a control group, in which one real participant completed the same experiment without any confederates. He found that less than 1% of the participants gave an incorrect answer.

Asch interviewed his participants after the experiment to find out why they conformed. Most of the participants said that they knew their answers were incorrect, but they went along with the group in order to fit in, or because they thought they would be ridiculed. This confirms that participants conformed due to normative social influence and the desire to fit in.

Evaluation of Asch

Asch used a biased sample of 50 male students from Swarthmore College in America. Therefore, we cannot generalise the results to other populations, for example female students, and we are unable to conclude if female students would have conformed in a similar way to male students. As a result Asch’s sample lacks population validity and further research is required to determine whether males and females conform differently

Furthermore, it could be argued that Asch’s experiment has low levels of ecological validity . Asch’s test of conformity, a line judgement task, is an artificial task, which does not reflect conformity in everyday life. Consequently, we are unable to generalise the results of Asch to other real life situations, such as why people may start smoking or drinking around friends, and therefore these results are limited in their application to everyday life.

Finally, Asch’s research is ethically questionable. He broke several ethical guidelines , including: deception and protection from harm . Asch deliberately deceived his participants, saying that they were taking part in a vision test and not an experiment on conformity. Although it is seen as unethical to deceive participants, Asch’s experiment required deception in order to achieve valid results. If the participants were aware of the true aim they would have displayed demand characteristics and acted differently. In addition, Asch’s participants were not protected from psychological harm and many of the participants reporting feeling stressed when they disagreed with the majority. However, Asch interviewed all of his participants following the experiment to overcome this issue.

• Normative Social Influence
• Task Difficulty

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Conformity - variations of asch (1951), types of conformity, explanations for conformity, ethics and psychology, conformity - jenness (1932), conformity to social roles, conformity to social roles as investigated by zimbardo, resistance to social influence - social support, our subjects.

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12.4 Conformity, Compliance, and Obedience

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Explain the Asch effect
• Define conformity and types of social influence
• Describe Stanley Milgram’s experiment and its implications
• Define groupthink, social facilitation, and social loafing

In this section, we discuss additional ways in which people influence others. The topics of conformity, social influence, obedience, and group processes demonstrate the power of the social situation to change our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. We begin this section with a discussion of a famous social psychology experiment that demonstrated how susceptible humans are to outside social pressures.

Solomon Asch conducted several experiments in the 1950s to determine how people are affected by the thoughts and behaviors of other people. In one study, a group of participants was shown a series of printed line segments of different lengths: a, b, and c ( Figure 12.17 ). Participants were then shown a fourth line segment: x. They were asked to identify which line segment from the first group (a, b, or c) most closely resembled the fourth line segment in length.

Each group of participants had only one true, naïve subject. The remaining members of the group were confederates of the researcher. A confederate is a person who is aware of the experiment and works for the researcher. Confederates are used to manipulate social situations as part of the research design, and the true, naïve participants believe that confederates are, like them, uninformed participants in the experiment. In Asch’s study, the confederates identified a line segment that was obviously shorter than the target line—a wrong answer. The naïve participant then had to identify aloud the line segment that best matched the target line segment.

How often do you think the true participant aligned with the confederates’ response? That is, how often do you think the group influenced the participant, and the participant gave the wrong answer? Asch (1955) found that 76% of participants conformed to group pressure at least once by indicating the incorrect line. Conformity is the change in a person’s behavior to go along with the group, even if he does not agree with the group. Why would people give the wrong answer? What factors would increase or decrease someone giving in or conforming to group pressure?

The Asch effect is the influence of the group majority on an individual’s judgment.

What factors make a person more likely to yield to group pressure? Research shows that the size of the majority, the presence of another dissenter, and the public or relatively private nature of responses are key influences on conformity.

• The size of the majority: The greater the number of people in the majority, the more likely an individual will conform. There is, however, an upper limit: a point where adding more members does not increase conformity. In Asch’s study, conformity increased with the number of people in the majority—up to seven individuals. At numbers beyond seven, conformity leveled off and decreased slightly (Asch, 1955).
• The presence of another dissenter: If there is at least one dissenter, conformity rates drop to near zero (Asch, 1955).
• The public or private nature of the responses: When responses are made publicly (in front of others), conformity is more likely; however, when responses are made privately (e.g., writing down the response), conformity is less likely (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955).

The finding that conformity is more likely to occur when responses are public than when they are private is the reason government elections require voting in secret, so we are not coerced by others ( Figure 12.18 ). The Asch effect can be easily seen in children when they have to publicly vote for something. For example, if the teacher asks whether the children would rather have extra recess, no homework, or candy, once a few children vote, the rest will comply and go with the majority. In a different classroom, the majority might vote differently, and most of the children would comply with that majority. When someone’s vote changes if it is made in public versus private, this is known as compliance. Compliance can be a form of conformity. Compliance is going along with a request or demand, even if you do not agree with the request. In Asch’s studies, the participants complied by giving the wrong answers, but privately did not accept that the obvious wrong answers were correct.

Now that you have learned about the Asch line experiments, why do you think the participants conformed? The correct answer to the line segment question was obvious, and it was an easy task. Researchers have categorized the motivation to conform into two types: normative social influence and informational social influence (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955).

In normative social influence , people conform to the group norm to fit in, to feel good, and to be accepted by the group. However, with informational social influence , people conform because they believe the group is competent and has the correct information, particularly when the task or situation is ambiguous. What type of social influence was operating in the Asch conformity studies? Since the line judgment task was unambiguous, participants did not need to rely on the group for information. Instead, participants complied to fit in and avoid ridicule, an instance of normative social influence.

An example of informational social influence may be what to do in an emergency situation. Imagine that you are in a movie theater watching a film and what seems to be smoke comes in the theater from under the emergency exit door. You are not certain that it is smoke—it might be a special effect for the movie, such as a fog machine. When you are uncertain you will tend to look at the behavior of others in the theater. If other people show concern and get up to leave, you are likely to do the same. However, if others seem unconcerned, you are likely to stay put and continue watching the movie ( Figure 12.19 ).

How would you have behaved if you were a participant in Asch’s study? Many students say they would not conform, that the study is outdated, and that people nowadays are more independent. To some extent this may be true. Research suggests that overall rates of conformity may have reduced since the time of Asch’s research. Furthermore, efforts to replicate Asch’s study have made it clear that many factors determine how likely it is that someone will demonstrate conformity to the group. These factors include the participant’s age, gender, and socio-cultural background (Bond & Smith, 1996; Larsen, 1990; Walker & Andrade, 1996).

Link to Learning

Watch this video of a replication of the Asch experiment to learn more.

Stanley Milgram’s Experiment

Conformity is one effect of the influence of others on our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Another form of social influence is obedience to authority. Obedience is the change of an individual’s behavior to comply with a demand by an authority figure. People often comply with the request because they are concerned about a consequence if they do not comply. To demonstrate this phenomenon, we review another classic social psychology experiment.

Stanley Milgram was a social psychology professor at Yale who was influenced by the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal. Eichmann’s defense for the atrocities he committed was that he was “just following orders.” Milgram (1963) wanted to test the validity of this defense, so he designed an experiment and initially recruited 40 men for his experiment. The volunteer participants were led to believe that they were participating in a study to improve learning and memory. The participants were told that they were to teach other students (learners) correct answers to a series of test items. The participants were shown how to use a device that they were told delivered electric shocks of different intensities to the learners. The participants were told to shock the learners if they gave a wrong answer to a test item—that the shock would help them to learn. The participants believed they gave the learners shocks, which increased in 15-volt increments, all the way up to 450 volts. The participants did not know that the learners were confederates and that the confederates did not actually receive shocks.

In response to a string of incorrect answers from the learners, the participants obediently and repeatedly shocked them. The confederate learners cried out for help, begged the participant teachers to stop, and even complained of heart trouble. Yet, when the researcher told the participant-teachers to continue the shock, 65% of the participants continued the shock to the maximum voltage and to the point that the learner became unresponsive ( Figure 12.20 ). What makes someone obey authority to the point of potentially causing serious harm to another person?

Several variations of the original Milgram experiment were conducted to test the boundaries of obedience. When certain features of the situation were changed, participants were less likely to continue to deliver shocks (Milgram, 1965). For example, when the setting of the experiment was moved to an off-campus office building, the percentage of participants who delivered the highest shock dropped to 48%. When the learner was in the same room as the teacher, the highest shock rate dropped to 40%. When the teachers’ and learners’ hands were touching, the highest shock rate dropped to 30%. When the researcher gave the orders by phone, the rate dropped to 23%. These variations show that when the humanity of the person being shocked was increased, obedience decreased. Similarly, when the authority of the experimenter decreased, so did obedience.

This case is still very applicable today. What does a person do if an authority figure orders something done? What if the person believes it is incorrect, or worse, unethical? In a study by Martin and Bull (2008), midwives privately filled out a questionnaire regarding best practices and expectations in delivering a baby. Then, a more senior midwife and supervisor asked the junior midwives to do something they had previously stated they were opposed to. Most of the junior midwives were obedient to authority, going against their own beliefs. Burger (2009) partially replicated this study. He found among a multicultural sample of women and men that their levels of obedience matched Milgram's research. Doliński et al. (2017) performed a replication of Burger's work in Poland and controlled for the gender of both participants and learners, and once again, results that were consistent with Milgram's original work were observed.

When in group settings, we are often influenced by the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of people around us. Whether it is due to normative or informational social influence, groups have power to influence individuals. Another phenomenon of group conformity is groupthink. Groupthink is the modification of the opinions of members of a group to align with what they believe is the group consensus (Janis, 1972). In group situations, the group often takes action that individuals would not perform outside the group setting because groups make more extreme decisions than individuals do. Moreover, groupthink can hinder opposing trains of thought. This elimination of diverse opinions contributes to faulty decision by the group.

Groupthink in the U.S. Government

There have been several instances of groupthink in the U.S. government. One example occurred when the United States led a small coalition of nations to invade Iraq in March 2003. This invasion occurred because a small group of advisors and former President George W. Bush were convinced that Iraq represented a significant terrorism threat with a large stockpile of weapons of mass destruction at its disposal. Although some of these individuals may have had some doubts about the credibility of the information available to them at the time, in the end, the group arrived at a consensus that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and represented a significant threat to national security. It later came to light that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, but not until the invasion was well underway. As a result, 6000 American soldiers were killed and many more civilians died. How did the Bush administration arrive at their conclusions? View this video of Colin Powell, 10 years after his famous United Nations speech, discussing the information he had at the time that his decisions were based on. ("CNN Official Interview: Colin Powell now regrets UN speech about WMDs," 2010).

Do you see evidence of groupthink?

Why does groupthink occur? There are several causes of groupthink, which makes it preventable. When the group is highly cohesive, or has a strong sense of connection, maintaining group harmony may become more important to the group than making sound decisions. If the group leader is directive and makes his opinions known, this may discourage group members from disagreeing with the leader. If the group is isolated from hearing alternative or new viewpoints, groupthink may be more likely. How do you know when groupthink is occurring?

There are several symptoms of groupthink including the following:

• perceiving the group as invulnerable or invincible—believing it can do no wrong
• believing the group is morally correct
• self-censorship by group members, such as withholding information to avoid disrupting the group consensus
• the quashing of dissenting group members’ opinions
• the shielding of the group leader from dissenting views
• perceiving an illusion of unanimity among group members
• holding stereotypes or negative attitudes toward the out-group or others’ with differing viewpoints (Janis, 1972)

Given the causes and symptoms of groupthink, how can it be avoided? There are several strategies that can improve group decision making including seeking outside opinions, voting in private, having the leader withhold position statements until all group members have voiced their views, conducting research on all viewpoints, weighing the costs and benefits of all options, and developing a contingency plan (Janis, 1972; Mitchell & Eckstein, 2009).

Group Polarization

Another phenomenon that occurs within group settings is group polarization. Group polarization (Teger & Pruitt, 1967) is the strengthening of an original group attitude after the discussion of views within a group. That is, if a group initially favors a viewpoint, after discussion the group consensus is likely a stronger endorsement of the viewpoint. Conversely, if the group was initially opposed to a viewpoint, group discussion would likely lead to stronger opposition. Group polarization explains many actions taken by groups that would not be undertaken by individuals. Group polarization can be observed at political conventions, when platforms of the party are supported by individuals who, when not in a group, would decline to support them. Recently, some theorists have argued that group polarization may be partly responsible for the extreme political partisanship that seems ubiquitous in modern society. Given that people can self-select media outlets that are most consistent with their own political views, they are less likely to encounter opposing viewpoints. Over time, this leads to a strengthening of their own perspective and of hostile attitudes and behaviors towards those with different political ideals. Remarkably, political polarization leads to open levels of discrimination that are on par with, or perhaps exceed, racial discrimination (Iyengar & Westwood, 2015). A more everyday example is a group’s discussion of how attractive someone is. Does your opinion change if you find someone attractive, but your friends do not agree? If your friends vociferously agree, might you then find this person even more attractive?

Social traps refer to situations that arise when individuals or groups of individuals behave in ways that are not in their best interest and that may have negative, long-term consequences. However, once established, a social trap is very difficult to escape. For example, following World War II, the United States and the former Soviet Union engaged in a nuclear arms race. While the presence of nuclear weapons is not in either party's best interest, once the arms race began, each country felt the need to continue producing nuclear weapons to protect itself from the other.

Social Loafing

Imagine you were just assigned a group project with other students whom you barely know. Everyone in your group will get the same grade. Are you the type who will do most of the work, even though the final grade will be shared? Or are you more likely to do less work because you know others will pick up the slack? Social loafing involves a reduction in individual output on tasks where contributions are pooled. Because each individual's efforts are not evaluated, individuals can become less motivated to perform well. Karau and Williams (1993) and Simms and Nichols (2014) reviewed the research on social loafing and discerned when it was least likely to happen. The researchers noted that social loafing could be alleviated if, among other situations, individuals knew their work would be assessed by a manager (in a workplace setting) or instructor (in a classroom setting), or if a manager or instructor required group members to complete self-evaluations.

The likelihood of social loafing in student work groups increases as the size of the group increases (Shepperd & Taylor, 1999). According to Karau and Williams (1993), college students were the population most likely to engage in social loafing. Their study also found that women and participants from collectivistic cultures were less likely to engage in social loafing, explaining that their group orientation may account for this.

College students could work around social loafing or “free-riding” by suggesting to their professors use of a flocking method to form groups. Harding (2018) compared groups of students who had self-selected into groups for class to those who had been formed by flocking, which involves assigning students to groups who have similar schedules and motivations. Not only did she find that students reported less “free riding,” but that they also did better in the group assignments compared to those whose groups were self-selected.

Interestingly, the opposite of social loafing occurs when the task is complex and difficult (Bond & Titus, 1983; Geen, 1989). In a group setting, such as the student work group, if your individual performance cannot be evaluated, there is less pressure for you to do well, and thus less anxiety or physiological arousal (Latané, Williams, & Harkens, 1979). This puts you in a relaxed state in which you can perform your best, if you choose (Zajonc, 1965). If the task is a difficult one, many people feel motivated and believe that their group needs their input to do well on a challenging project (Jackson & Williams, 1985).

Deindividuation

Another way that being part of a group can affect behavior is exhibited in instances in which deindividuation occurs. Deindividuation refers to situations in which a person may feel a sense of anonymity and therefore a reduction in accountability and sense of self when among others. Deindividuation is often pointed to in cases in which mob or riot-like behaviors occur (Zimbardo, 1969), but research on the subject and the role that deindividuation plays in such behaviors has resulted in inconsistent results (as discussed in Granström, Guvå, Hylander, & Rosander, 2009).

Table 12.2 summarizes the types of social influence you have learned about in this chapter.

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The effects of information and social conformity on opinion change

Daniel j. mallinson.

1 School of Public Affairs, The Pennsylvania State University - Harrisburg, Middletown, Pennsylvania, United States of America

Peter K. Hatemi

2 Department of Biochemistry, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States of America

3 Department of Molecular Biology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States of America

4 Department of Political Science, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States of America

Associated Data

Data are available from the corresponding author’s Harvard Dataverse ( http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YVCPDT ).

Extant research shows that social pressures influence acts of political participation, such as turning out to vote. However, we know less about how conformity pressures affect one’s deeply held political values and opinions. Using a discussion-based experiment, we untangle the unique and combined effects of information and social pressure on a political opinion that is highly salient, politically charged, and part of one’s identity. We find that while information plays a role in changing a person’s opinion, the social delivery of that information has the greatest effect. Thirty three percent of individuals in our treatment condition change their opinion due to the social delivery of information, while ten percent respond only to social pressure and ten percent respond only to information. Participants that change their opinion due to social pressure in our experiment are more conservative politically, conscientious, and neurotic than those that did not.

Introduction

Information and persuasion are perhaps the most important drivers of opinion and behavioral changes. Far less attention, however, has been given to the role of social pressure in opinion change on politically-charged topics. This lacuna is important because humans have a demonstrated proclivity to conform to their peers when faced with social pressure. Be it in the boardroom or on Facebook, Solomon Asch and Muzafer Sherif’s classic studies hold true today. Individuals conform based on a desire to be liked by others, which Asch [ 1 , 2 ] called compliance (i.e., going along with the majority even if you do not accept their beliefs because you want to be accepted), or a desire to be right, which Sherif et al. [ 3 ] termed private acceptance (i.e., believing that the opinions of others may be more correct or informed than their own). These two broad schemas encompass many specific mechanisms, including, motivated reasoning, cognitive dissonance, utility maximization, conflict avoidance, and pursuit of positive relationships, among others. Information-based social influence and normative social influence (i.e., conformity pressure) both play important, albeit distinct, roles in the theories of compliance and private acceptance (see [ 4 ]). In both cases, humans exhibit conformity behavior; however only in private acceptance do they actually update their beliefs due to the social delivery of new information.

Extensions of Asch and Sherif’s path-breaking works have been widely applied across a number of behavioral domains [ 5 – 9 ], to include political participation. For example, significant attention has been focused on the import of conformity on voter turnout and participatory behaviors [ 10 ], including the effects of social pressure on the electoral behavior of ordinary citizens [ 11 – 15 ]. This body of work points to both the subtle and overt power of social influence on electoral behavior, yet little is known about the import of social conformity for politically charged topics in context-laden circumstances, particularly those that challenge one’s values and opinions.

Testing conformity pressure in the ideological and political identity domain may explicate whether the pressure to align with an otherwise unified group is different when dealing with politically charged topics versus context-free topics such as the size of a line or the movement of a ball of light [ 2 , 16 ]. Opinions on politically charged topics are complex, value laden, aligned with cultural norms, and not easily changed [ 17 – 21 ]. It remains unknown if the effects of social conformity pressures on political opinions are conditioned by the personal nature of the locus of pressure. To be sure, social conformity is a difficult concept to measure without live interaction. An observational approach makes it difficult to untangle if or how social pressure independently affects behaviors given these variegated casual mechanisms, and whether changes in opinion that result from social interaction are due to compliance or private acceptance. Nevertheless, experiments provide one means to gain insight into how and why opinion change occurs. Here, we undertake an experiment to test the extent to which opinion change is due to persuasion through new information, social conformity pressure, or a combination of the two in a more realistic extended discussion environment.

Conformity and political behavior

Both observational and experimental research has addressed different aspects of the impact of socially-delivered information on individual behavior. Observational analyses of social networks form the backbone of much of the recent research on social influence and political behavior. Sinclair [ 22 ], for instance, demonstrates that citizen networks convey a bounded set of political information. Individuals may turn to highly informed peers [ 23 ] or aggregate information from trusted friends and family [ 24 ] in order to reduce the cost of gathering the information required to engage in political behavior (e.g., voting). In turning to their network, they are open to privately accepting this useful information. Political information, however, is not the only type of information transmitted through personal networks. Social pressure helps the network induce compliance with desired social norms [ 25 – 27 ]. In this case, members of the network provide information regarding the group’s expectations for appropriate engagement in politics. Individuals that are concerned about whether or not the group will continue to accept them therefore conform out of a desire to be liked, broadly defined. Norms are often self-enforcing, with merely the perceived threat of potential sanctions being enough to regulate behavior through compliance and self-sanctioning [ 28 , 29 ].

The debate over the practicality and reality of deliberative democracy further highlights the importance of understanding the role of political conformity in public and elite discourse. Scholars and theorists argue that political decisions are improved and legitimized under a deliberative process [ 30 – 34 ], even though deliberation does not necessarily result in consensus [ 35 ]. The crux of democratic deliberation is that participants are engaging in a rational discussion of a political topic, which provides the opportunity for each to learn from the others and thus privately update their preferences (i.e., out of a desire to be right). It results in a collectively rational enterprise that allows groups to overcome the bounded rationality of individuals that would otherwise yield suboptimal decisions [ 36 ]. This requires participants to fully engage and freely share the information that they have with the group.

Hibbing and Theiss-Morse [ 37 ], however, raise important questions about the desirability of deliberation among the public. Using focus groups, they find that citizens more often than not wish to disengage from discussion when they face opposition to their opinions. Instead, they appear averse to participation in politics and instead desire a “stealth democracy,” whereby democratic procedures exist, but are not always visible. In this view, deliberative environments do not ensure the optimal outcome, and can even result in suboptimal outcomes. In fact, the authors point directly to the issue of intra-group conformity due to compliance as a culprit for this phenomenon. The coercive influence of social pressure during deliberation has been further identified in jury deliberations [ 38 , 39 ] and other small group settings [ 40 ].

Beyond politics, there is experimental evidence of the propensity to conform out of a desire to either be liked or to be right [ 25 , 41 – 45 ]. Using a simple focus group format and pictures of lines, Asch [ 1 , 2 ] demonstrated that individuals would comply with the beliefs of their peers due to a desire to be accepted by the group, even if they disagree and even when they believe the group opinion does not match reality. To do this, Asch asked eight members of a group to evaluate two sets of lines. The lines were clearly either identical or different and group members were asked to identify whether there was a difference. Unknown to the participant, the seven other group members were confederates trained to act in concert. At a given point in the study, the confederates began choosing the wrong answer to the question of whether the lines were equal. Consequently, the participant faced social pressure from a unified group every time they selected their answer. Asch varied the behavior of the group, including the number of members and number of dissenting confederates. Participants often exhibited stress and many eventually complied with the group consensus, even though the group was objectively wrong and participants did not agree with them privately.

Using a much more complex and context-laden format—a youth summer camp with real campers—Sherif et al. [ 3 ] demonstrated private acceptance whereby humans internalize and conform to group norms because consensus suggests that they may have converged on a right answer. In this case, the boys in the camp quickly coalesced into competing factions and initial outliers in the groups conformed out of a desire to win competitions (i.e., be right). While the groundbreaking Robbers Cave experiments revealed a great deal about group behavior well beyond conformity, we focus specifically on this particular aspect of the findings, which have stood the test of time in numerous replications and extensions across a wide variety of social domains [ 46 – 52 ].

Replication of Asch’s experimental work, in particular, has met varying degrees success. Lalancette and Standing [ 53 ]found that Asch’s results were mixed when using a prompt more ambiguous than unequal lines. Further, Hock [ 54 ] critiques the Asch design for not replicating a real life situation. Focusing on divorce attitudes, Kenneth Hardy provided an early application of Asch’s public compliance and Sherif’s private acceptance theories to political opinions using a similar small-group format with six confederates and one participant. Confederates offered not only their opinions, but also reasons for their opinions, which provided a methodological innovation by introducing more information than just the confederates’ votes. Hardy’s work provided an important starting point for identifying the process of conformity in the political realm, but it remains limited. He only utilized men in his study and did not allow for repeated discussion to assess how long participants hold up to conformity pressure. In a more recent study, Levitan and Verhulst [ 55 ]found persistence in political attitude change after interaction with a unanimously-opposing group, but they did not incorporate any discussion.

Our experiment builds on these works by examining the micro-process underlying opinion change for a politically charged topic discussed in a real context. We bridge between studies that allow for no discussion with those that study day-long deliberations in order to determine if group influence has a stronger effect, even when the discussion centers on an attitude closely tied with social identity. Our interaction of about an hour simulates a likely real-world example of dialogue. More importantly, our design allows us to speak to the debate over social influence by pulling apart the desires to be right (private acceptance) and liked (compliance). Our main goal is not to completely predict the general public’s behavior, but rather to identify the independent causal role of social pressure on opinion change, given the known import of information effects. We expect conformity pressure and information to have joint and independent effects on opinion change.

Variation in conformity behavior

While our primary interest is in identifying the average effects of information and conformity pressure on opinion change, we nevertheless recognize that there is variation in humans’ responses to social pressure, depending on observed and unobserved individual characteristics. Thus the average treatment effect recovered can mask substantively important heterogeneity [ 56 , 57 ]. For instance, not all of Asch’s or Hardy’s subjects complied with group opinion and there was a great deal of variation in how willing Sherif et al.’s campers coalesced into cohesive and functioning groups. In order to address this possibility we test three factors that have been previously identified as covarying with the average propensity to conform: personality traits, self-esteem, and ideology. The most consistent evidence points towards those who change their opinions as being generally more agreeable, neurotic, and having lower self-esteem [ 58 ].

Generating hypotheses regarding the import of other personality and ideological dispositions on opinion change for political, moral and identity-laden topics is more complicated. Extant research indicates support for both stability and change for these traits and differs in the source of that change, i.e., whether it is informational or social. For example, on the one hand we might expect those who are more politically conservative to be more likely to conform to the group overtly, given extant studies showing conservatives think less negatively toward conformity and comply more often to group pressure and norms [ 59 – 61 ]. In addition, conservatives are also higher on the Conscientiousness personality trait, and this trait both reflects and is related to more conformist behavior [ 62 – 64 ].

On the other hand, conservatism, by definition, advocates the status quo and is related to resistance to change and greater refusal to privately accept new information, specifically if that information contradicts one’s values [ 65 , 66 ], leading to a greater likelihood of internal stability. In a similar manner, those high in openness and more politically liberal, while more likely to take in new information, and thus possibly more likely to privately accept it, are also less prone to restrictive conformity, and thus possibly less likely to conform publicly [ 67 ]. We treat these propositions as secondary hypotheses, and explore their import in a limited manner given restrictions in the data.

Materials and methods

In order to explicate the independent and joint effects of compliance and private acceptance, we designed an experiment, conducted at the Pennsylvania State University from May to December of 2013, which placed participants in a deliberative environment where they faced unified opposition to their expressed opinion on a political topic that is relevant to their local community. We assessed participants’ privately-held opinions, absent the group, before and after the treatment in order to determine whether those who expressed a change in opinion during the discussion only did so verbally in order to comply with the group and gain acceptance or if they privately accepted the group’s opinion and truly updated their own values. The group discussed the topic openly, for approximately 30–45 minutes, also allowing us to assess participant behavior throughout the discussion. We discuss the specifics in more detail below.

In designing the experiment, we leveraged a unique time in Penn State’s history, the aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky child abuse scandal and the firing of longtime Head Coach Joe Paterno. The firing provided an ideal topic of discussion and a hard test of conformity pressure given the fact that it exhibited high salience on campus, was politically charged, and connected to the participants’ identities as Penn State students. The question posed to our participants was whether or not they felt that Coach Paterno should have been fired by the University’s Board of Trustees in November 2011. Previous research demonstrates that undergraduates may not have as clearly defined political attitudes as older adults on many topics and thus may be more susceptible to conformity pressure from peers due to non-attitudes [ 68 ]. This informed our choice of the discussion topic, as Paterno’s role in the abuse was not only highly salient on the Penn State campus, but typically invoked strong and diametrically opposed opinions in the undergraduate population and the general Penn state community. We begin by providing some background on this issue and its connection to identity and politics.

Firing of Penn State football Head Coach Joe Paterno

The first week of November 2011 was a whirlwind for students at Penn State. Police arrested former defensive coach Jerry Sandusky on charges of child sexual abuse following the release of a grand jury report by the Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General. In the midst of a national media firestorm and with evidence mounting that the University President, Athletic Director and Head football Coach had been aware of Sandusky’s activities, Penn State President Graham Spanier resigned and the Board of Trustees relieved Paterno of his duties. They also placed the Athletic Director, Tim Curley, and Vice President, Gary Schultz, on administrative leave after being indicted for perjury regarding their testimony about their knowledge of Sandusky’s sexual assaults of young boys. Immediately after the firings and suspensions, students poured into campus and downtown State College, causing damage and flipping a news van [ 69 ]. Various student protests persisted for weeks. The following summer brought Sandusky’s conviction, but controversy has not subsided, especially in Pennsylvania. The firing is continually alive at Penn State, as lawsuits against the university and the trials of Spanier, Curley, and Shultz continue to progress as Paterno’s family and supporters seek to restore his legacy.

While the real-life context of our design adds to its external validity, the discussion topic’s high salience and likelihood of evoking a strong opinion also improves the internal validity of the experiment. Paterno was more than an employee; he was the image of Penn State, “an extension of [the students’ and alumni’s] collective self” ([ 70 ], 154), and thus tied to students’ identities as members of the community [ 71 ]. As reported at the time of the scandal:

“More than any other man, Mr. Paterno is Penn State–the man who brought the institution national recognition… Paterno is at the core of the university’s sense of identity.” [ 72 ].

Given the emotion surrounding this issue, it is not unlike morality policies that evoke strong responses from individuals [ 73 ], thereby providing a hard test of conformity pressure on value- and identity-laden opinions. There is no better example of this than the ongoing pursuit of justice by the children subjected to abuse by Catholic priests and the mounting evidence of systematic concealment and enablement of such abuse by the Catholic Church. The similarities between Penn State and the Church persist on nearly every level, including the scandals threatening an important aspect of its members’ identities. In this way, the experience of students following the child abuse scandal at Penn State generalizes to politically relevant circumstances where organizational power and personal identities are challenged.

In addition to being a highly salient and identity-laden topic of discussion, the Paterno firing is a social and political issue. It weighed heavily on the 2012 Board of Trustees elections, when many candidates campaigned on their support for Paterno. Furthermore, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett was a de facto member of the Board and originally launched the Sandusky investigation while serving as the state Attorney General. As a board member, Corbett advocated for Paterno’s firing and faced both praise and criticism across the Commonwealth. As a result of the scandal, Pennsylvania passed legislation that clarifies responsibilities for reporting child abuse and heightens penalties for failures to report. The abuse received national recognition. When asked for his reaction to the firing, President Obama called on Americans to search their souls and to take responsibility for protecting children [ 74 ]. Thus, there is recognition by elites, the public, the media, and the academy that Paterno’s firing is an inherently political issue. Furthermore, the topic has personal importance to the participants, is identity laden, and relevant at the local, state, and national-levels. Having described the context of the topic of discussion, we now turn to describing the experimental protocol.

Participant recruitment

The experiment was advertised as a study on political discussion in upper- and lower-level social science courses, as well as through campus fliers and a university research website. As an incentive, participants were entered into a raffle for one of eight $25 gift cards to Amazon. The first participants completed the study in May 2013 and data collection closed in December 2013. There were no major developments in the Sandusky scandal during our data collection phase, thus we believe that no outside events threaten the validity of the study. The firing of the four university officials, Joe Paterno’s death, Jerry Sandusky’s conviction, issuance of the Freeh Report, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s sanctions all occurred prior to the start of data collection. This study was approved by the Pennsylvania State University Office for Research Protections Institutional Review Board (Study# 41536) on February 20, 2013. All participants in the treatment group signed a written informed consent form prior to participating in the study. Participants in the control group supplied implied consent by completing the online survey after reading an informed consent document on the first web page of the survey. Penn State’s IRB approved both methods of consent. Consent materials can be found with other study reproduction materials at the corresponding author’s dataverse ( http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YVCPDT ). Thus, all participants provided informed consent and all procedures contributing to this work complied with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committees on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975.

A total of 58 students participated in either the treatment or control groups. Compared to observational studies, this may appear a small number, but it comports with current research norms that require high participant involvement and a substantial amount of their time [ 75 , 76 ] and is consistent with the sample sizes for the foundational work in this area [ 2 , 6 ]. The pre- and post-test, discussion session and debriefing required at least 1.5 hours of each participant’s time. Researchers spent, on average, at least eight hours per participant recruiting, coordinating, and scheduling discussion groups, running discussion sessions, and coding behavioral data. The study generally targeted current undergraduates, but three graduate students and one recent graduate also participated. Upon volunteering to take part in the study, participants were randomly assigned to either the treatment (n = 34) or control (n = 24) group using a coin flip. The total sample includes an un-randomized 16 person pilot of the experimental protocol. See S3 File for additional information on this pilot group, its characteristics, and analyses showing their inclusion does not affect the main findings.

Pre-test survey

Fig 1 presents the study design including information provided to the treatment and control groups (in black) and the points at which we measured their opinion regarding Paterno’s firing (in red). Both groups were administrated a pre-test survey using Qualtrics. The treated group completed this survey before attending a discussion session. In addition to basic demographic characteristics, we collected a number of psychological and behavioral traits for every participant. Ideology was measured by an attitudinal measurement of ideology, a Liberalism-Conservatism scale [ 77 ] widely used to prevent measurement error that arises from the difficulty in accurately collapsing a complex view of politics into a single dimension. This measure of ideology is well validated (e.g., Bouchard et al. 2003) and serves as the basis for modern definitions of ideology across disciplines [ 78 , 79 ]. The measure relies on respondents simply agreeing or disagreeing with a broad range of political and social topics, from evolution to taxes. In this case, we used 48 different topics, which generate an additive scale of conservatism ranging from 0 (very low) to 48 (very high). In addition to measuring our participant’s political ideology, we assessed their self-esteem using Rosenberg’s [ 80 ] scale and personality using McCrae and John’s [ 81 ] 44-question Big 5 dimensions of personality: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

This figure presents each phase of the study, including information provided to treated and control groups (in black) and the points at which we measured their opinion of the Paterno firing (in red).

Finally, all participants were asked their opinion on five policies that affect undergraduates at Penn State: alcohol possession on campus; government oversight of academic performance; the firing of Paterno; prevention of State Patty’s Day celebrations; and use of the student activities fee. Participants recorded their opinion using a five-point Likert scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” We included five different topics on the survey so that treatment group participants would be unsure as to which topic they would be discussing.

Discussion group

After completion of the online survey, participants in the treatment group were scheduled individually for a discussion session. Each discussion group was comprised of a single participant and two to four trained confederates (we compare differences in the number of experimenters and find no effects; for more information see S4 File ). A total of five unique confederates, three females and two males, were used across the length of the study. Among them were four political science Ph.D. candidates of varying experience and one recent graduate who majored in political science. The confederates looked young and dressed informally, and were not distinguishable from our undergraduate students. In terms of training, the confederates were not strictly scripted so that the discussion would not appear forced or scripted. Instead, the experimenter and other volunteers took part in pre-experiment tests as mock participants so that the confederates could argue both sides of the Paterno firing and develop the consistent points they used for the duration of the study (see S2 File ). Fig 2 shows a typical discussion session. Discussion sessions were held in a conference room with all of the group members sitting around a table. There was no fixed seating arrangement.

Clockwise from bottom left: Experimenter, confederate, confederate, participant, and confederate. Note the participant’s seemingly disengaged body language. This participant ultimately changed their opinion.

At the beginning of each discussion session, the experimenter reminded the group that the general purpose of the experiment is to understand political decision-making and how individuals form political opinions. They were told that a topic was randomly selected for each discussion group from the five included in the pre-test survey, with their topic being the firing of Paterno. Prior to the start of open discussion, group members were provided a sheet of excerpts from the Freeh Report [ 82 ] regarding Paterno’s involvement in the Sandusky scandal at Penn State (see S1 File ). They were told that the information was drawn from independent investigations and was meant to refresh their memories, given that two years had passed since the firing.

After providing time to read the information sheet, the group was polled verbally regarding whether or not they believed Paterno should have been fired (yes or no). The participant was always asked to answer first. This allowed the confederates to subsequently express the opposite opinion throughout the discussion. Though very little time passed between completion of the pre-test surveys and participation in the discussion groups, we did not rely on the opinions expressed in the pre-test surveys as the basis of our confederates’ opinion. We recorded and used the verbal response as the respondents’ opinion. This also ensures that our confederates were responding to the precise opinion held by the participant at the start of the discussion session. This way we could track the effect of conformity pressure on their opinion throughout the session.

The group was then provided 30 minutes for open discussion; however, discussion was allowed to go beyond 30 minutes in order allow participants to finish any thoughts and reflect a more natural interaction. During this discussion, up to four confederates argued the opposition position to greater or lesser degrees depending on the confederate, including responding to and interacting with the participant and even agreeing with the participant on certain points. At the conclusion of the discussion time, group members were told that researchers wished to understand their true opinion at that moment and that we would be aggregating the individual opinions from our groups in order to gain a sense of overall student opinion on each of the five topics. Thus, they were instructed to complete an anonymous ballot with their final opinion. The anonymous ballot allowed us to measure whether their opinion had actually changed during the discussion, conforming to other people’s behavior due to private acceptance that what they are saying is right, or were only publicly complying with other people’s behavior, without necessarily believing in what they are doing or saying.

Each discussion session was video recorded for the purposes of coding both verbal and non-verbal indications of their opinion. Two coders were hired to review each discussion session video and record a series of behavioral characteristics of the participants (not reported in this paper) as well as their impression regarding whether the participants verbally changed their opinion during the course of the discussion (a binary yes/no). The principal investigators also coded each video. We used the modal code from all four coders, with the principal investigators re-reviewing the videos to break six ties. Fleiss’s Kappa [ 83 ] indicates moderate agreement among raters on the verbally expressed opinion (0.54, p < 0.001).

The combination of anonymous balloting and video recording for verbal cues is an important aspect of the study design that allows us to pull apart whether participants conformed out of a desire to be right, liked, or a combination of the two. Finally, we debriefed each participant to explain the full purpose of the study, including any and all possible points of deception, and to gather information about their personal feelings on being in the minority during the discussion.

Control group

We utilized a control group in order to identify the independent effect of social pressure on opinion change. Their behavior established a baseline expectation for the amount of opinion change we could expect with just the introduction of new information and no interpersonal interaction. This baseline then allows us to compare the two groups, social influence treatment and control, in order to tease apart the independent and joint effects of social conformity pressure and information on opinion change.

To this end, the control group took the same pre-test survey as the treatment group. However, after completion of the survey, instead of being in a deliberative session, control group participants read additional information on a topic that was “randomly” selected from the five opinion questions. Based on their opinion regarding the firing of Paterno, we presented them with the same sheet of information provided to the treated as well as a summary of the same pro- and counter-arguments used by the actual confederates during the discussion group sessions (see S1 and S2 Files). After reading these, control group participants were asked whether they believe Paterno should have been fired (yes or no) and the strength of that opinion (very strongly, somewhat strongly, neutral). If they changed their opinion at this juncture, we consider they did so only because of the introduction of new information, as there was an absence of social pressure. Thus, our design allows us to parse out the effect of the discussion group and the social pressure emerging from an unanimity of opinion opposite to the participants.

Results and discussion

The core finding of this study revolves around the question to what extent will people conform to an opposing opinion on a topic that is salient, politically charged, and informs some aspect of their identity? Furthermore, can we evoke deviation rates similar to the foundational studies that relied on less complex aspects of one’s psychology [ 1 ]? And most important, what type of change is occurring? For those participants who changed their opinions, was it due to new information (i.e., private acceptance), social pressure (i.e., public compliance), or some combination of the two? To answer these questions, we first examined the degree of opinion change in both the treatment and control groups. For the control group, we compared their initial opinion from the pre-test survey with the opinion they provided after reading the information sheet and counter-arguments. Fig 3 displays the percentage of each group that did and did not change their opinion. Within the control group, which received the same information as the discussion group, but had no social interaction, only 8 percent of the participants changed their opinion. The information-based change we observed is consistent with extant research [ 84 , 85 ]. In addition, though a large proportion of the control group did not change their opinion, some did moderate it (i.e., strengthened or weakened) based on the receipt of new information alone. See S5 File for a further breakdown of these changes.

Turning to the treatment group, 38 percent of our treated participants changed their opinion between the initial vote (after receiving information and prior to the discussion) and the final secret ballot. Our complex, identity, and value-laden topic returned findings that comport remarkably close to the deviation rates of Asch [ 2 ] and those that follow (for a meta-analysis, see [ 6 ]). If we consider all other things equal, the 30 percent increase in opinion change is dependent on the treatment of participating in the group discussion (χ 2 = 5.094, p < 0.05). This finding remains unchanged if the 16 non-randomized members of the pilot study are removed from the treatment group (though the p-value of the chi-square declines to 0.10, due to the smaller n, see S3 File ). As further evidence, Table 1 presents logistic regression results demonstrating the treatment effect. Namely, being in the treatment condition increases the odds of opinion change by 581 percent. Meaning, social pressure and/or the personal delivery of information, as opposed to simple exposure to new information, had a profound influence on either true opinion change through private acceptance or conformity through public compliance. Due to the small sample size, we are hesitant to include additional covariates in this model, but instead use t-tests below to examine differences in the characteristics of participants who changed their opinion and those who did not.

* p < 0.05; standard errors in parentheses and 95% confidence intervals in brackets

Sources of change

Moving to our secondary analyses, the research design also allowed us to parse out the specific sources of change within the treatment group. Recall we accounted for both true opinion change (i.e., the anonymous ballot at the end of discussion) and verbal opinion change (i.e., declared opinion change during group discussion captured in video and coded by independent raters) for those in the treatment condition. Therefore, we divided those in the treatment group into four subgroups in order to better understand why they changed their opinion. Table 2 shows the percentages of participants in the treatment group who changed their opinion overtly, covertly, or not at all. In sum, 47 percent did not change their opinion between the start and end of the discussion session. A total of 33 percent changed both overtly and covertly, meaning they verbally expressed an opinion change and wrote a changed opinion on their secret ballot. We argue that this group responded to a combination of the desires to be right and liked. Of the remaining participants, 10 percent changed due to a desire to be liked (overtly, but not covertly) and 10 percent due to a desire to be right (covertly, but not overtly). Though only anecdotal, one of the participants in the desire to be right category went so far as to tell the experimenter that he agreed with the group but adamantly refused to agree openly. Such participants were swayed by the introduction of new information out of a strong desire to be right, but apparently did not want to look like they were changing their opinion. Thus, our first set of analyses confirms that information plays an important role in opinion change, but social pressure also has a substantive and, at least in this context, a larger effect. For even a topic so important to one’s identity, participants changed their previously held opinions.

N = 34, only includes treatment group

Psychological differences

Having established the main findings of our study and the relative import of the two causal mechanisms for why participants changed their opinion, we now turn to examining how underlying traits, including ideology, personality, age and sex, differ between those that changed their opinion and those that did not. Demographic differences are included for descriptive purposes. First, we assessed differences between pro- and anti-firing participants. Second, we examined the relationship between direction of opinion change and trait differences between participants that changed their opinion and those that held firm. Due the nature of the experiment and specific focus on the question of causality, these tests are secondary to the main findings in the paper. For the following analyses, the sample sizes are small and in some cases and the findings only speculative.

Across both the treatment and control groups, the pre-test survey showed almost two-to-one support for Paterno keeping his job (i.e., against the firing). As mentioned earlier, “JoePa” was not only a symbol of Penn State, but also an icon to its students, and to some degree seen as a reflection of them. Table 3 displays the average demographic and psychological measures for those for and against the firing, based on the pre-test survey. The only statistically significant difference between the groups is their political ideology. The group opposed to Paterno’s firing is, on average, more conservative in their attitude positions than those that called for his firing. It is important to note that these are college students, and thus the overall distribution of ideology exhibits a liberal skew. However, Fig 4 demonstrates that the pro-firing group is not only less conservative, on average, but is also more ideologically narrow, whereas those that did not support the firing are more conservative, but also drawn from a wider ideological span. This finding suggests that ideology is a substantial factor for individuals that supported the firing. Whereas support for Paterno may have a less pronounced ideological dimension, those supporting his firing may focus more narrowly on the issue of child abuse and the responsibility of those in leadership to protect vulnerable citizens. Given that ideology is the only difference we could identify among participants’ opinions prior to the start of the experiment, we next examined whether there were differences between participants who changed their opinion and those that did not in both the treatment and control conditions.

* entries indicate significant t-tests, p < 0.05.

† Difference in proportions test used for Male. These analyses have a smaller overall sample size due to removal of neutral pre-test votes.

Tables ​ Tables4 4 and ​ and5 5 provide a sense of how demographic and psychological characteristics differ between participants who changed their opinion and those who did not. Table 4 includes both treatment and control participants, whereas Table 5 focuses solely on the treatment group. We found evidence both supporting and refuting our hypotheses presented above. There were consistent significant differences ( p < 0.05) in conservatism and conscientiousness. Namely, participants who changed their opinion are less conservative and less conscientious. Given the reported relationships between these two traits, this finding makes sense. Additionally, when all subjects are pooled ( Table 4 ), there is also a significant difference in neuroticism, with opinion changers registering higher on this scale. Both suggest that political and psychological traits may play a role in the mean shift demonstrated above. There were no differences based on the number of confederates. Meaning, participants were no more or less effected by social pressures from greater (4) or fewer (2) opponents in the discussion environment. These results demonstrate that individual differences exist across individuals that change their opinion and those that do not. Additional research will be required to both confirm and expand upon these findings. What we do find, however, is in line with expectations derived from past research and points to useful areas of future inquiry.

† Difference in proportions test used for Male.

† Difference in proportions test used for Male. Smaller overall sample size due to using only treatment condition participants.

All participants were debriefed upon completion of the discussion and informed to all aspects of the study. Participants were asked during the debriefing how they felt about being the only dissenting voice. Forty-seven percent of the treatment group participants freely offered that they felt pressured or intimidated. Twenty-nine percent also freely said that they felt like they had to dig in and defend their position during the discussion. This included six people that ultimately changed their minds. One said, “I’m not getting any support in this room. Alright I’ll defend my own position.” Another said, “I feel extra pressure to explain myself.” For some, their defensiveness continued into the debriefing. In particular, some students that did not change their opinion continued defending themselves when talking one-on-one with the experimenter, even after it was explained no matter which position they took, they would face opposition. This demonstrates that some participants are put on the defensive when faced with a unified opposition. Of those that expressed feeling defensive, some dug-in deeply and did not budge at all, while others opened up to the influence of their peers as the discussion progressed. This behavior comports the foundational work of Asch [ 1 , 2 ] and Milgram [ 86 ] and strongly suggests that our participants indeed experienced social pressure in the treatment condition, but differs in that it highlights the variance in how individual’s react to such pressure.

Limitations

We wish to call attention to two specific limitations of this study that are discussed above and in the supplementary materials, but warrant further mention. The first limitation is the inclusion of a meaningful, relative to the overall sample size, non-randomized pilot of the treatment condition. While this had no substantive effect on the results, it is important to recognize and we discuss this in more detail in the S3 File . Second, Fig 1 makes apparent that we use two similar, but slightly different scales for opinion throughout the study. Namely, pre-test opinion is measured on a five-point Likert scale and the remaining opinion measures are dichotomous (yes/no), with an additional strength question for the control group. Our primary analyses, however, rely on the comparison of the two yes/no answers in the treatment group; the verbal designation of yes/no at the beginning of the discussion section and the yes/no in the post discussion ballot. We further discuss this in the S5 File .

Finally, to some the small sample size of the study may be a limitation, especially those concerned about a replication crisis in Social Psychology [ 87 ]. We would respond, however, that the intensive nature of this study in terms of researcher hours and treatment condition makes it difficult to scale-up. Thus, a multi-site replication is likely the best approach to assessing the veracity of these findings [ 88 , 89 ]. We encourage such replication and have provided all materials necessary on the corresponding author’s Dataverse ( http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YVCPDT ). Additional lessons relevant to replication work and laboratory experiments in political science can be found in Mallinson (2018) [ 90 ].

Conclusions

While researchers have examined the roles of social influence (public compliance) and new information (private acceptance) on opinion change, the two are less often examined concurrently and the explicit causal arrows are more often assumed than tested through an experiment. Furthermore, social conformity is a complex concept to measure through surveys or interviews alone. Live interaction provides an optimal means to understand social pressures. Our experiment was designed specifically to further unpack the causal mechanisms underlying opinion change and test whether a person’s values and identity are subject to social pressure. Furthermore, the selection of the topic of study, the firing of an important symbol of Penn State, also allowed us to explicate the extent to which information and social pressure challenge a person’s deeply held values and identity. We find that while information has an important role in changing people’s opinions on a highly salient topic that is attached to a group identity, the social delivery of that information plays a large and independent role. Most individuals that changed their opinion did so out of some combination of the two forces, but there were people who only changed their opinion overtly in order to gain social acceptance as well as those who did not want to give the appearance of changing their mind, but still wanted to be right.

These findings have important implications for research on social and political behavior. They reinforce the understanding that citizens and elites cannot be simply viewed as rational utility maximizers independent of group dynamics. Yet, at the same time, the desire to be right and information remain critical components of opinion change. Furthermore, there are important individual differences such as ideology, self-esteem, and personality that appear to have a role in conformity. Exposure to politics and political discussion are fundamentally social, and therefore behavior is conditioned on the combination of the information one receives, and the social influence of the person or group providing that information interacting with one’s disposition. All should be considered when examining any inter-personal, social or political outcome. Be it a deliberative setting like a jury or a town hall meeting or informal gatherings of citizens, or political elites for that matter, changes in behavior are not simply due to rational information-driven updating, and even when they are, that updating may be pushed by the social forces that we experience in our interactions with other humans in variegated ways dependent upon the characteristics of the individual (for example, see [ 91 ]). This was the case for simple and objective stimuli, like Asch’s lines, and it is also the case in our context-laden experiment that focuses on the complexities of personal identity and opinion. That is, the conformity of social and political values relies on the same psychological mechanisms underlying general conformity.

Beyond theoretical and empirical importance for the study of social and political behavior, these findings also hold normative importance for democratic society. The normative implications are perhaps best exemplified by the organizational and personal turmoil that followed the revelation of child abuse by priests in the Catholic Church. Politics forms important aspects of the social and personal identities of elites and citizens, more so today than ever before [ 92 , 93 ]. People include their political party, positions on particular issues (e.g., environmentalism), and membership in political, religious, social and academic organizations, among other things, as key aspects of their identities. Our experiment helps us better understand how individuals behave when part of that identity is challenged.

That being said, no design is perfect, and this experiment only unpacks part of the causal mechanism. Like the early work on social conformity, it serves as a foundation for future studies to extend upon and further explicate the causal mechanism. For example, an extension on this design, such as controlling variation in the type and number of confederates [ 44 , 94 ], could help us better understand the nature and amount of pressure necessary to induce conformity across a variety of individual characteristics. For example, a potentially fruitful avenue of extension would be to provide the participant with one supportive confederate who verbally changes their opinion during the discussion. Having support reduces conformity pressure, but deviation by that support should increase it. Additionally, while we identify individuals whose behavior was prompted by either social pressure or information, the largest group responded to a combination of the two. Further parsing out the interaction between information, persuasion, pressure and the complexity of human dynamics will require an even more complex research design on a larger scale. The numerous extensions of Asch’s original experiment demonstrate the wealth of potential extensions of this design that can help unpack this black box. Doing so requires an incremental approach that will be time and resource intensive. This study provides the foundation for those next steps.

Supporting information

Acknowledgments.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2013 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois, and the April 2014 Center for American Political Responsiveness Brown Bag in State College, Pennsylvania. We would like to thank the editor, the anonymous reviewer, Ralf Kurvers, Rose McDermott, and conference attendees for their helpful comments and suggestions on this manuscript. We are also grateful to Ralf Kurvers for providing Fig 1 . We would like to thank our research assistants, Ronald Festa, Emilly Flynn, Christina Grier, Christopher Ojeda, Kimberly Seufer, and Matthew Wilson, that helped make this experimental protocol a success.

Funding Statement

This project was supported by a $1,000 internal grant from the Penn State Department of Political Science (awarded to DJM). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Data Availability

LESSWRONG LW

Asch's conformity experiment.

Solomon Asch, with experiments originally carried out in the 1950s and well-replicated since, highlighted a phenomenon now known as “conformity.” In the classic experiment, a subject sees a puzzle like the one in the nearby diagram: Which of the lines A, B, and C is the same size as the line X? Take a moment to determine your own answer . . .

The gotcha is that the subject is seated alongside a number of other people looking at the diagram—seemingly other subjects, actually confederates of the experimenter. The other “subjects” in the experiment, one after the other, say that line C seems to be the same size as X. The real subject is seated next-to-last. How many people, placed in this situation, would say “C”—giving an obviously incorrect answer that agrees with the unanimous answer of the other subjects? What do you think the percentage would be?

Three-quarters of the subjects in Asch’s experiment gave a “conforming” answer at least once. A third of the subjects conformed more than half the time.

Interviews after the experiment showed that while most subjects claimed to have not really believed their conforming answers, some said they’d really thought that the conforming option was the correct one.

Asch was disturbed by these results: 1

That we have found the tendency to conformity in our society so strong . . . is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct.

It is not a trivial question whether the subjects of Asch’s experiments behaved irrationally. Robert Aumann’s Agreement Theorem shows that honest Bayesians cannot agree to disagree—if they have common knowledge of their probability estimates, they have the same probability estimate. Aumann’s Agreement Theorem was proved more than twenty years after Asch’s experiments, but it only formalizes and strengthens an intuitively obvious point—other people’s beliefs are often legitimate evidence.

If you were looking at a diagram like the one above, but you knew for a fact that the other people in the experiment were honest and seeing the same diagram as you, and three other people said that C was the same size as X, then what are the odds that only you are the one who’s right? I lay claim to no advantage of visual reasoning—I don’t think I’m better than an average human at judging whether two lines are the same size. In terms of individual rationality, I hope I would notice my own severe confusion and then assign >50% probability to the majority vote.

In terms of group rationality, seems to me that the proper thing for an honest rationalist to say is, “How surprising, it looks to me like B is the same size as X. But if we’re all looking at the same diagram and reporting honestly, I have no reason to believe that my assessment is better than yours.” The last sentence is important—it’s a much weaker claim of disagreement than, “Oh, I see the optical illusion—I understand why you think it’s C, of course, but the real answer is B.”

So the conforming subjects in these experiments are not automatically convicted of irrationality, based on what I’ve described so far. But as you might expect, the devil is in the details of the experimental results. According to a meta-analysis of over a hundred replications by Smith and Bond . . . 2

. . . Conformity increases strongly up to 3 confederates, but doesn’t increase further up to 10–15 confederates. If people are conforming rationally, then the opinion of 15 other subjects should be substantially stronger evidence than the opinion of 3 other subjects.

Adding a single dissenter—just one other person who gives the correct answer, or even an incorrect answer that’s different from the group’s incorrect answer—reduces conformity very sharply, down to 5–10% of subjects. If you’re applying some intuitive version of Aumann’s Agreement to think that when 1 person disagrees with 3 people, the 3 are probably right, then in most cases you should be equally willing to think that 2 people will disagree with 6 people. 3 On the other hand, if you’ve got people who are emotionally nervous about being the odd one out, then it’s easy to see how adding a single other person who agrees with you, or even adding a single other person who disagrees with the group, would make you much less nervous.

Unsurprisingly, subjects in the one-dissenter condition did not think their nonconformity had been influenced or enabled by the dissenter. Like the 90% of drivers who think they’re above-average in the top 50%, some of them may be right about this, but not all. People are not self-aware of the causes of their conformity or dissent, which weighs against any attempts to argue that the patterns of conformity are rational. 4

When the single dissenter suddenly switched to conforming to the group , subjects’ conformity rates went back up to just as high as in the no-dissenter condition. Being the first dissenter is a valuable (and costly!) social service, but you’ve got to keep it up.

Consistently within and across experiments, all-female groups (a female subject alongside female confederates) conform significantly more often than all-male groups. Around one-half the women conform more than half the time, versus a third of the men. If you argue that the average subject is rational, then apparently women are too agreeable and men are too disagreeable, so neither group is actually rational . . .

Ingroup-outgroup manipulations (e.g., a handicapped subject alongside other handicapped subjects) similarly show that conformity is significantly higher among members of an ingroup.

Conformity is lower in the case of blatant diagrams, like the one at the beginning of this essay, versus diagrams where the errors are more subtle. This is hard to explain if (all) the subjects are making a socially rational decision to avoid sticking out.

Finally, Paul Crowley reminds me to note that when subjects can respond in a way that will not be seen by the group, conformity also drops, which also argues against an Aumann interpretation.

1 Solomon E. Asch, “Studies of Independence and Conformity: A Minority of One Against a Unanimous Majority,” Psychological Monographs 70 (1956) .

2 Rod Bond and Peter B. Smith, “Culture and Conformity: A Meta-Analysis of Studies Using Asch’s (1952b, 1956) Line Judgment Task,” Psychological Bulletin 119 (1996): 111–137 .

3 This isn’t automatically true, but it’s true ceteris paribus .

4 For example, in the hypothesis that people are socially-rationally choosing to lie in order to not stick out, it appears that (at least some) subjects in the one-dissenter condition do not consciously anticipate the “conscious strategy” they would employ when faced with unanimous opposition.

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I don't see this exercise as being so much about rationality as it is about our relationship with dissonance. People in my community (context-driven software testers) are expected to treat confusion or controversy as itself evidence of a potentially serious problem. For the responsible tester, such evidence must be investigated and probably raised as an issue to the client.

In short, in the situation given in the exercise, I would not answer the question, but rather raise some questions.

I drive telephone surveyors nuts in this way. They just don't know what to do with a guy who answers "no opinion" or "I don't know" or "can't answer" to every single question in their poorly worded and context-non-specific questionnaires.

as being so much about rationality as it is about our relationship with dissonance

It seems to me that most of rationality is about our relationship with dissonance. Though in most cases that dissonance is implicit while here it is obvious.

Robert Aumann's Agreement Theorem shows that honest Bayesians cannot agree to disagree - if they have common knowledge of their probability estimates, they have the same probability estimate.

Um, doesn't this also depend on them having common priors?

Yes. More importantly, it depends on them being honest Bayesians, which humans are not.

It feels like there was no explicit rule not to ask questions. It's interesting what percentage of subjects actually questioned the process.

If people are conforming rationally, then the opinion of 15 other subjects should be substantially stronger evidence than the opinion of 3 other subjects.

I don't see how moderate number of other wrong-answering subjects should influence decision of rational subject, even if it's strictly speaking stronger evidence, as uncertainty in your own sanity should be much lower than probability of alternative explanations for wrong answers of other subjects.

The video notes that when the subject is instructed to write their answers, conformity drops enormously. That suggests we can set aside the hypothesis that they conform for the rational reason you set out.

90% of drivers can be better than the average.

Only in a hella skewed distribution, far from the observed distribution of actual driving behavior.

Depends on how you measure it. For example, 99.9% of drivers have caused a below-average number of road fatalities.

Even a more sane and more continuously distributed measure could yield that result, depending on how you fit the scale. If you measure the likelihood of making a mistake (so zero would be a perfect driver, and one a rabid lemur), I expect the distribution to be hella skewed. Most people drive in a sane way most of the time. But it's the few reckless idiots you remember - and so does every single one of the thousand other drivers who had the misfortune to encounter them. It would not surprise me if driving mistakes followed more-or-less a Pareto distribution.

I took it to mean "You create some measurement that orders all of the N drivers (labeled with the natural numbers). They do not know their numbers. 90% of them will estimate that their number is >= the ceiling function of N/2".

'This may come as some surprise' to Asch & Aumann, but rationality is not the design point of the human brain (otherwise this blog would have no reason to exist), getting by in the real world is. And getting by in the real world involved, for our ancestors through tens of millenia, group belonging, hence group conformity. See J. Harris, 'No Two Alike', Chaps. 8 & 9 for a discussion which references the Asch work. This does not mean of course that group conformity was the only adaptation factor. Being right and being 'in' both had (and have...) fitness value, and it's pefectly natural that both tendencies exist, in tension.

traditional culture =/= the human brain

At an applied level, this reminds me of Dr. Jerry B. Harvey’s discussion of the "Abilene Paradox" in management, where groupthink can take over and move an organization in a direction that no-one really wants to go. All it takes is one dissenter to break the spell.

Surely there's more than social conformity/conflict aversion at work here? In the experiment in the video, an expectation of pattern continuation is set up. For most questions, the 4 spoken words the subject hears before responding do correspond to the apparently correct spoken word response. I'd expect subconcious processes to start interpreting this as an indicator of the correct answer regardless of social effects and be influenced accordingly, at least enough to cause confusion which would then increase susceptibility to the social effects.

I'd expect this effect to also be reduced where the subject is writing down his answers, as that takes out of the equation the close connection between hearing spoken numbers and speaking spoken numbers.

Aumann's Agreement Theorem was proved more than twenty years after Asch's experiments, but it only formalizes and strengthens an intuitively obvious point - other people's beliefs are often legitimate evidence.

No, other people's beliefs are often treated as evidence, and very powerful evidence at that.

Belief is not suitable as any kind of evidence when more-direct evidence is available, yet people tend to reject direct evidence in order to conform with the beliefs of others.

The human goal usually isn't to produce justified predictions of likelihood, but to ingratiate ourselves with others in our social group.

What are you attempting to do, Eliezer?

Isn't this exactly what was said in Hug The Query? I'm not sure I understand why you were down voted.

Caledonian was a well-known LW troll who would frequently make vague, unreadable, critical, somewhat hostile remarks.

So it's guilt by association.

I'd call it ad hominem

"Belief is not suitable as any kind of evidence when more-direct evidence is available ..." is more like 'You Can Only Ever Hug The Query By Yourself'.

FYI, if you look at Asch's 1955 Scientific American article , the lines on the cards were a little closer in length than in the example shown above.

my vision is so bad that i answered 'none of the above'. i had to decide to measure the lines. that meant i first had to get to where i did not think the trick was the question. that took a cup of tea. 'trust the ruler, not the vision' has been added to my list of -ings.

Isn't it reasonable to find it more likely that people are lying than that something has gone that flagrantly wrong with my ability to judge sizes of lines?

Not necessarily. Maybe your eyes are very bad, or you've suffered a stroke. (Though maybe you should be concerned about that and halt the experiment, rather than just agreeing.)

"Belief is not suitable as any kind of evidence when more-direct evidence is available, yet people tend to reject direct evidence in order to conform with the beliefs of others."

Caledonian, this is just wrong. Our ability to interpret evidence is not infallible, and is often fallible in ways that are not perfectly correlated across individuals. So even if we share the same 'direct evidence' as other observers of equaly ability their beliefs are still relevant.

Except we'd have to take into account the idea that the others who's beliefs we are using as evidence may themselves have been using the same idea... That results weighting of the beleifs of an initial group being greatly amplified above and beyond what it should be, no?

In addition to what James Annan said, they also both have to know (with very high confidence) that they are in fact honest bayesians. Both sides being honest isn't enough if either suspects the other of lying.

In terms of individual rationality, I hope I would notice my own severe confusion and then assign >50% probability to the majority vote.

Noticing your own severe confusion should lead to investigating the reasons for the disagreement, not to immediately going along with the majority. Honest Bayesians cannot agree to agree either. They must go through the process of sharing their information, not just their conclusions.

What are the odds, given today's society, that a randomly selected group of people will include any honest Bayesians. Safer to assume that most of the group are either lying, self-deluded, confused, or have altered perceptions. Particularly so in a setting like a psychology experiment.

Strict honest Bayesians? ZERO. (Not even LW contains a single true honest Bayesian.)

Approximations of honest Bayesians? Better than you might think. Certainly LW is full of reasonably good approximations, and in studies about 80% of people are honest (though most people assume that only 50% of people are honest, a phenomenon known as the Trust Gap). The Bayesian part is harder, since people who are say, religious, or superstitious, or believe in various other obviously false things, clearly don't qualify.

people who are say, religious, or superstitious, or believe in various other obviously false things

Why do you think you know this?

Check out this paper:

Gregory S. Berns, Jonathan Chappelow, Caroline F. Zink, Giuseppe Pagnoni, Megan E. Martin-Skurski, and Jim Richards, “Neurobiological Correlates of Social Conformity and Independence During Mental Rotation,” Biological Psychiatry 58 (2005), pp. 245-253.

It claims that the conformists can, under some conditions, actually come to see the world differently.

Oh, one other thing. I know it's been brought up before, but as far as the agreement theorem, I don't feel I can safely use it. What I mean is that it seems I don't understand exactly when it can and cannot be used. Specifically, I know that there's something I'm missing here, some understanding because I don't know the correct way to resolve things like agreement theorem vs quantum suicide.

It's been discussed, but I haven't seen it resolved, so until I know exactly why agreement theorem does not apply there (or why the apparently straightforward (to me) way of computing the quantum suicide numbers is wrong), I'd personally be really hesitant to use the agreement theorem directly.

The quantum suicide numbers are wrong because of the Born probabilities, and also the fact that consciousness is not an either-or phenomenon. The odds of losing 99% of your consciousness may be sufficiently high that you effectively have no consciousness left. (Also: Have you ever been unconscious? Apparently it is possible for you to find yourself in a universe where you WERE unconscious for a period of time.)

Also, I've convinced that Many-Worlds is a dead end and Bohm was right, but I know I'm in the minority on LW.

Perhaps Eliezer or someone else can check the math, but according to my calculations, if you use Nick Bostrom's SSSI (Strong Self-Sampling Assumption), and make the reference class "observers after a quantum suicide experiment", then if the prior probability of quantum immortality is 1/2, after a quantum suicide experiment has been performed with the person surviving, both the outside observer and the person undergoing the risk of death should update the probability of quantum immortality to 4/7, so that they end up agreeing.

This seems odd, but it is based on the calculation that if the probability of quantum immortality is 1/2, then the probability of ending up being an observer watching the experiment is 17/24, while the probability of being an observer surviving the experiment is 7/24. How did I derive this? Well, if Quantum Immortality is true, then the probability of being an observer watching the experiment is 2/3, because one observer watches someone die, one observer watches someone survive, and one observer experiences survival. Likewise if QI is true, the probability of being an observer surviving the experiment is 1/3. On the other hand, if QI is false, the probability of being an observer watching the experiment is 3/4 (I will leave this derivation to the reader), while the probability of being an observer surviving the experiment is 1/4.

From this it is not difficult to derive the probabilities above, that the probability of being a watcher is 17/24, and the probability of being a survivor 7/24. If you apply Bayes's theorem to get the probability of QI given the fact of being a survivor, you will get 4/7. You will also get 4/7 if you update your probabilities both on the fact of being a watcher and on the fact of seeing a survivor. So the two end up agreeing.

Intuitive support for this is the fact that if a QI experiment were actually performed, and we consider the viewpoint of the one surviving 300 successive trials, he would certainly conclude that QI was true, and our intuitions say that the outside observers should admit that he's right.

Interesting. If that's right, then clearly QI is wrong, because we've watched people die.

In the above calculation I forgot to mention that for simplicity I assumed that the experiment is such that one would normally have a 50% chance of survival. If this value is different, the values above would be different, but the fact of agreement would be the same (although there would also be the difficulty that a chance other than 50% is not easy to reconcile with a many-worlds theory anyway.)

Quantum suicide vs. Aumann has been discussed a couple times before, and yes, it's very confusing.

My intuitions say outside observers should not update their estimates one bit, and I'm pretty sure this is correct, unless they should also increase their probability of MWI on making the equivalent observation of a coin coming up heads 300 times in a row.

(although there would also be the difficulty that a chance other than 50% is not easy to reconcile with a many-worlds theory anyway.) http://www.hedweb.com/everett/everett.htm#probabilities http://hanson.gmu.edu/mangledworlds.html

IMHO quantum immortality and quantum suicide (unlike MWI) are nonsense, but I'm still trying to figure out a way to say this that convinces other people.

For probabilities in MWI I recommend the work of David Wallace.

Nick, my argument didn't depend on intuition except for support; so it doesn't bother me if your intuition differs. What was your opinion of the argument (or did I simply omit too many of the details to judge)?

I think the most interesting question that arises from these experiments is what's the difference in personality between people who dissent and people who conform (aside from the obvious).

I would guess that if we did a study using the usual Big Five, a single personality trait would drive most of the variance, the one called "agreeableness". Unfortunately this is not actually one trait, we just treat it like it is; there's no particular reason to think that conformity is correlated with empathy, for example, yet they are both considered "agreeableness". (This is similar to the problem with the trait "Belief in a Just World", which includes both the belief that a just world is possible and the belief that it is actual. An ideal moral person would definitely believe in the possibility; but upon observing a single starving child they would know that it is not actual. Hence should they be high, or low, in "Belief in a Just World"?)

At my school we did this experiment. (I, happened to be one of the people who was not in on it, and did not conform). I have no idea what evidence they had to say this but the teacher suggested that people into "maths, physics or science stuff" were less likely to conform.

Unknown: Hrm, hadn't thought of using the SSSI. Thanks. Ran through it myself by hand now, and it does seem to result in the experimenter and test subject agreeing.

However, it produces an... oddity. Specifically, if using the SSSI, then by my calculations, when one takes into account that the external observer and the test subject are not the only people in existance, the actual strength of evidence extractable from a single quantum suicide experiment would seem to be relatively weak. If the ratio of non test subjects to test subjects is N, and the probability of the subject surviving simply by the nature of the quantum experiment is R, the likelihood ratio is (1+N)/(R+N), (which both the test subject and the external observer would agree on). Seeing a nonsurvival gives a MWI to ~ MWI likelihood ratio of N/(R+N). At least, assuming I did the math right. :)

Anyways, so it looks like if SSSI is valid, quantum suicide doesn't actually give very strong evidence one way or the other at all, does it?

Hrm... I wonder if in principle it could be used to make estimates about the total population of the universe by doing it a bunch of times and then analyzing the ratios of observed results... chuckles May have just discovered the maddest way to do a census, well, ever.

Clearly it can't actually matter what the population of the universe is. (There's nothing about the experiment that is based on that! It would be this bizarre nonlocal phenomenon that pops out of the theory without being put into it!) That's the kind of weirdness you come up with if you do anthropic calculations WRONG.

Actually, if considering the SSSA instead of just the SSA, one has to take into account all the observer-moments, past and future, right? So there well be, in addition to the specific observer moments of "immediately post experiment test subject (or not), experimenter, everyone else...", there'll be past and future versions theirof, and of other entities, so you'll have K1 total "others" (other observer-moments, that is) in a MW universe, and K2 << K1 "others" in a single world universe.

This'll make the calculation a bit more confusing.

"... then what are the odds that only you are the one who's right?"

If this is the reasoning for people choosing the same answer then surely it becomes a question of confidence rather than conformity?

Choosing the same answer as the group in your argument is because you aren't confident in your answer and are willing to defer to the majority answer. Not necessarily the same as conformity. By your own rationing you are going with the group because you think their answer is "better" not because you want to be part of the group. I know you can argue that that is just your rationale for conformity, but I feel that conformity is more about doubting something you are sure you know, to side with a group, rather than doubting something you think you might know.

I feel possibly a more accurate test (using this reasoning for conformity) would be to take a group and tell all the members individually that only they will know the right answer. Then give all bar one the same answer and one a different answer and see if they will conform with the group.

I believe that the subjects were of those of a non-matured state, thus making them of a "childish" mind and not able to process the situation. The subjrects would simply say anything their peers would say or do. I am testing this experiment on my classmates. I am in the 10th grade and will respond back with the solution. I blieve that a matured mind would not give in so easily with a simple question. It is not the question at hand that is making the subjects say something completely incorrect, it is the group pressure and the maturity of the subjects. If a child's mind thinks he or she is to believe that of another subject, then it shall think of that at hand. Children's minds are so open and naive thatt they will believe something as simple as Santa Clause comming down the chimney every year, then they will not hesitate to think of an answer to the question of this experiment. It is a simple and most uneducated experiment I had to present and test. A matured mind will think not of the group pressure but that of the question. I will be back with my results. Thank you.

Leeroy Jenkins

These were adult subjects, so by your (unusual) definition most adults are "immature".

"I believe that the subjects were of those of a non-matured state..."

I guess that's the difference between being biased or not. I think your understanding of a "mature mind" equals an "unbiased mind" which is not present in all the adults. And of course the result of this experiment would have been different if it were conducted on the readers of this website.

I don't see why you think that 3 extra people, no matter if they're honest or not, amount to any significant amount of evidence when you can see the diagram yourself.

Sure, maybe they're good enough if you can't see the diagram; 3 people thinking the same thing doesn't often happen when they're wrong. But when they are wrong, when you can see that they are wrong, then it doesn't matter how many of them there are.

Also: certainly the odds aren't high that you're right if we're talking totally random odds about a proposition where the evidence is totally ambiguous. But since there is a diagram, the odds then shift to either the very low probability "My eyesight has suddenly become horrible in this one instance and no others" combined with the high probability "3/4 people are right about a seemingly easy problem", versus the low probability "3/4 people are wrong about a seemingly easy problem", versus the high probability "My eyesight is working fine".

I don't know the actual numbers for this, but it seems likely the the probability of your eyesight suddenly malfunctioning in strange and specific ways is worse then the probability of 3 other people getting an easy problem wrong. Remember, they can have whatever long-standing problems with their eyesight or perception or whatever anyone cares to make up. Or you could just take the results of Asch's experiment as a prior and say that they're not that much more impressive than 1 person going first.

(All this of course changes if they can explain why C is a better answer; if they have a good logical reason for it despite how odd it seems, it's probably true. But until then, you have to rely on your own good logical reason for B being a better answer.)

"I hope I would notice my own severe confusion and then assign >50% probability to the majority vote."

On a group level, I wouldn't think it's a particularly rational path to mimic the majority, even if you believe that they're honestly reporting. If you had a group of, say, 10 people, and the first 5 all gave the wrong answer, there would then be a rational impetuous for everyone subsequent to mimic that wrong answer on the logic that "the last (5-9) people all said C, so clearly p(C) > 0.5".

Far better to dissent and provide the group with new information.

Ooh, that's really interesting. The best solution might actually be to say the full statement, "I see B as equal, but since the other 5 people before me said C, C is probably objectively more likely." Then future people after you can still hear what you saw, independently of what you inferred based on others.

But I think there are a lot of other really interesting problems embedded in this, involving the feedback between semi-Bayesians trying to use each other to process evidence. (True Bayesians get the right answer; but what answer to semi-Bayesians get?)

This gives us a very good reason to publicize dissenting opinions about just about anything---even perhaps when we think those dissents are wrong. Apparently the mere presence of a dissenter damages groupthink and allows true answers a much better chance to emerge.

I was all set to ask whether the result of female groups' increased conformity had any explanatory power over the question of why there aren't more woman in the rationalist movement. Then as I read on, it became less likely that female psychology had anything to do with it. Rather, in-group vs out-group psychology did. Males, being the socially more privileged gender, are more likely to see themselves as 'just normal' rather than part of a particular group called 'males'.

Of course, this lends itself to predictions. In a given grouping that self-identifies strongly as that grouping (such as woman, minority ethnicities, etc), if that group is very into a particular subject, its members will also likely be into it. Whereas, with a group that is less likely to self identify (such as American Caucasians, Americans within American borders (but not abroad) and men) the conformity on interests will be less.

Have there been any studies done to test this minority vs majority group conformity idea?

I'm not upset about losing points for this post, but I am a bit confused about it. Many out there know more about this stuff than I do. Did I say something factually inaccurate or engage in bad reasoning? I want to know so that I don't repeat my mistake.

Your first paragraph mentions a highly contested thesis that you admit is irrelevant to the evidence. Your second paragraph seems to assert that dominant groups do not strongly-self identify - which seems empirically false - consider spontaneous chants of "USA, USA, USA"

Also, you are using some quasi-technical jargon less precisely than the terms are usually used - and your misuses seem to be directed at supporting a particular ideological position.

But that's just the sense of someone who probably has a contrary ideological position, so I'm not sure how I would recommend you generalizing from my impression. (and the downvote is gone at the moment I'm writing this - was it just one? Just ignore those if you can't figure them out.)

I had suspected that it might be because someone had tried to infer my position on such matters from my asking of the question and didn't like the implication. I did, after all, admit to including the thesis that 'the observed high conformance of a group of females is influenced by an aspect of female psychology' in my list of possible explanations for the high conformance in that group, even though I ended up rejecting that hypothesis.

(I suspect that your position viz a viz whether either gender is superior is not that different than my own. But to be clear, my position is that both genders possess great capacity for type 2 cognition, which is the most important measurement of human success. Any difference between healthy adults of either gender in their use of such cognition comes down to social factors, which can be changed to create a fairer society.)

I'm still surprised about the second paragraph's inaccuracy, though. In my experience, the chants of "USA, USA, USA" occur at sporting matches against other countries. That's not an 'internal to America' thing. Then again, I don't live in America and haven't for many years. I chose America because I was trying to cater my words to my audience. Perhaps that was wrong and I should have spoken from experience instead. (I'm Australian.)

I want to use every word accurately, so I would be most appreciative if you could give me a few examples of jargon I've used and a description (or link to one) of the way it should actually be used.

Thanks, Avi

PS - Yes. It was just one vote, so maybe I got re-upvoted or something. Oh well. The experienced alerted me to an issue. That's all anyone could ask of it.

Image is missing from article.

Thank you, fixed! (And thanks to Said for having backups of all the images on readthesequences.com)

Glad someone's paying attention to comments on old articles. There's actually quite a few examples of missing images like this. Sorry I didn't mention the ones I've encountered so far. I will do so in the future.

Yes, please do. I try to fix all broken links and images in old content that I can find. 

I can't imagine myself ever conforming until it was less than 1/8 as blatant as the example image.  Assigning a >50% probability to the majority being correct seems way too generous, because I have no strong evidence that they're not lying, and a high prior on my ability to see linear distances on a 2D page. Did the 100+ replications collect any data on what sort of people are more conformist than others, besides the gender gap?

On the topic of "why would conformity not grow with 15 people going before you instead of 3", one answer is obvious. The subject realises that the other people are not independently wrong, but that their is a trick. A Baysian can reason that other people might not be independent data points.

In my school I volunteered with the psychology class to help with an experiment. The first person said line C was the matching one, I practically flinched, and gave them an involuntary "what is wrong with you?" look. The second agreed it was line C. I thought "what the hell?!!" and looked at their sheet, then back and my sheet and confirmed they were the same. On person 3 I realised I could fold my sheet over and hold it to the light to check they lined up. If I had been the 4th in the line I would have been really confused. But I was something like 12th. By person 7 I was almost 100% sure the play was "Oh, they must all be in on it somehow. They want to see if peer pressure will turn me into an idiot."

So an unavoidable issue with the experiment is that more people conforming gives the subject more time to theorise about why a large cohort of people would all be making such an obvious mistake in a correlated way. And this theorising will not take long to start focussing on the fact that you know its an experiment , and you start wondering what they could be testing.

I was about to add on that no-one would ever conform if they had even the slightest real reward for pointing out the obvious (eg. some $ for a right answer), but a quick google suggests that my intuitions on that might be really out.

This doesn't seem true; the data correlate pretty strongly, so more wouldn't provide much evidence.

Adding a single dissenter—just one other person who gives the correct answer, or even an incorrect answer that’s different from the group’s incorrect answer—reduces conformity very sharply, down to 5–10% of subjects.

This is irrational, though.

A Criticism of the Asch Conformity Experiment Research Paper

Introduction, criticisms of the asch experiment.

The ability of a single individual to influence the decision making structure of many has been in play for centuries past. The name given to this influence by various scholars and psychologists is peer/group pressure. The term refers to the situation whereby the voice of an individual affects the decisions made by others within a given group.

In the 1950s, a famous psychologist Solomon Asch conducted an experiment geared towards determining the extent to which pressure from a dominant individual affected the decisions made by other participants. In this critical analysis of the experiment, we shall focus on the various assumptions that surrounded the experiment.

Through the use of relevant literature, a detailed evaluation of the experiment shall be provided to validate or dismiss the conclusions reached through the Asch’s conformity experiment.

The study of individual conformity as a result of peer pressure has been in existence for many centuries but has only gained prominence in recent times. This can mostly to the experiment carried out in the 1950s by the famous psychologist Solomon Asch. The aim of this experiment was to gather valuable data pertaining to the reasons behind any act and behavior that was portrayed as a result of peer pressure (British Psychological Society, 2006).

The psychologist managed to do this by conducting interviews and studying a group of test subjects. The participants included seven confederate and one study subject. They were seated around a table such that they could not be suspicious. The participants were asked a series of simple questions and were expected to answer them aloud. These simple questioned would help the psychologist ascertain how group pressure influenced the answers provided by the subjects.

The results of the experiment were very interesting. They showed that the answers given could to a significant percentage be influenced by peer pressure. The participants that were not subjected to peer-pressure gave the correct answers to all but one question. On the other hand the participants surrounded by the people giving wrong answers, invariably gave more wrong answers.

Brain (2000) claims that at least 75% of the participants gave the wrong answer to at least one question. In as much as this would have been ruled out as an experimental error, it was enough to declare that peer pressure indeed can lead to conformity among groups. In summary, the experiment proved that one voice can undoubtedly influence other people into conformity.

Despite the progress made, there were criticisms directed towards the experiment. The first criticism was based on the age of the participants which reflected their level of experience in life related matters. As regarding to the experiment, the participants were all male subjects. In addition to this, they were all considerably young.

Critics under this argument state that older participants would have provided better findings since they are more mature and have experienced different life situations. These accompanied by the fact that older people have more mental strength meant that they could have held to their convictions as regarding to what they believed was the true answers to the questions provided (Weiten, 2009).

In addition to this, the participants were undergraduates and therefore more intelligent than the target population. This may have had an effect on the results. According to recent studies, women have been seen to be more conformist than their male counterparts. In addition to this, the experiment was conducted on American subjects.

However, there is documented (Eysenck, 2004) proof that individuals from collectivistic cultures (Africans) are more likely to conform than their counterparts from individualistic cultures (Americans). These factors shows that the results of the experiment were not conclusive as they overlooked other variables as mentioned above.

According to Hill (2001) the Asch conformity experiment had no ecological underpinnings. This simply means that the experiment and the findings could not apply in most real life situations. This is because the environment under which the experiment was conducted was controlled and there was no room for influence from other factors such as emotions, morals and personal perception.

Further on, the experiment was disregarded by the findings of concurrent experiments which showed that the level of conformity was minimal if the participants wrote down their answers. The findings revealed that the satisfaction of being anonymous reduced the fear of being judged thereby making peer pressure invalid.

Wren (1999) articulates that the experiments were done in the fifties. As such, experiments conducted in recent times cannot yield the same results. The author attributes his opinion to the fact that conformity was more prevalent in the fifties. During this period, McCarthyism was widespread and the educational system followed a strict chain of command. This is so different from today’s society where people exercise their rights and are less ignorant.

However, the proponents of the Asch experiment argue that unlike the sherif’s experiment conducted in 1935 was indefinite and can therefore be termed as the true test of conformity. In addition, they claim that the patterns utilized during the experiments have been used in other experiments and the experiment can therefore be termed as the ultimate guideline for doing further studies on conformity.

Group pressure has been seen as the most prevalent cause of social problems because it leads to group think. This simply means that individuals feel obligated to agree to a dominant decision within a group. This leads to a situation whereby other opinions are suppressed and alternative solutions are not fully analyzed.

The Asch experiment tried to determine the extent to which this is true. However, flaws and benefits have been documented as regarding to the validity of his experiment towards the research and studies of conformity. If the flaws are addressed and the benefits utilized, the experiment will remain to be the foundation of other studies not only at present times but also in future studies.

Brain, C. (2000). Advanced subsidiary psychology: approaches and methods . USA: Nelson Thornes.

British Psychological Society. (2006). The Psychologist . Britain: British Psychological Society.

Eysenck, T. (2004). Psychology: An International Perspective . USA: Taylor & Francis.

Hill, G. (2001). AS Level Psychology Through Diagrams . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Weiten, W. (2009). Psychology: Themes and Variations . LA: Cengage Learning.

Wren, K. (1999). Social influences . CA: Routledge.

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• The Asch Conformity Experiment
• Social Conformity in Solomon Asch’s Experiments
• The Asch's Conformity Experiment
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• Primary Effects On Impression Formation
• First Impression Significance
• Peer Pressure: Positive and Negative Effects
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Asch - Conformity

Psychologists have long been interested in conformity as a powerful influence on our behaviour, making us behave in ways that can often conflict with our attitudes and moral and ethical principles.

Asch was interested in how strong the urge was to social conformity. He believed that people are manipulated by suggestion, where a person’s judgment of a situation can be changed without their knowledge of it being changed first.

When confronted by majority opinion, a person appears to lose their confidence and capacity to go against group pressure, and will instead conform.

Sherif demonstrated that people will look to others for guidance and answer in line with the majority. Participants were tested on their estimation of how far a stationary light had moved in a dark room, and there was considerable doubt about the appropriate response, therefore Asch wanted to test in a situation where the correct answer was clearly obvious.

Social Psychology offers the insight that conformity is characterized by public compliance rather than attitude change.

Asch aimed to demonstrate that a significant minority of people would be willing to say that a line was the same length as another line of blatantly different length.

Conformity involved many concepts such as values, beliefs, morals and ethics, but Asch was particularly interested in perceptual conformity.

In a controlled laboratory setting, using a simple visual comparison task, he was able to test peoples judgement, where the correct answer was unambiguous and therefore clearly obvious The study used a volunteer sample of 123 male American college students from 3 different universities.  Participants were in a group of 7-9, and within these groups there was only one genuine participant, with the others being confederates, working with the experimenter to exert group pressure. This was achieved by ensuring that the real participant was always last or second to last to answer. Participants were told that they would be participating in a psychological experiment in visual judgement, and when seated around the table, the real participant would be seated at the end of second to end.

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Participants were shown 2 large white cards. The first had a single black vertical line on it, and the second had 3 vertical lines of differing lengths labelled A, B and C. Their job was state aloud in turn, which of the lines on the second card was the same length as the single vertical line on the first card. Participants answered in the same order on each round, with the real participant answering either last or second to last. On the first round, all confederates stated the same matching line. Likewise, on the second round the confederates again unanimously stated the same correct answer. On the third round and several latter, the confederates gave the unanimous wrong answer, to see if the participant would conform to the answer or not.

There were 18 trials in all, 12 of which were critical in that the confederates gave the unanimous incorrect answer. In the control condition the real participant would always state the correct line (majority of the time).

The experiment was stopped if the participant grew suspicious or had appeared to have guessed the aims of the research. This however only happened in a few cases and the results were not included. In the control condition, participants named the correct line 98% of the time. There was a significant difference between the correct answers stated in the control condition compared to in the critical condition.

In the 12 critical trials 63% of participants would state the correct line, but nearly 37% of participants conformed to the wrong answer. 73% conformed at least once, but 26% never conformed. The conformity levels ranged from 17% on the first critical trial, to 54% on the 4 th  critical trial, and on the twelfth and final critical trial, the overall conformity level was 41%.

Post experimental interviews revealed two main reasons why participants conformed. The first was that they didn't want to be the odd one out, and the second reason was that their perception and judgement had been distorted and so they believed the answer of the majority. It was also noted that in the majority who conformed, they still continued privately to trust their own opinions and judgement, but changed their public behaviour in order to avoid disapproval from other members. Asch concluded that conformity is a powerful influence on our behaviour, as some were willing to conform even when the correct answer was unambiguous. He noted that the strong desire for intelligent and well meaning young people to conform and give an incorrect answer in a clear cut situation, raises questions about education and the values that guide conduct. Asch also noted that an important finding came from his research. In over two thirds of trials, participants remained independent and didn't conform to the majority wrong answer. In those who participated it was agreed that independence is far preferable to conformity.

This demonstrates individual differences in response to group pressure and shows that independence can override the inclination to submit to the majority viewpoint. A strength of the methodology used by Asch is that laboratory experiments provide findings with good scientific validity. They provided objective, measurable and quantitative data and used a clear IV, which would be the majority opinion, and a clear DV, which would be the percentage of participants conforming. This means that the findings drawn from the use of this method also have good internal validity. Furthermore, the use of laboratory experiments means that the findings and conclusions drawn on conformity can be replicated. This is because an IV, the majority opinion, is manipulated to see its effect on the DV, which is the percentage of participants willing to conform. Also, extraneous variables were strictly controlled, and the controlled environment has allowed others like Smith and Bond to replicate to research and produce similar results. Therefore, a cause and effect conclusion can be drawn due to the variables being controlled, and the replications strengthen support for the original findings into conformity.

However, the use of laboratory experiments can be criticised for producing findings that lack external validity. This is because the research into conformity took place in an artificial and controlled environment and therefore didn't produce results that would be reflective of conformity in real life. This means that the findings drawn on conformity are situation specific and not representative of conformity in real life situations.

Also, Orne criticised laboratory experiments for producing demand characteristics. It is possible that the participants guessed the aims of the experiment, or received cues as to the type of behaviour that was desired from them, and so changed their behaviour which would have ultimately flawed the effects of a majority opinion have an effect on conformity levels. Perrin and Spencer described Asch’s study as a ‘child of it’s time’ because they used the same procedure but with British students, and found that there was only 1 out of 386 trials that conformed. This casts the doubt on the validity of Asch’s study, suggesting that it may be historically/culturally biased. Asch’s findings and conclusions drawn about conformity could just be situation specific to a 1950s America, where independence was not encouraged.

Perrin and Spencer carried out a sub sequent study that found similar results to Asch when the costs of non conformity were high. Youths on probation were used as participants and probation officers were used as confederates. The study was in line with the context of Asch’s and provides valuable insights that when the costs of independence are high, people will publically conform. A meta-analysis by Smith and Bond from 1952 to 1994 used the same or similar procedure to Asch’s. Individualistic and Collectivist cultures were tested along with their conformity levels. Smith and Bond found that the collectivist culture had a higher level of conformity than the individualistic culture, and also found that conformity levels had declined steadily since Asch’s original study in the 1950s. Despite the differences, some of Asch’s variations are in line with the findings of the meta analysis, such as higher conformity levels with females, and with larger majority sizes. This shows that conformity is not a stable tendency, but is unpredictable and influenced by many external factors. Asch made a number of variations to his study, which showed that many factors affect the influence of majority on a person and the pressure to conform. For example, the size of the majority increased the conformity levels, and the presence of an authority figure decreased the conformity levels. It is clear that majority groups do have a significant effect on behaviour, but there are also many other factors and so no firm conclusions can be drawn.

Peer Reviews

Here's what a star student thought of this essay.

sydneyhopcroft

Quality of writing.

The Quality of Written Communication is excellent. From both an English and Psychology perspective, their are no causes for concern with regard to use of appropriate grammar, correct spelling and accurate use of punctuation. The candidate also very proficiently uses a number of psychology-related terminology - an excellent way to show the examiner that you are comfortable to express your ideas about psychology using the language of the professionals.

Level of analysis

The Level of Analysis is perfect - just the right amount is present, A good, strong pair of strengths, which are nicely balanced with similarly strong weaknesses. The candidate explains the strength/weakness well, outlining the positive/negative effects on the results of the studies, and then citing the study that said evaluative point features. It's written very succinctly and flows well from point to point. I recommend anyone struggling with effective psychology evaluation to read this candidate's work.

Response to question

This is an excellent coursework. It covers everything required with regards to the psychology of conformity, normative social influence and the study on said phenomena by Asch. The candidate also concerns a n umber of other studies and theories which only fortifies there answer as it shows the examiner the candidate possesses the ability to qualify their ideas with empirical evidence. The study by Asch is not an easy one to explain, but this candidate shows a clear and accurate knowledge of the study, correctly identifying the aim, the procedure, the methodology and the results. Perhaps a more professionally-worded explanation of the laboratory-controlled conditions and the low mundane realism of the lab experiment could be added to improve this section, but nonetheless everything is accurate and well-presented.

Document Details

• Word Count 1461
• Page Count 4
• Level AS and A Level
• Subject Psychology

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