In , Asch conducted his classic conformity experiments. The group was first shown a card with a line on it, then they were shown a second card with three lines labeled A, B, and C. Each person was then asked to choose which line on the second card matched the line on the first card. The real participant always gave his answer last or second to last. There were eighteen rounds or trials in total and the correct answer for each trial was very obvious. Unknown to the participant, the confederates were instructed to answer incorrectly in twelve specific trials.
During the first two rounds, all the confederates answered correctly and this helped to put the participant at ease. However, after the fourth round, the confederates all gave the same wrong answer whenever they got to a critical trial. They gave these wrong answers loudly and confidently.
Asch then waited to see if the participant would conform to group pressure by giving the same incorrect answer as the confederates. Why did so many participants conform at least once to the majority view when they could see the correct answer for themselves? After the experiment, some of the participants explained that they did not want to stand out or be ridiculed for their answers.
Other participants said they actually thought the majority view was correct. Asch concluded that there are two major reasons people conform:. They want to appear normal and fit in with everyone else in the group this is called normative influence. Asch found that conformity was more likely to occur if there were three or more confederates who all gave the same wrong answer. However, if one confederate gave the correct answer while the other confederates answered incorrectly, the participant was much less likely to conform.
In later experiments, he showed that conformity increases when 1 the task at hand is more difficult, 2 the other members of the group have a higher social status, and 3 the participant is asked to respond publicly. Social conformity is found in many aspects of everyday life. For example, people conform to social standards of wearing clothing in public and driving in a particular lane on the road.
However, social pressure may also be applied to other fields such as:. Politics - Residents who display political yard signs may influence other residents in their community to vote for a specific political party.
Marketing - Companies may increase sales by using stats to show that most people in the neighborhood are using a specific product or service. Healthcare - People who want to improve their health may be encouraged to surround themselves with individuals who have healthy habits such as exercising regularly and eating a healthy diet.
Parenting - Parents may influence the behaviors their children develop by monitoring the friends they keep. Military - New recruits are influenced to shave their head, develop combat skills, and follow orders if they want to fit in with the group.
Education - Schools maintain order by ensuring that new students conform to certain existing standards. New students may be influenced to wear a uniform or respond to specific bells when they observe the behavior of other students. His participants were all young male students who attended Swarthmore College.
Consequently, his results may not be applicable to females or older people. A second issue is that the study has low ecological validity as the results may not be applicable to real-life scenarios that involve conformity.
Asch ensured that the participants were able to identify the correct answer in each trial. However, people in real-life situations of conformity may be unsure what the correct decision is. Studies conducted in other countries show that the level of conformity may change depending on whether a country prioritizes individualism or collectivism.
Other critics argue that participants did not have a desire to conform to the rest of the group, but simply wanted to avoid unnecessary conflict. Asch authored a number of landmark articles that helped to shape the field of social psychology. In , he published his research findings in the book Social Psychology. Asch married Florence Miller in and the two enjoyed a long and pleasant marriage.
Asch and Florence met at a library and although they lived just a few blocks apart, they wrote to each other constantly during their courtship. Asch, who was affectionately called Shlaym by his friends, died on February 20, , at his home in Haverford, Pennsylvania. He was 88 years of age. He was survived by his wife, two grandsons, a granddaughter, and a great-grandson.
His son, Peter, predeceased him in Asch, S. Studies in space orientation: I. Perception of the upright with displaced visual fields. Asch pointed the way to a balanced and productive blend of natural and social science, an approach that produced three pioneering and highly influential experiments and a classic textbook, Social Psychology. In studying what became known as prestige suggestion, Asch manipulated the attribution of quotations like "I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms are in the physical.
Behaviorists interpreted this result in terms of simple associations, but Asch showed that the attribution affected the meaning of the quotation: Lenin meant blood whereas Jefferson meant politics.
Hence, Asch helped establish the dominant view of contemporary social psychology: behavior is not a response to the world as it is, but to the world as perceived. In his experiments on impression formation, Asch showed that the meaning of a personality trait depended upon other traits attributed to the same person. Though controversial especially among advocates of elementist models , the importance of his results is uncontested.
The network of inferences from one characteristic to another is being studied still; Asch's technique of comparing impressions generated by descriptions differing in only one characteristic is still popular. Asch's most famous experiments set a contest between physical and social reality. His subjects judged unambiguous stimuli — lines of different lengths — after hearing other opinions offering incorrect estimates.
This technique was a powerful lens for examining the social construction of reality, and gave rise to decades of research on conformity. Stanley Milgram's studies of obedience to authority were inspired directly by Asch's studies. Solomon Asch was born in Warsaw but emigrated to the United States in at the age of Asch attended the College of the City of New York and graduated with his bachelor's degree in He then went to Columbia University, where he was mentored by Max Wertheimer and earned his master's degree in and his Ph.
During the early years of World War II when Hitler was at the height of power, Solomon Asch began studying the impact of propaganda and indoctrination while he was a professor at Brooklyn College's psychology department.
It was during the s, Asch became famous for his series of experiments known as the Asch conformity experiments that demonstrated the effects of social pressure on conformity. Just how far would people go to conform to others in a group? Asch's research demonstrated that participants were surprisingly likely to conform to a group, even when they personally believed that the group was incorrect.
From to , Asch held the title of director and distinguished professor of psychology at the Institute for Cognitive Studies at Rutgers University. Solomon Asch is considered a pioneer of social psychology and Gestalt psychology. His conformity experiments demonstrated the power of social influence and still serve as a source of inspiration for social psychology researchers today.
Understanding why people conform and under what circumstances they will go against their own convictions to fit in with the crowd not only helps psychologists understand when conformity is likely to occur but also what can be done to prevent it.
Asch also supervised Stanley Milgram's Ph. Milgram's work helped demonstrate how far people would go to obey an order from an authority figure.
While Asch's work illustrated how peer pressure influences social behavior often in negative ways , Asch still believed that people tended to behave decently towards each other. The power of situations and group pressure, however, could often lead to less than ideal behavior and decision-making. In a review of some of the most eminent psychologists of the 20th century, Asch was ranked as the 41st most-frequently cited psychologist.
Ever wonder what your personality type means? Sign up to find out more in our Healthy Mind newsletter. The biological bases of conformity. Front Neurosci. Asch SE. Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments. In: Guetzkow H, ed.
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