Asch Conformity

Imagine the following situation: you are in a classroom and the teacher has asked the class a question. You have got one answer to the question, but you see majority of the students raising their hands for a different answer to the same question. What would you do? Would you go along with your own answer or would you change your mind and go along with the majority thinking that if majority of the people have the same answer then the answer must be correct? Most of the people would change their minds and follow the majority. In psychology, conformity is defined as the tendency to change our perceptions, opinions, or behavior in ways that are consistent with group norms (Brehm, Kassin, and, Fein 213), also simply known as “following the crowd”.
An experiment similar to the Asch experiment was, therefore, conducted by two Harvard psychologists, Kathleen H. Corriveau and Paul L. Harris, in 2010. A group of three-year-old and four-year-old children were asked to decide which of a set of 3 lines was the longest, both individually and in the presence of adult informants who were part of the experiment. Children were consistently accurate when making independent judgments, but sometimes conformed to the inaccurate consensus of the adults
Daniel Haun and Michael Tomasello, another duo of psychologists, studied how preschoolers handle information that they gain from their peers instead of an adult informant or confederate. A total of ninety-six four-year-old girls and boys from twenty-four different kindergarten groups participated in this study conducted in 2011. In the first part of the experiment, the preschoolers were tested in groups of four children each. They received seemingly identical books including 30 double pages with illustrations of animal families. On the left page were mother, father and child together, on the right only one of the three was present, as shown in figure 1.2.B. The children were then asked to identify the family member on the right. Yet, while the children believed all books to be the same, only three of the four books were actually identical, the fourth sometimes included the picture of a different family member on the right page. The child with the different book was encountered with what was, from his or her point of view, a false but undivided judgment from three other peers. Out of 24 children, 18 conformed to the majority’s answer at least once although they knew the majority response to be false