Conforming to the Majority Research Proposal

Previous Research The subject of conformity is one that has not been extensively researched over the years. There are very few famous studies concerning conformity but of them Soloman E. Asch’s stands out. In Asch's experiments, students were told that they were participating in a 'vision test.' While unaware to the subject, the other participants in the experiment were all confederates, or assistants of the experimenter. 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 three segments of different lengths. The experimenter asks each participant individually to select the matching line segment. Confederates are asked first and on some occasions everyone in the group chooses the correct line, but occasionally, they unanimously state that a different line is actually the correct match. While the subject knows for a fact that they are wrong, it is then that you find out whether or not they will conform to the unanimous answer or state what they know to be true.
The results in Asch’s experiment rang true to my own hypothesis. Close to 75 percent of the subjects in the conformity experiments went along with the rest of the group at least once. After combining all of the trials, the results showed that participants conformed to the incorrect group answer roughly one-third of the time. To ensure that participants were capable of knowing which lines were correct in the first place they were asked to write down there answers privately on a sheet of paper. According to these results, participants chose the correct answer 98 percent of the time. The next study this researcher gathered information from was interested in the consideration of age in the conformity experiments. Considering most theories of conformity do not consider adult development. This study examined age differences and their responses for two types of tests: judging geometric shapes and facial expressions. Participants