Solomon Asch Analysis

Is it really so hard to confide in our own opinions and judgment? Does fear of being wrong or being judged prevent us from stating what we actually feel? When I was in high school, I was influenced by my peers that being a conservative was the thing to be in the little town of Van Alstyne, Texas. Even though I did not agree with the majority of the political views, I was too fearful of what would happen if I just said what I actually thought. I was conformed to believe that in order to be accepted in this town, you had to abide by these certain views. This social conformity eventually led me into pretending something that I was not. Looking back at that now, it was dumb of me to think that I had to live up to these standards that were set;
In the early 1950s, Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments to investigate the effect of social pressures on an individual. A group of seven to nine college students, all male, assembled in a classroom for a “psychological experiment” (page 598; par. 1). These young men were told that they were taking part in a vision test experiment, which wasn’t true. The plot twist to this was that one of the participants in the group was the only one that did not know the real reason behind the experiment. Every single person in that room knew exactly what was going on except for him. The rest of the participants were among Asch’s group of associates. They were told, by the experimenter, to give incorrect answers unanimously (page 599; par. 5). Sometimes the incorrect answers they gave were so obvious but still preceded. In order to avoid suspicion from the subject, the associates were also told to give correct answers as well. The experimenter put two different cards in front of the participants; on one was a single vertical black line and the other consisted of three lines, all different lengths. On the second card, one of the lines was supposed to be the exact same
Asch’s experiment was very flawed, in a sense that it did not represent the human race as a whole. He stated that the experimentees were “a group of seven to nine young men, all college students….” The group should have consisted of females as well and would have provided a more accurate result. Also, he could have added in younger or older participants instead of just college-aged males. By adding in more participants that were not male or college-aged would have essentially made the results far more precise. Who knows, maybe females and older people react differently to social pressures than males do, but we would never know that with this experiment. The entire thing seems discriminatory. But overall, the test group does not seem