The Asch Experiment

The Asch Experiment
How conformity influenced the world Megan Foster
Many psychologists have performed experiments to prove theories and replicate actions. One of these most famous psychologists is Solomon Asch. In 1955, social psychologist Asch designed and experiment to show the effects of conformity in today’s society. Conformity is the adjusting of one’s behavior or thinking to coincide with group standard or belief. The results from the experiment were shocking and changed the way social patterns were studied.
To test conformity, Asch set up the experiment to be a single- blind experiment, where the participant did not really know what was being tested. A single participant came into the testing room where others, people who know the experiments purpose, sat around a table looking at a white board. On the white board was a series of three lines ranging from short, medium, and long, length and a line that matched one of the lines. The experimenter would the go around the group asking each participant to state which lines matched each other. The other participants would then begin to answer incorrectly, saying that the long/ medium line matched the short line, or vice versa. When it came time for the test subject to answer, the results were shocking, more than one- third of the people would answer incorrectly also, to follow group norms. Normally, when asked these basic, obvious answers alone the participants never erred from their answers but when in a group were willing to change their answers for the sake of conformity. This proved a point that in modern day society, people want to fit in and conform to the norms of society. It is shown in nature that animals travel in groups. Fish travel in schools and birds migrate together, so it is concluded that people tend to try to fit into groups as well. The two major ideas that came from this experiment are the normative social influence theory and the informational social influence theory. The normative social influence is where someone changes their ideas from a desire to gain approval or avoid disapproval. Normative social influence is shown in this experiment because the subjects would often change their answers to avoid being persecuted by others and fit in to the ‘group’. The informational social influence is shown through this experiment because the test subject may very well believe they are crazy, or dumb and are seeing the answer wrong, so conform to others idea or reality. This experiment changed how the world, and psychologists, viewed social interactions and caused many theories ad discoveries to stem from it. Many were fascinated with this experiment that captured human drive and conformity without being scripted. Group pressure and conformity are innately apart of the human and animal nature. All being want to fit in and avoid disapproval from one another. Throughout the world, Asch’s experiment changed how social psychology was studied and caused a breakthrough in history.