Opinions and Social pressure summary

Around the 1950’s a social psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments called “Opinions and Social Pressure” to see how groups impact individual others. The basic design of the experiment is seven to nine college students are sat in a classroom for a “visual judgment experiment” and they compare the length of lines. The experimenter had two cards, the first card had one line and the second had 3 lines with different lengths. The students were asked to give their answer aloud and in the order of which they were sitting. There was only one student who didn’t know that they were being tested. He sat close to the end so all the other participants would give their answers before he gave his. Some of the participants were told to give incorrect answers but were also told to give the correct answer every so often so the naïve didn’t suspect. There were 18 trials in each series and on 12 the majority gives the wrong answers. Of 123 subjects put to the test, 75% agreed with the majority. 25% of the subjects were completely independent and never went along with the majority. This shows that subjects are very likely to agree with everyone else. The participants that comply do it for one of the two reasons: 1. they believe the group is better informed than they are or 2. They do not want to be different. Asch’s experiment was modified to examine the question which aspect of the influence of a majority is more important- the size of the majority or its unanimity? The size of the majority does matter but only to a certain point. When a subject was confronted with a single individual, he continued to answer independently and correctly. When increased by two, the pressure became substantial: minority subjects accepted the wrong answer 13.6 per cent of the time and after increased by three, the subject’s errors went up to 32.8 per cent. Uprising of the majority’s unanimity had a striking effect. In Asch’s experiment, the subject was given a partner that did not