Asch Experiments

In these basics studies by Solomon Asch, groups of seven or 8 people were put in a classroom and shown two cards by the experimenter. The first card had a main line on it; the second card had 3 lines, each of a various length. Ostensibly, the task was for each person in the group to say the following 3 lines was the same length as the basic line on the first card. The right answer was quite general and, under normal conditions, people choose the right answer more than 99 percent of the time. In these experiments, however, all but one in the group was confederates of the experimenter, and only 1 person was the true, unsuspecting topics of the experiment. In each case, the topic was the last person to say which line matched. One by one, the other group members gave the same, wrong answer. In about 35 percent of the cases, the topic agreed with the rest of the group, even though the answer was incorrect. The Asch experiments showed that conformity pressures could lead individuals to make wrong choices in the concentration of conforming and remaining a member of a group.