SOLOMON ASCH EXPERIMENT (1958)

1. In 1951 social psychologist Solomon Asch conducted this experiment to test the extent that pressure from other people could affect one's perceptions.

2. Asch showed bars to college students in groups of 8 to 10. He told them he was studying visual perception and that their task was to decide which of the bars on the right was the same length as the one on the left. Asch asked the students to give their answers aloud. He repeated the procedure with 18 sets of bars. Only one student in each group was a real subject. All the others were confederates who had been instructed to give incorrect answers on 12 of the 18 trials. Asch arranged for the real subject to be the next-to-the-last person in each group to announce his answer so that he would hear most of the confederates incorrect responses before giving his own.

3. To Asch's surprise, 37 of the 50 subjects conformed to the majority at least once, and 14 of them conformed on more than 6 of the 12 trials. When faced with a unanimous wrong answer by the other group members, the mean subject conformed on 4 of the 12 trials. Most of the participants did not really believe their conforming answers, but had gone along with the group for fear of being ridiculed or thought "peculiar." A few of them said that they really did believe the group's answers were correct.

*This experiment allowed us to see how humans are manipulated by peer pressure and how we follow what others do when we are in an awkward situation. Most of the time we do this so we are acepted and seen as normal while doing a task.

http://www.experiment-resources.com/asch-experiment-figure.html
http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/psychology/social/asch_conformity.html

http://www.experiment-resources.com/asch-experiment.html