Dr. Solomon Asch has shown that many people will choose the wrong answer to a question if the rest of the group picked that answer
Dr. Solomon Asch is known for some of the most prominent studies on normative influence in the early 1950s at Swarthmore College. The format of his studies was simple. A volunteer, thinking that this was a study of perception, would be given a pair of cards. One card would have a line on it, the other a trio of different-length lines, one of which matched the length of the singleton line. Which line of the trio is the same length as the singleton? Easy; volunteers sitting alone in a room had about a 1 percent error rate over a series of cases.
Meanwhile, the volunteers in the experimental group take the test in a room with seven others, each saying his choice out loud. Unbeknownst to the volunteer, the other seven worked on the project. The volunteer would “just happen” to go last, and the first seven would unanimously pick a glaringly wrong answer. Stunningly, volunteers would now agree with that incorrect answer about a third of the time, something replicated frequently in the cottage industry of research spawned by Asch. Whether due to the person’s actually changing their mind or their merely deciding to go along, this was a startling demonstration of conformity
References
- Sapolsky, Robert. (2017). Behave Chapter 12. Hierarchy, Obedience, and Resistance (p. 525). New York, NY: Penguin Random House.
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Type:🔴 Tags: Psychology / Social Psychology Status:☀️