Asch's Conformity Experiment

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Asch’s Conformity Experiment Conformity refers to the tendency of a person to go a long with rules or behaviors of a social or larger group, even if it is believed that the behavior is wrong, because of a desire to fit in, be correct or be liked. There have been many researchers who have studied the power of conformity, including Solomon Asch whose experiments about line judgment are famous. In these experiments, Asch sets up a situation to see if study participants would conform to a task even though they realized that the outcome was wrong. However, it is likely that the Asch experiment results do not show an accurate view of conformity in our society today. Do you think Asch’s experiment shows an accurate view of conformity in our society today? In Ash’s experiments there were seven people involved as confederates, or fakes. There was one person who was actually a participant and was not aware of the true purpose of the experiment. The participants were told that the study was about vision accuracy. They were shown a line and then asked to choose a matching line from a group of three lines, each of a different length. The experimenter asked each participant to say their answer out loud, with the actual participant answering last. As the confederates gave the wrong answer, the actual participant faced a difficult situation. The participant had to either be the only person to choose the correct matching line (and be different), or to conform and go along with the group to fit in. The result of the Asch conformity experiment was that 75 percent of the actual participants went along with, or conformed to, the group behavior to answer incorrectly. The experiment was then changed in two ways to see if conformity changed as well. Both when the actual participants were not alone in answering correctly, and when they were allowed to write their answers conformity
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