Solomon asch experiment summary

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Solomon asch experiment summary: The Asch conformity experiments were

Social Psychology 7 ed. Social Psychology. Psychological Bulletin,— Doise, W. Current Issues in European Social Psychology. Cambridge: — Tajfel, H. Social Identity and Intergroup Relations. Cambridge, UK: 15— Asch received his Ph. This study is one of the most influential studies in social psychology. As for his control group, Asch found that people generally said the correct answer when they did not have a group of actors saying answers before them.

Some subjects had become very agitated during the experiment, wondering why they kept disagreeing with the group. Other subjects admitted during the interview that they changed their answers after hearing others in their group reply differently. After the interviews, Asch concluded in his study that his subjects conformed to the opinions of the group for three different reasons:.

Distortion of perception due to the stress of group pressure: This group of subjects always agreed with the group and said during the interview that they wholeheartedly believed that their obviously incorrect answers were correct. Asch concluded that the stress of group pressure had distorted their perception. Distortion of judgment: This was the most common outcome, where subjects assumed that their individual answers were incorrect after seeing the rest of the group answer differently, so they changed their answer to align with the group.

Distortion of action: These subjects never doubted that they were correct and the group was wrong, but out of fear of being perceived as different, they suppressed their opinions and intentionally lied when it was their turn to give an answer.

Solomon asch experiment summary: During the s, psychologist

Both the Asch Line Study and the Milgram Experiment look at conformity, obedience, and the negative effects of going along with the majority opinion. Those negative effects are slightly awkward, like in the Asch Line Study, or dangerous, like in the Milgram Experiment. Both experiments were conducted in the Post-WWII world as a response to the conformity that was required for Nazi Germany to gain power.

The premise of Asch's study was not nearly as dramatic. Milgram's was. To test conformity, Milgram and his researchers instructed participants to press a button. Participants believed that the buttons would shock another "participant" in a chair, who was really an actor. No one was shocked. The study continued as long as participants continued to shock the participant at increasingly dangerous levels.

The participants knew that they could cause serious harm to the person in the chair. Yet, many obeyed. Solomon Asch didn't just conduct one experiment and move on. He replicated his experiment with new factors, including:. There are also many reproductions and replications of this study online. In each experiment, a naive student participant was placed in a room with several other confederates who were in on the experiment.

The subjects were told that they were taking part in a "vision test. The confederates were all told what their responses would be when the line task was presented. The naive participant, however, had no inkling that the other students were not real participants. After the line task was presented, each student verbally announced which line either 1, 2, or 3 matched the target line.

There were 18 different trials in the experimental conditionand the confederates gave incorrect responses in 12 of them, which Asch referred to as the "critical trials. During the first part of the procedure, the confederates answered the questions correctly. However, they eventually began providing incorrect answers based on how they had been instructed by the experimenters.

The study also included 37 participants in a control condition. In order to ensure that the average person could accurately gauge the length of the lines, the control group was asked to individually write down the correct match. After combining the trials, the results indicated that participants conformed to the incorrect group answer approximately one-third of the time.

The experiments also looked at the effect that the number of people present in the group had on conformity.

Solomon asch experiment summary: Solomon Asch experimented with

When just one confederate was present, there was virtually no impact on participants' answers. The presence of two confederates had only a tiny effect. The level of conformity seen with three or more confederates was far more significant. Asch also found that having one of the confederates give the correct answer while the rest of the confederates gave the incorrect answer dramatically lowered conformity.

Later studies have also supported this finding, suggesting that having social support is an important tool in combating conformity. At the conclusion of the Asch experiments, participants were asked why they had gone along with the rest of the group. In most cases, the students stated that while they knew the rest of the group was wrong, they did not want to solomon asch experiment summary facing ridicule.

A few of the participants suggested that they actually believed the other members of the group were correct in their answers. These results suggest that conformity can be influenced both by a need to fit in and a belief that other people are smarter or better informed. Asch was interested to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view.

Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the majority view. Why did the participants conform so readily? Apparently, people conform for two main reasons: because they want to fit in with the group normative influence and because they believe the group is better informed than they are informational influence.

One limitation of the study is that is used a biased sample. All the participants were male students who all belonged to the same age group. This means that the study lacks population validity and that the results cannot be generalized to females or older groups of people. Another problem is that the experiment used an artificial task to measure conformity — judging line lengths.

How often are we faced with making a judgment like the one Asch used, where the answer is plain to see? This means that the study has low ecological validity and the results cannot be generalized to other real-life situations of conformity. Asch replied that he wanted to investigate a situation where the participants could be in no doubt what the correct answer was.

In so doing he could explore the true limits of social influence. In the s America was very conservative, involved in an anti-communist witch-hunt which became known as McCarthyism against anyone who was thought to hold sympathetic left-wing views. Conformity to American values was expected. Support for this comes from studies in the s and s that show lower conformity rates e.

They found that in only one out of trials did an observer join the erroneous majority. Perrin and Spencer argue that a cultural change has taken place in the value placed on conformity and obedience and in the position of students. In America in the s, students were unobtrusive members of society, whereas now, they occupy a free questioning role.

However, one problem in comparing this study with Asch is that very different types of participants are used. Perrin and Spencer used science and engineering students who might be expected to be more independent by training when it came to making perceptual judgments. Finally, there are ethical issues : participants were not protected from psychological stress which may occur if they disagreed with the majority.

Solomon asch experiment summary: During Asch's experiment.

Evidence that participants in Asch-type situations are highly emotional was obtained by Back et al. This finding also suggests that they were in a conflict situation, finding it hard to decide whether to report what they saw or to conform to the opinion of others. However, deception was necessary to produce valid results. The clip below is not from the original experiment inbut an acted version for television from the s.

In further trials, Aschchanged the procedure i.