The Power of Conformity Psychology of Conformity In the early 1950’s psychologist, Solomon Asche began testing conformity as a powerful force within human behavior. Conformity within a psychological understanding is how a person might hide their true attitudes, opinions, or beliefs to better fit within a group. This was a difficult concept to study due to people’s differing backgrounds, ethics, morals, belief systems, etc, so Asche focused his testing on perceptual conformity. Testing this through a visual comparison task allowed Asche to study this behavior in a controlled environment. Asche expected a single subject to conforming under group pressure through his experiments. Method The method that Asche used for his study consisted of two pieces of paper, one containing three different sized vertical lines and the other consisted of a single line matching a line from the other piece of paper. Six people, who are in on the experiment, are all seated in a row. A single subject would sit at the end of this row and everyone is asked which line the single card matches. The collective group (and the subject) will answer correctly during
several trails until they purposely pick an incorrect answer. The subject will then have to choose to either stand up for their answer against six others or to simply conform even though the answer is so obviously wrong. Each person in the control group had to write down their answers before group pressure was applied.
Results and Related Research Despite the control group individuals having 98% accuracy, 75% went along with a group's decision and about one-third of them went along with the incorrect answer. Asche would discover a number of other findings throughout his studies. In a variation of his experiment involving Social Support showed that when at least one person within the group agreed with the subject, conformity towards the majority group only showed in 5% of subjects. In another study, if a person is already attracted and committed towards the group, they will most likely conform to their ideas. Asche would also prove that conformity is shown prominently in larger groups, but
this will stagnate when the group numbers are above 7 as people become aware that others are trying to pressure them and will resist. Earlier experiments showed women being more conformist but this was proven to be incorrect due to bias and an uncomfortable environment and current studies have shown no differences between male and female conformity. Criticism and Current Practices A major criticism is an argument that Ashe’s research dealing with vertical lines doesn’t relate to the real world. While that is a decent argument, one can argue that real-world conformity is stronger within real-world pressure to form groups. Ashe’s influence is still very much so in practice today with studies showing that teen HIV risk behaviors to be connected largely due to conformity to peer group norms. Studies have shown that conformity within the United States has declined significantly since Ashe’s studies with researchers linking this to a countries culture. Individualistic countries (US) tend to have lower levels of group confirmative vs collectivist countries(Japan).