One of the most significant social psychologists, Solomon E. Asch, has shaped psychology today with his views. In this piece, we will explore the complex research that established Asch as a key authority on the subtle dynamics of peer pressure and the powerful influence of group dynamics.
Asch’s experimental investigations into conformity not only revealed the group’s sometimes invisible power over the individual but also how interactions within society are woven with compliance. We will delve into Asch’s profound observations and examine the studies that have greatly influenced the field’s understanding of social behavior. So, who was Solomon Asch?
Key Insights
- The work of Solomon Asch essentially illustrates the powerful influence that group pressure has on an individual’s judgments and actions, revealing that people frequently follow the opinions of others even when they are at odds with their own sensibilities.
- His studies on majority power and conformity underscore the significance of normative influence in social contexts by illuminating the conflict between the demand for independence and the need for social approval.
- Asch’s research offers a crucial comprehension of group dynamics by demonstrating how, in the face of a unanimous group agreement, the need for conformity may cause an individual’s perceptions, thoughts, and behaviors to be distorted.
Solomon Asch’s Life
Born on September 14, 1907, in Warsaw, Poland, Solomon E. Asch was to become one of the most prominent psychologists of the 20th century, and his research continues to have an impact on how we understand how people behave in social situations.
Asch’s lifetime commitment to psychological study was sparked by his upbringing in a home that valued education and intellectual interests. Asch’s family moved to the US in the early 1920s in search of a fresh start.
Asch’s future profession would be greatly influenced by this relocation, as it gave him the chance to interact with people from different backgrounds and cultures, which stoked his interest in the workings of the human mind.
Conformity Experiment
For what he claimed to be a visual perception experiment, Asch assembled seven or nine male college students from Swarthmore College in the USA (Asch, 1955). Except for one (the real participant), the others were all confederates, and when he (the real participant) walked in, the others had already taken their seats in a row (Hock, 2005). He took a seat at the very end of the row, and the study began.
Two huge white cards were shown by the experimenter: one had three lines of varying lengths (the comparison lines) and the other had only one line (the standard line). Out of the three lines, one was the same as the standard line, and the others were of different lengths.
It was required of the participants to state aloud which of the three comparison lines equaled the standard line (Asch, 1955). The group all provided the right response on the first two trials, but on the third trial, the confederates all provided the incorrect response (Asch, 1955). In twelve out of the eighteen trials in each study, the confederates provided unanimously false replies (Asch, 1955). On occasion, they provided accurate responses to allay participant suspicions of collaboration (Asch, 1955).
Outcomes
Asch conducted tests on 123 distinct young men from three distinct universities (Asch, 1955). In the group setting outlined in the approach, he discovered that participants made errors in line judgment 36.8% of the time, compared to less than 1% of the time when they were alone (the control group) (Asch, 1955). A quarter or so of the participants never succumbed to the majority, whereas some people nearly always complied (Asch, 1955). In subsequent interviews, every participant who complied with the majority overestimated the frequency of their conformity (Asch, 1955).
Conclusion
At the conclusion of the study, participants were interviewed. Participants’ nonconformity was explained away by things like having faith in their own judgment or having to keep to their responses (Asch, 1955). According to Asch (1955), conformists used justifications such as “I am wrong, they are right,” “not to spoil your results,” or the notion that there was a problem with them since they saw the solution differently and hence wanted to conceal it. Even those who conformed thought that the group members may just be “sheep” who followed the first person to reply, or that the people who gave the erroneous answer were only experiencing an optical illusion, but they nevertheless answered wrongly along with the majority (Asch, 1955).
To answer the question of why people conform so readily, Deutsch and Gerard (1955) are often cited. They proposed two terms:
- Normative social influence – related to group norms, which are expectations held by group members regarding how to behave.
- Informative social influence – related to when an individual thinks that group members have more information than them.
Criticism
Despite the fact that several additional studies have supported Asch’s findings, it is frequently criticized for being difficult to apply his findings in practical contexts (Hock, 2005). Critics contend that compliance on significant real-life issues has nothing to do with something as unimportant as measuring a line’s length in a lab (Hock, 2005).
An additional critique posits that the subjects could be adhering to the investigator’s expectations rather than those of the collective (Schulman, 1967).
Lionel G. Standing and Marie-France Lalancette contend that Asch’s results were only a phenomenon rather than a consistent feature of human behavior, based on the findings of Perrin & Spencer, as well as their own results, which demonstrated no conformity when the test stimuli were more ambiguous (Standing & Lalancette, 1990).
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