Asch (1951) decided that the best way to measure conformity was in terms of a person’s tendency to agree with people who unanimously gave the wrong answer on a task where the answer was unambiguous. In the experiment some of the participants acted as stooges. The stooges were told that they were going to do the tasks again, but this time in a group. There would also be one naïve participant. On certain critical trials, Asch would indicate by means of secret signals the wrong answer to the stooges.
In Sherif’s experiment the estimates showed a convergence when in a group. Asch had found a mean conformity rate of 32 percent. Both had shown that a large proportion of participants conformed when in groups. But there were also many differences in the two experiments.
Asch’s later study was a response to Sherif’s as he felt that conclusions were hard to draw due to the lay out of the experiment. Initially the task could be found to be ambiguous and so saying it was measuring conformity and were it not just people giving similar answers was difficult to conclude. Additionally it was hard to call Sherif’s participants a group or conclude that there were group norms as there was no direct interaction taking place or participants seeing themselves as engaged in some kind of joint society. Sherif created this group by creating trust between the participants; this was done in the first trials (neutral trials) where everyone gave the correct answers. This built trust between the stooges and the naïve participant. Also contrastive of Asch’s study, the answer was unambiguous and so made it elusive whether conformity was occurring or not.
Another difference between the two experiments was that Asch had control over his participants and Sherif had none. The effect of this was that the results could show conformity clearly as it was evidently definable conformity was occurring whereas Sherif’s results were in ranges that followed a norm.
Crutchfield (1954) questioned whether others needed to be physically there for conformity to occur. This is significant as the experiments used group situations to determine whether conformity was occurring. However Sherif had first asked his participants to answer privately then in a group to compare the results. This showed that Sherif was also concerned of individual opinion compared to group opinion. This is not seen in Asch’s experiment which heavily emphasises group conformity.
Sherif (1935) played an essential role by experimentally indicating how group norms can form. In particular, he showed that people who made judgements in a group setting communally developed perceptual standards (judgements of the apparent movement of a point of light in a darkened room) and that these standards persisted even when the group was no longer there. The importance of this study was that it provided an experimental demonstration of the social mediation of cognition at a very early stage of the history of social psychology.
An important factor that influences conformity that was not taken into consideration by the two experiments was social role. Could the results just be a reflection of the times? Experiments similar to Asch’s were conducted in different years and the findings did not match that of Asch’s. This meant that society was having a considerable influence on conformity. Larsen (1974) found significantly lower conformity rates among American students, but five years later Larsen et al (1979) found rates similar to Asch. This was because they were conducted during the time that the Vietnam War was taking place and also people were more liberal, which explains the varying results recorded.
‘The Asch findings are clearly an indicator of the prevailing culture.’ (Spenser & Perrin (1998))
The findings from both experiments were different and post experimental interviews presented diverse conclusions on why conformity occurred. In Sherif’s study all participants denied being influenced by others’ judgements. Furthermore they claimed that they struggled to arrive at the correct answer on their own. This meant that participants did not consider themselves as part of a group which made it difficult to see why conformity occurred. However Asch’s findings had shown much more clearly the factors affecting conformity and so had produced variables into the situation which controlled the amount of conformity taking place.
Sherif’s experiment was the first to create this idea of group norms and Asch later extended Sherif’s work by drawing better conclusions from his own studies. Neither of the experiments had taken into consideration social role and it being an influencing factor. Asch’s study has shown that the conformity level is quite high.
‘The results reveal the tremendous impact of an “obviously” correct but unanimous majority on the judgements of a lone participant’ (van Avermaet (1996))
The findings from both experiments show that conformity occurs for two reasons, normative influence and informational influence. Participants conformed either because of internalisation or compliance. But this idea can be argued against with the self-categorisation approach. The idea being that if we believe that there is a correct answer and we are uncertain what it is, then only those whom we categorise as belonging to ‘our’ group will influence our judgements. As can be seen Asch and Sherif’s studies have drawn many conclusions and raised even more questions in why conformity does occur.
