In different variations of the experiment, where different variables could be tested to further his study into conformity, Asch found that conformity significantly increased as the number of participants rose from one to three, but not from three to sixteen.
Also, if the participant had a supporter, or a dissenter, where someone else also gave the wrong answer, conformity dropped to 5%.
When questioned as to why they conformed most participants aid it was because they thought that agreeing with the others was the experimenter’s wishes, or that they would be ‘upsetting the experiment’ if they did not conform, and wished to make a favourable impression on the experimenter by agreeing with the stooges, or they feared ridicule. In one of Asch’s experiments, he placed a stooge in a group of sixteen naïve participants and when he gave a wrong answer by himself, the other participants, justifying the fear of ridicule by giving a non-conformed answer, reacted it to with laughter and mockery.
Asch’s study was important because it shows that even when the answer is unambiguous, there is still a large rate of conformity, and group pressures were much stronger than previously thought.
However it has been suggested the massive rate of conformity may be due to the fact the experiment took place in the McCarthyism era of America, which was a very conformist time in America and being different was certainly not desirable. This may have affected Asch’s experiment. So, during the Seventies, Perrin and Spencer did a repeat of Asch’s study in England. They found very little conformity, leading them to think that the Asch paradigm was ‘a child of its time’. But, one reason for the lack of conformity in their version of the experiment may just be because they used engineering students, who were trained to believe the importance of their own measurements and therefore would be more confident in their own opinion, rather than the need to conform.
Perrin and Spencer also carried out two other studies in to conformity, one where the participants were young men on probation, who mixed with stooges who gave wrong answers, gave a conformity rate similar to Asch. Perrin and Spencer also studied unemployed young Afro-Caribbean men who also had a similar conformity rate to Asch. It was concluded by Smith and Bond that the American studies using Asch’s paradigm showed steady decline in the conformity rate, probably because of environmental and political influences throughout history.
The earliest criticisms of Asch’s experiments were the fact that they were time consuming and d uneconomical. So, Crutchfield set up a procedure where participants were sat in a row of cubicles with a panel with switches on in front of them. Questions were then projected on to the wall, and the participants answered them by pressing switches. The participants were told the lights represent the answers given by others, when really the experimenter controlled them. This arrangement removed the need for stooges, thus saving time and money along with the fact that several participants could be tested at once. Amongst the findings, we saw that college students agreed with silly statements which given a different circumstance would have answered very differently.
The two studies we have looked at show two different types of influence, informational and normative.
Deutsch and Gerard defined the two in this way:
Informational social influence: conformity due to the apparent superior knowledge and judgement of others, shown by Sherif’s study. People change their opinion because of a number of different reasons including status and roles and familiarity. Informational influence leads usually to internalisation, where what a person believes actually changes.
Normative social influence: conformity due to the want to be liked and accepted by others, as shown by Asch’s experiment. Normative does not change private opinion; it affects public opinion because of compliance, where people, even though they don’t believe in it, comply for the above reason of wanting to be accepted.
Zimbardo studied social roles and the idea of identification or group membership. He investigated whether people conform to their expected roles in society 9 or their ‘uniform’.
Zimbardo found some emotionally stable participants to act as prisoners and guards for his mock prison, to see whether the hostility found in prisons at that time would be found in his prison.
Zimbardo aimed to find out whether conforming behaviour was due to the nature of the person or the situation and environment that they were in.
His self-selected sample of 24 undergraduate students was randomly allocated the role of prisoner or guard. With Zimbardo, being the Prison Warden.
As a controlled observation study, it was made ass realistic as possible, even to the extent of the prisoners being arrested at their homes, taken to a police station before being transferred to the prison, where they were subject to strip searches and delousing before they lost their identity, as they were given an ID number instead of their name.
Guards were issued with uniforms and instructed to enforce sixteen different rules and to enforce a ‘reasonable degree of order’.
They were all then strictly observed, with data collected by videotape, audiotape, direct observation, interviews and questionnaires.
The guards soon conformed to a sadistic, abusive and authoritarian role and issued punishments for prisoner ‘misbehaviour’, and first lenient and reluctant, but soon the punishments progressed to severe, unproportioned rates, with the prisoners being severely humiliated and mistreated so much so, that four of the twelve prisoners had to be released early due to emotional disturbance.
The prisoners themselves, at first, resisting the guards’ authority, but soon became submissive and mild showing blind obedience the guards orders.
Even after the four prisoners were released, the guards became more aggressive and the prisoners (where remember, innocent of any crime,) accepted the treatment.
Zimbardo himself, as prison officer, got drawn into his role and allowed the guards to treat the prisoner’s so badly, until he was warned by his fiancé to stop the experiment.
This study shows the strength of conformity as a form of social influence, with the participants conforming to their expected role. Te conformity observed in this experiment was out of social influence and situation rather than personal characteristics, as all the participants had very similar personalities.
Zimbardo’s study came under attack because many people regarded it as unethical, exposing people to such humiliation. For example was it fair that Zimbardo allowed the guards order prisoners to wash toilets with their bare hands?
Zimbardo argued that he provided a day long de-briefing sessions for the participants and carried them on for years, and along with the fact that most participants said that they learnt valuable things about themselves, he concluded no lasting arm was brought upon any of the participants.
Were the guards just role-playing and acting to their stereotypes? This is not very likely, considering the extent that the guards went to, and the fact that they did not start of with an aggressive manner. The degree of humiliation suffered by the prisoners was far beyond any role-playing.
This experiment shows that in our every-day lives we conform to the social role expected of us, (as a policeman, a nurse, a scientist, whatever) and what we expect of others.
We have seen through the studies of Asch and Sherif that the majority can certainly affect the minority. But can the minority ever affect the majority? History seems to prove that this is the case (Hitler, Thatcher etc.), and Moscovici et al studied whether this was the case.
Moscovici’s experiment involved groups of people asked to describe the colour of 36 slides in groups of six people, with four being naïve participants and two being stooges. All the slides showed different shades of blue-green (with more blue, so that you would describe the slide as blue, not green), and the stooges were requested to describe them as green.
The stooges tried the experiment many times in which they tested whether consistency effected the others opinions.
In the consistent condition they described all 36 slides as green, but in the inconsistent condition, the two stooges described 24 of the 36 slides as green, the others blue. Did this affect the conformity rate of the majority?
In the consistent condition, 8.42% of the participants conformed by answering green, and 32% of participants conformed at least once. However, in contrast, in the inconsistent condition, only 1.25% of the participants answered green. Thus, only the consistent condition showed conformity to minority influence.
The evidence indicates that Moscovici was correct in saying that the minority can affect the majority, but the study may have lacked internal validity, because though the effects of minority are seen here, in the real world the difference between minority and majority are much less clearly defined and more complex. Money, status and power all have a part to play in the effects of minority influence in the real world.
Moscovici’s study did highlight the need to be consistent though, as if you are consistent people will be much more likely believe what you’re saying because they can more clearly see that you believe it yourself and will take you more seriously.
An explanation for both minority and majority influence may be social impact theory. This theory states that an individual’s behaviour can be predicted in terms of three factors: strength, status and knowledge and immediacy.
Strength means the amount of people who are present, which can have an effect on the rate of conformity and also the consistency of the message.
People are more influenced if you are of a high status; you need few people of great status to make an impact compared to the amount of low status individuals. Also if you are a professional then you have more of an impact that an amateur.
The closer the source of influence is to you and you’re heart the more likely you are to believe them, and also physically, if you see the person influencing you, you are more likely to conform.
How do you reduce conformity behaviour? Asch found two ways of reducing it. Firstly, by introducing a dissenter into the group. This reduced levels of conformity to only 5%. Secondly, by reducing the number of people with a different answer to you. It is easier not to conform in a small group than it is to a large one.
