Transcription
But an experiment is not a public opinion poll. It examines behavior under the pressure of social forces.
As the experiment of Solomon Ash reveals, the experiment you'll be taking part in today involves the perception of lengths of lines. As you can see here, I have a number of cards, and on each card there are several lines. Your task is a very simple one. You're to look at the line on the left and determine which of the three lines on the right is equal to it in length.
All right, we'll proceed in this order. You'll give your answer only of the people in the group is a real subject, the fifth person with the white T-shirt. The others are confederates of the experimenter and have been told to give wrong answers on some of the trials.
The experiment begins uneventfully as subjects give their judgments. Two, two, two, two, two. Three, three, three, three, three. But on the third trial, something happens. Two, two, two, two, two. The subject denies the evidence of his own eyes and yields to group influence.
What Ash found: subjects went along with the group on 37% of the critical trials. But he found through interviews that they went along with the group for different reasons.
One, one. "They must be right. There are four of them and one of me." One. This subject's yielding is based on a distortion of his judgment. He genuinely believes that the group is correct.
One, one, one. Two, one. Two, two, two. "I know they're wrong, but why should I make waves?" Two. In this case, the subject knows he is right but goes along to avoid the discomfort of disagreeing with the group. Here, the distortion is at the level of his response.
Two, two, two, two. In the previous experiment, the naive subject stood alone against the group. In this variation, Ash gave the naive subject a partner, here seated in the third position, who also gives the correct response.
One, one. Two, one. Um, two. With a partner, yielding drops to only 5% of the critical trials, compared to 37% without a partner. Although subjects report warmth and good feeling toward the partner, they typically deny that he played a role in their own independence.
The partnership variation shows that much of the power of the group came not merely from its numbers, but from the unanimity of its opposition. When that unanimity is punctured, the group's power is greatly reduced.
Sometimes we go along with a group because what they say convinces us they are right. This is called informational conformity. But sometimes we conform because we are apprehensive that the group will disapprove if we are deviant. This is called normative conformity.
The strength of the normative factor is shown in another variation carried out by Ash. In this variation, the subject is told that because he had arrived late, he would have to write his answers. Subjects in this private response experiment are exposed to the same amount of misleading information as other subjects, but they are immune from any possible criticism by the group.
One, one, one. And this enormously reduces the pressure to conform. Conformity drops by 23%.
Ash's experiment is a classic. It reveals how people will deny what they see and submit to group pressure. It allows us not only to observe conformity, but to study the conditions that increase or reduce its occurrence.