Solomon Asch Conformity Experiment (Or How People Believe Obvious Lies)

This experiment was conducted using 123 male participants. Each participant was put into a group with 5 to 7 "confederates" (people who knew the true aims of the experiment, but were introduced as participants to the naive "real" participant). The participants were shown a card with a line on it, followed by another card with 3 lines on it labeled a, b, and c. The participants were then asked to say which line matched the line on the first card in length. Each line question was called a "trial". The "real" participant answered last or penultimately. For the first two trials, the subject would feel at ease in the experiment, as he and the other "participants" gave the obvious, correct answer. On the third trial, the confederates would start all giving the same wrong answer. There were 18 trials in total and the confederates answered incorrectly for 12 of them, these 12 were known as the "critical trials". The aim was to see whether the real participant would change his answer and respond in the same way as the confederates, despite it being the wrong answer.
Solomon Asch thought that the majority of people would not conform to something obviously wrong, but the results showed that 25% of the participants did not conform on any trial. 75% conformed at least once, and 5% conformed every time (37% conformity over subjects averaged across the critical trials).
In the basic Asch paradigm, the participants — the real subjects and the confederates — were all seated in a classroom. They were asked a variety of questions about the lines such as how long is A, compare the length of A to an everyday object, which line was longer than the other, which lines were the same length, etc. The group was told to announce their answers to each question out loud. The confederates always provided their answers before the study participant, and always gave the same answer as each other. They answered a few questions correctly but eventually began providing incorrect responses.
In a control group, with no pressure to conform to an erroneous view, only one subject out of 35 ever gave an incorrect answer. Solomon Asch hypothesized that the majority of people would not conform to something obviously wrong; however, when surrounded by individuals all voicing an incorrect answer, participants provided incorrect responses on a high proportion of the questions (32%). Seventy-five percent of the participants gave an incorrect answer to at least one question.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• conformity
• solomon
• asch
• psychology
• group think
• comply
• control
• brainwash
• perception
• sheep
• 9/11
• 911
• peer
• nwo
• mass
• media
• lie

[KASPLARFO]

Classic.

Those robots squeak and need oil!

[DOVUSOPERIOR]

Sheepeople 

[y0utUBeH8r]

@kirokyukan no way i would look at that shit and call those fuckers out for being retarded. thats how i roll.

[kirokyukan]

@y0utUBeH8r No, your delusional.

[y0utUBeH8r]

I am totally immune to this sort of thing.

[thetruthisoutthere32]

What an asshole! The look on his face when he says three at 1:19 is priceless. I guarantee I would not have conformed during any of the trials, unless the other participants' answers matched what I thought was correct.

[pokidots]

have an exam tomorrow and currently staying up all night studying conformity, the last part of that video just gave me the will power to continue. hilarious!

[lopytube]

@R2Mintus

Truth is the truth no matter which presentation.But I will agree that after all these yrs its still amazing to watch

[R2Mintus]

@w3bst3r123

At first I was skeptical, but thinking about it (4 people against one) it made sense, specifically peer pressure is peer pressure.

The 2nd vid is hilarious. This experiment should start w/ the 2nd vid then it'll make the 1st vid less disagreeable.

[w3bst3r123]

@DOVUSOPERIOR easy to say when you are not the subject. Group pressure is very powerful... I dare you to do somthing out of the norm today =D