Database results:
examBoard: AQA
examType: GCSE
lessonTitle: Asch Study of Conformity
Imagine you're in a classroom and everyone stands up when the teacher enters, even though there's no rule saying you have to. What do you do? Most likely, you stand too! This is conformity in action - a fascinating psychological phenomenon that affects us all daily, often without us realising.
Key Definitions:
Compliance: Going along with others publicly while privately disagreeing (surface-level conformity).
Internalisation: Genuinely accepting and believing in the group's views (deep-level conformity).
Identification: Conforming to be accepted as part of a group you admire or want to belong to.
Understanding conformity helps explain:
In the 1950s, Solomon Asch conducted what would become one of the most famous studies in psychology. He wanted to investigate a simple question: Would people conform to an obviously incorrect majority?
Asch's experiment was brilliantly simple yet revealed profound insights about human behaviour:
Male college students who believed they were taking part in a "visual perception" test. Each session had 7-9 participants, but only one was a real participant - the rest were confederates (actors working with the researcher).
Participants were shown a card with a line on it, then another card with three lines of different lengths. They had to say which of the three lines matched the original line. The answer was always obvious. Each person announced their answer in turn, with the real participant nearly always positioned second-to-last.
In critical trials, all confederates unanimously gave the same wrong answer before it was the real participant's turn to respond. Would the participant trust their own eyes or conform to the group?
Each participant completed 18 trials:
The results were striking and revealed much about the power of social pressure:
These findings were remarkable because the task was so simple - the correct answer was visually obvious, yet many participants doubted their own perception when faced with group consensus.
After the experiment, participants who conformed gave different explanations:
Asch identified two main reasons:
Informational influence: Believing the group must be right (especially when uncertain)
Normative influence: Wanting to fit in and avoid disapproval
Asch conducted several variations to understand what factors affected conformity rates:
Conformity increased with group size up to 3-4 confederates, then levelled off. Even a single dissenter in the group dramatically reduced conformity rates.
When participants wrote their answers privately instead of announcing them, conformity dropped significantly - showing the power of public pressure.
When just one confederate gave the correct answer, conformity dropped by 80% - showing that social support makes resistance to pressure much easier.
In one variation, Asch arranged for one confederate to give the correct answer before the real participant's turn. Conformity dropped from 32% to just 5.5%. This powerful finding shows that having just one ally can give people the confidence to trust their own judgement, even against majority pressure.
This has important real-world implications for standing up to peer pressure, bullying and groupthink in schools, workplaces and social settings.
Like all psychological studies, Asch's work has both strengths and limitations:
Asch's findings help us understand many everyday situations:
While Asch's research was conducted in the 1950s, conformity remains highly relevant today. Social media creates new forms of majority influence through likes, shares and online comments. Research shows people are more likely to upvote content that already has many likes, regardless of quality - a digital version of the conformity Asch observed.
However, online anonymity can also reduce conformity pressure, similar to Asch's private-response condition, allowing people to express views they might not share face-to-face.
Asch's conformity experiments revealed:
Next time you find yourself going along with a group decision you're not sure about, remember Asch's study - you're experiencing a well-documented psychological phenomenon that affects almost everyone!
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