In the early 1950’s, Solomon Asch released results from research that was both surprising and disturbing. He set up an experiment that tested people’s conformity – to determine the extent to which people would agree with other people, even when it was obvious that the other people were wrong. We explain below.
In 1951 social psychologist Solomon Asch devised an experiment to examine the extent to which pressure from other people could affect one’s perceptions. In total, about one third of the subjects who were placed in this situation went along with the clearly incorrect majority.
Asch showed bars like those below to college students in groups of 8 to 10:
He told them he was studying visual perception and that their task was to decide which of the bars on the right was the same length as the one on the left.
As you can see, the task is simple, and the correct answer is obvious. Asch asked the students to give their answers aloud. He repeated the procedure with 18 sets of bars. Only one student in each group was a real subject.
All the others were confederates who had been instructed to give incorrect answers on 12 of the 18 trials.
Asch arranged for the real subject to be the second last person in each group to announce his/her answer so that they would hear most of the confederates’ incorrect responses before giving their own. Would they go along with the crowd?
To Asch’s surprise, 37 of the 50 subjects conformed to the majority at least once, and 14 of them conformed on more than 6 of the 12 trials. Asch was disturbed by these results:
“The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black. This is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct.”
It would be fascinating to replicate this experiment with current college students. I have a feeling the results might not be quite the same, given the tendency for younger people to be more vocal nowadays!
This study has wide ranging implications nonetheless, that extend to organisations generally. What is the ‘conformity pressure’ in your organisation? If a senior manager says something that others think is wrong, do they feel free to challenge that manager? Or is there an ‘unwritten ground rule’ that says ‘it is unwise to challenge the boss’?
You can test your ‘conformity pressure’ at your next meeting. Listen to whether or not a different point of view is aired. And if it is, look and listen to the responses from other people at the meeting!
