The Solomon Asch experiment is a classic in psychological research. Describe the study and what was found. Some have argued that the results are not terribly valuable because conformity is being assessed on a relatively innocuous task. What kind of situation might you use to test conformity that would be immune to this criticism? Can you think of a way to test conformity in the real world, in a way that would be both useful and ethical?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The Asch experiment investigated conformity. He wanted to determine why some people would go along with a group in situations where they could see the group's opinion was wrong. He had participants enter a room with several confederates, where they were presented with a picture of a reference line and then a picture of three lines of varying length. Participants were asked a number of questions while sitting with the confederates in the study. On some of the questions, the confederates would intentionally answer incorrectly, and what Asch observed was how often the participant would answer incorrectly just to reflect the response of the confederates. Asch observed that 75 percent went along with the incorrect group at least once during the experiment, and on average people conformed to the incorrect group response a third of the time. Students will then need to describe a study they would do to test conformity in the real world, in a way that would be useful and ethical. As an example, they might propose something like testing student conformity to bad choices (e.g., cheating on an exam or lying to adults).