A Minority of One: Conformity to Group Norms
Overview
Source: William Brady & Jay Van Bavel—New York University
It is obvious that we are influenced by those around us, but in the early to mid 1900's, psychologists began to study how potent social influence can be on our thoughts and behaviors. Motivated in part by attempts to explain the behaviors of Nazi soldiers in World War II, one topic of considerable interest at the time in psychology was conformity, the phenomenon in which people match their attitudes, behaviors, or beliefs to group norms.
While behaviorist psychology explained conformity in terms of simple reinforcement learning (e.g., it is rewarding to follow the group), Gestalt psychologists argued that conformity is the result of perception being determined just as much by our social world as the physical world. Starting in 1951, Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments to test the Gestalt idea that group norms can influence our perception of the world, even when the group norm is incorrect in a judgment of something that can be measured objectively. The experiments involved participants making a judgment about which of three comparison lines matched the length of a standard line. The experiments consisted of a group of people who were confederates with the exception of the one participant, and on certain judgments the confederates purposely claimed that the wrong comparison line matched the standard. This allowed the experimenter to measure whether the participant would conform to the objectively incorrect majority judgment. Solomon's experiments not only demonstrated the power of group norms on behavior, but it also laid the groundwork for decades of social psychological research studying social influence.
Inspired by Asch, this video demonstrates how to design a task to test the power of conformity on judgments.1
Procedure
1. Participant Recruitment
- Conduct a power analysis and recruit a sufficient number of participants and obtain informed consent from the participants.
- The original study included 123 participants in the experimental group and 37 in the control condition.
- Recruit seven confederates (trained actors), who will serve as the "majority" opinion during each session (which will include a single participant).
- Instruct the confederates to simply follow a script in
Results
The results showed that there were more participant errors made per critical trial in the experimental group than in participants in the control group (Figure 1). The mean amount of errors per critical trial was 4.41 in the experimental group but only 0.08 in the control group. Put another way, 36.8% of all participant judgments were distorted (in line with the majority error) in the experimental condition, whereas less than 1% of judgment were incorrect in t
Application and Summary
Results of the Asch conformity study showed that a majority of participants will conform to group norms at least sometimes, even when the group norm is at odds with something a person knows to be untrue. Even though participants could ostensibly tell that the majority was incorrect on the critical trials, participants either second-guessed themselves or simply followed what the majority said. These data provided a springboard for future research (much of which was conducted by Asch himself later) looking to identify the
References
- Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 70, 1-70.
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