Keith E Rice - Asch's Lines Experiment

Solomon Asch 1951 (Updated: 23/09/11)

AIMS: To determine whether a majority can influence a minority even when the situation is unambiguous. Asch aimed to find out if the effects of majority influence that had previously been found in situations in which the stimulus was ambiguous are so great that they are still present when it is apparently obvious that the majority

have responded incorrectly.

PROCEDURE (METHOD): Asch set up a situation in which seven males all sat looking at a display. In turn, they had to say out loud which one of the three lines A, B, or C was the same length as a given stimulus line X [see below]. All but one of the participants were confederates of the experimenter, and on some ‘critical’ trials the confederates were instructed unanimously to givr the same wrong answer. The one genuine participant was the last (or the last but one) to offer his/her opinion on each trial. The performance of participants exposed to such group pressure was compared to performance in a control condition in which there were no confederates.

FINDINGS (RESULTS): On the critical trials where the confederates gave the same wrong answer, the genuine participants also gave the wrong answer on approximately 37% of these trials. This should be compared against an error rate of only 0.7% in the control condition. Many of the participants who gave wrong responses indicated that they had yielded to majority influence because they didn’t want to stand out. Individuals who gave only correct answers said either that they were confident in the accuracy of their own judgement or focused on doing the task as directed (i.e., being accurate and correct).

CONCLUSIONS: A majority can influence a minority even in an unambiguous situation in which the correct answer is obvious (as was shown by the almost perfect performance in the control condition). Asch showed convincingly that group pressures to conform in terms of majority influence are much stronger than had been thought previously. However, on about 2/3 of the crucial trials, the genuine participant gave the correct answer, so many people managed to resist majority influence.

CRITICISMS (EVALUATION):

Asch’s results may be explained in terms of the fact that the study took place in America in the 1950s, a time when conformity was high and “doing your own thing” was less socially acceptable. However, Asch’s basic findings have been repeated several times more recently in various cultures.
The research raises important ethical issues. Asch’s participants didn’t provide fully informed consent, because they were misled about key aspects of the experimental procedures (e.g. presence of confederates). In addition, they were placed in a difficult and embarrassing position.
Asch’s situation was limited in that he only assessed conformity among strangers. In fact, majority influence has been found to be even greater among friends than among strangers (Williams & Sogon, 1984).
Asch obtained some relevant evidence from questioning his participants, but he didn’t really explain exactly why there was so much majority influence. He also didn’t explain why there were individual differences in the tendency to submit to majority influence.

Some commentators on Asch replications have found that many confederates (who are not usually trained actors) struggle not to give the game away. Therefore, the results are open to the criticism that the naive participant is displaying demand characteristics - ie: that they realise the ruse and play along with rather than genuinely conform.
Kazuo Mori & Miho Arai (2010), in Japan, got around this criticism by replicating Asch’s study with groups of 4 genuine participants, each wearing glasses with

polarising filters. 3 in each group saw the same stimulus line through the filters but the fourth saw a different line. The order of shouting out which of A, B and C matched the stimulus line was the same as in Asch’s original. Mori & Arai found a gender difference in that their female fourth participants conformed to the similar levels to those of Asch’s original; however, the conformity rates of Mori & Arai’s males were much lower.