Okay, I wanna give you a test of your visual acuity.
Your sensitivity to differences in line lengths.
So I'm gonna show you a standard
and then I'm gonna show you three comparison lines.
One is gonna be bigger, one is gonna be shorter,
and one is gonna be the same size as the standard.
Your job is...
tell me which line, A, B, or C is the same as the standard.
Seems like a simple judgement.
You always get it right.
But now, before you give your answer,
there are gonna be
half dozen to ten other people, like you, in the room
and they're gonna give their answers first.
An amazing thing happens.
One after another, they say the line that you see as shorter
is the same as the standard.
Shorter, shorter, shorter, shorter,
they don't say shorter, they just say B, B, B, B. and so forth.
Now it's your turn.
You know B is the wrong answer.
But what do you say?
In this study done by Solomon Asch,
a classic study of group conformity,
the majority of people gave in.
Gave in on most of the critical trials
to agree with, to say, publicly
that they agreed with the majority.
So this study is one of the first classic studies
on the power of a group.
As long as there's three or more people
who agree among themselves
that reality is not the way you see it,
in many cases, you give in
to see the world in their way.
Let's look at that study.
(male speaker) The experiment you'll be taking part in
today involves the perception of lengths of lines
as you can see here, I have a number of cards
and on each card there are several lines.
Your task is a very simple one.
You're to look at the line on the left
and determine which of the three lines
on the right is equal to it in length.
Alright we'll procede in this order:
you'll give your answer...
(male narrator) Only one of the peope in the group
is a real subject.
The fifth person with the white t-shirt.
The others are confederates of the experimenter
and have been told to give wrong answers on some of the trials.
The experiment begins uneventfully, as subjects give their judgements.
Two.
(Subject 1) Three.
(Subject 2) Three.
(Subject 3) Three.
(Narrator) But on the third trial, something happens.
(Subject 1) Two.
(Subject 2) Two.
(Subject 3) Two.
Uh, two.
(Narrator) The subject denies the evidence
of his own eyes and yields to group influence.
Asch found subjects went along with the group
on 37% of the critical trials.
But he found, through interviews,
that they went along with the group for different reasons.
One.
(thinking) They must be right.
There are four of them and one of me.
One.
(Narrator) This subject's yeilding
is based on a distortion of his judgement.
He genuinely believes that the group is correct.
One.
Two.
One.
(Subject 1) Two.
(thinking) I know they're wrong,
but why should I make waves?
Two.
(Narrator) In this case,
the subject knows he is right,
but goes along to avoid the discomfort of disagreeing with the group.
Here the distortion is at the level of his response.
Two.
(Narrator) In the previous experiment,
the naive subject stood alone against the group.
In this variation, Asch gave the naive subject
a partner, here seated in the third position,
who also gives the correct response.
(Subject 1 One.
Two.
One.
Um, two.
(Narrator) With a partner,
yielding drops to only 5% of the critical trials,
compared to 37% without a partner.
Although subjects report warmth and good feeling
toward the partner, they typically deny
that he played a role in their own independence.
The partnership variation shows that much of the power of the group came,
not nearly from it's numbers, but from the uninimity of its opposition.
When that uninimity is punctured,
the group's power is greatly reduced.
Sometimes we go along with a group
because what they say convinces us they are right.
This is called informational conformity.
And sometimes, we conform because we are apprehensive
that the group will disapprove if we are deviant.
This is called normative conformity.
The strength of the normative factor
is shown in another variation carried out by Asch.
In this variation, the subject is told that, because he had arrived late,
he would have to write his answers.
Subjects in this private response experiment
are exposed to the same amount of
misleading information as other subjects,
but they are immune from any possible criticism by the group.
One.
(Narrator) And this enormously reduces
the pressure to conform.
Conformity drops by two thirds.
Asch's experiment is a classic.
It reveals how people will deny what they see
and submit to group pressure.
It allows us not only to observe conformity,
but to study the conditions that increase or reduce it's occurrence.
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