You have probably been in a meeting where everyone raised their hands for the same opinion, and even though you had doubts inside, you quietly raised yours too. When you see a long line in front of a popular restaurant, the place somehow looks tastier. These are moments when the choices of people around us feel bigger than our own eyes and judgment. The research that first showed this state of mind clearly in a laboratory is the “Asch Conformity Experiments.”
Put simply, conformity means “the phenomenon of changing one’s own thoughts or behavior to match the majority because of group pressure.” Social psychologist Solomon Asch designed these experiments to find out whether people would follow the majority’s wrong answer even on a problem whose answer was completely obvious.
In this article, we will look in turn at how the experiments were conducted, the two reasons people followed the majority, the conditions that increase and decrease conformity, and how to avoid being swept along in everyday life.
The Power of Conformity Seen in the Line-Length Experiments
An Easy Problem for Anyone, Yet Split Answers
Asch conducted his first experiment in 1951 at Swarthmore College in the United States. The participants were male college students who were told they were taking part in an experiment on visual judgment. Eight people sat around the room, but only one was a real participant; the other seven were confederates who gave answers agreed on in advance.
The task was very simple. Participants had to pick, from the three lines on another card, the one equal in length to the standard line drawn on a card, and say their answer aloud in turn. The real participant always answered last. Out of 18 trials in total, on 12 the confederates deliberately gave the same wrong answer.
The results were striking. In a control group answering alone, the error rate was less than 1%, but when the majority gave a wrong answer, about one-third of the participants’ answers followed the majority’s error. In a report covering 123 people, about 75% went along with the majority at least once, and about 25% never went along with it at all.
Asch wrote that it was a matter of concern that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people were willing to call white black. It was not a problem of eyesight or intelligence; the situation of facing the majority itself had shaken their judgment.
Two Reasons We Follow the Majority
In interviews after the experiment, the participants revealed a variety of inner thoughts. A few said the majority’s answer really did seem right, many suspected that their own eyes might be wrong, and some said they knew the answer but went along because they did not want to stand out. In 1955, Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard explained this kind of conformity by dividing it into two types of influence.
(1) Normative influence
This is when people follow the majority only outwardly because they do not want to be left out of the group or seen as odd. Inside, they believe their own answer is right, yet out loud they say the majority’s answer.
(2) Informational influence
This is when people follow others because, in an ambiguous situation or when they lack confidence, they believe that the judgment of many people is more likely to be accurate. In this case, their thinking itself shifts toward the majority.
In Asch’s experiments, both types of influence were at work. However, participants who conformed generally remembered conforming fewer times than they actually had.
Conditions That Increase and Decrease Conformity
Asch varied the experimental conditions bit by bit to see in which situations conformity grew stronger or weaker.
- Majority Size: When only one person gave the wrong answer, participants hardly followed, but when this grew to two or three people, conformity rose sharply. Increasing the number beyond that did not raise conformity any further.
- Broken Unanimity: When one confederate gave the correct answer, conformity dropped markedly. Conformity also weakened when that person gave a wrong answer different from the majority’s.
- Response Mode: When participants wrote their answers on paper instead of saying them aloud, conformity dropped sharply.
- Task Difficulty: The more the difference in line length was reduced to make the problem harder, the more people relied on the majority.
Conformity Varies by Culture and Era
In 1996, Rod Bond and Peter Smith gathered and analyzed 133 similar experiments conducted in 17 countries. Conformity was higher in collectivist cultures that value group harmony, and in the United States, levels of conformity were found to have gradually declined since the 1950s. Conformity, in other words, depends not only on individual personality but also on the social climate.
How to Judge Without Being Swept Along
This experiment is often presented as proof that people cannot go against the majority, but looking at the results again, two-thirds of the answers held to the correct answer in the face of the majority. Conformity is not an inescapable fate but a tendency that can be reduced depending on conditions. Bringing the lessons of the experiments into everyday life looks like this.
In meetings, asking everyone to write down their opinions first, or letting the most junior people speak first, can reduce the tendency to lean to one side. Since the mood changes when even one person voices a different opinion, it is also a good idea to deliberately assign someone the role of raising objections. The same principle works online. Comments with many likes and products with high star ratings feel trustworthy even before we read them, and news shared by many people tends to spread without fact-checking. As individuals, it helps to make a habit of taking the majority’s choice into account while asking once more what that judgment is based on.
Listening to the voice of the majority while checking to the end what you have seen with your own eyes: that is the first step toward judgment that does not waver.
