Solomon Asch Conformity Experiment
How would you behave when you know others around you are wrong?
The Solomon Asch conformity experiments were designed to study the effects of group pressure on individuals. In the experiments, participants were placed in a room with several other people (who were actually confederates of the experimenter) and were shown a card with a line on it. They were then asked to choose which of the three other lines was the same length as the line on the card. However, the confederates had been instructed to give the wrong answer on purpose, and the real participant was then asked to give their answer out loud.
The results of the experiments showed that a significant number of participants conformed to the incorrect answers given by the confederates, even when they knew the correct answer. The experiments demonstrated the powerful influence that social pressure could have on individuals. In some cases, participants conformed on nearly every trial, even when the confederates' answers were obviously wrong. This showed that people are often willing to go along with the majority, even when they know it is wrong.
The experiments also showed that the presence of just one other person who disagreed with the majority and provided the correct answer significantly reduced the level of conformity. This suggests that people are more likely to resist group pressure when they have support from others who share their beliefs.
Overall, the Solomon Asch conformity experiments demonstrated the powerful influence that social pressure could have on individuals and the ways in which it can affect their behavior and decision-making.
This was an important experiment because it can help us understand how the people around us can influence our actions and behaviors. Social pressure can have a powerful effect on individuals, and understanding how it works can help us make more informed decisions about how we act and behave in social situations. Additionally, being aware of social pressure can help us identify when we may be influenced by it and make conscious choices about how we want to respond.
Social pressure is the influence exerted on individuals by the people around them. This can take many forms, from subtle cues and suggestions to more overt forms of pressure, such as peer pressure or groupthink. Social pressure can have a powerful effect on individuals because we are naturally social creatures and often want to fit in and be accepted by the people around us. This can lead us to adopt certain behaviors or beliefs that align with those of the people around us, even if they may not align with our own personal values or beliefs.
Awareness of social pressure can help us identify when we are being influenced by it and make conscious choices about how we want to respond. For example, if we are being pressured by our friends to do something that we are uncomfortable with, being aware of the social pressure being applied to us can help us stand up for ourselves and make the right decision for us. Additionally, understanding social pressure can help us avoid falling prey to groupthink, which is the tendency of people to conform to the opinions and beliefs of the group they are a part of, even if those opinions may be flawed.
How have you behaved when you knew others around you were completely wrong? Have you recently fallen prey to social pressure like the participants did in the Solomon Asch conformity experiment? If so, in what way?
Clayton is the founder and publisher of the social and political commentary newsletter Think Things Through and the host of the Think Things Through Podcast.
Twitter: @claytoncraddock
In the process of keeping an eye on the role of groupthink in interpreting the events in Ukraine, I have been thinking a lot lately about the phenomenon of credulity, which a quick right-click search indicates as "a tendency to be too ready to believe that something is real or true."
What continues to amaze me the most about this so-called Age of Information, is that the more extensive the resources for examining the credibility of information, for some bizarre reason the less disposed to examine things in depth the bulk of the smart-phone-addicted general public seem to be.
Even the term itself, 'Age of Information', by now rings obsolete, as a sort of naive idealism which may have attended the early emergence of such capabilities, but by 2022 which more serves as a cue to remind us that what we now inhabit is an Age of Too Goddamn Much Information.
And so, enter the therapeutic properties of groupthink, perhaps even more serviceable a sedative now than it has ever been. It becomes so much easier to sort out all the bullshit and decide which bullshit to (at least appear) to believe, when the syringe one turns to on encountering any claim that things are not as they appear is marked 'Conspiracy Theory'. Whenever one is exposed to such unsettling claims as the idea that a political ideology is false or misleading, the auto-response is of course marked 'What, You Have a Better Idea? Let's Hear It...' Et cetera.
It turns out that, to my personal astonishment but according to the counter-commenters on Youtube, what I have actually been all this time since 1960 is something called a 'Russian bot.' Rest my mother's departed soul, if only she had known....
Which is to say, the phenomenon I encounter continually on Youtube comment sections attached to various items about the war, whenever I post remarks to the effect that something in the above content doesn't add up as genuine or credible, is that replies immediately begin to spring up like so many hydra-heads, to the effect that if I cannot immediately provide better evidence that some other version of events is the actual truth, then my claim of something being false is therefore moot.
What kind of arithmetic is that? Someone tells you that aliens landed in Roswell in 1947, you suggest in turn that this doesn't really add up, and they tell you to prove it? Not every equation in the Age of TGDMI is as straightforward as determining whether or not two and two are five, unfortunately.
But owing to the mass consumption of groupthink credulity, the comforting knowledge that what 'most people think' must be true and that even if it isn't somehow just the survey-driven 'fact' that most people think it has its own redemptive properties for the time being, suffice it to say that in the face of all this too goddamn much information, most of it probably at least somewhat accurate but much of it not, the critical thinking facilities to sort the former from the latter have been the first casualty.