Facts, basics, statistics, tests

participants to the test subject.
2. There will be a series of eighteen simple visual questions,
where the answer should always be obvious. All of your
participants will answer each question in the presence of
each other.
3. Sit the participants in a line, and have the test subject sit at
the end and be the last or second to last to give his or her
answer.
4. Show the participants a card with a line on it, similar to the
card on the left in the above illustration. Then show them
the card on the right, with the three lines labeled A, B, and
C.
5. Have each person say out loud which one out of A, B, or C is
most similar to the line on the left.
6. The first two answers should be correct, so the test subject
feels comfortable.
7. On the third answer, the confederates should all start giving
the same wrong answer.
8. Out of the eighteen trials, the confederates should answer
twelve of them with the same incorrect answer. These twelve
are the “critical trials.”
9. The goal of this experiment is to see if the test subject will

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begin giving the same answer as the rest of the group even
though it is the wrong answer.
THE RESULTS
Amazingly, Asch found that over the eighteen trials, 75 percent of
participants conformed at least once to the clearly incorrect answer
given by the majority of the group. After combing the trials, Asch
concluded that 32 percent of the participants conformed. To make
sure that the individuals accurately understood the length of the
lines, Asch had them write down what they thought was the correct
match, and 98 percent of the time, the participants chose the correct
match. This percentage was higher because the pressure from being
in the group was no longer an issue.
Asch also looked at how the number of people that were present
affected conformity. When there was only one other person with the
test subject, there was practically no impact on the answers given by
the test subject. And when there were two other people present,
there was a small effect. When there were three or more
confederates, however, the results were much more significant.
When the comparison lines were harder to judge because their
lengths were very similar, Asch discovered that conformity
increased. This demonstrates that when people are unsure about
something, they are more likely to turn to other people for a
confirmation. The more difficult the task is, the greater the chance of
having conformity.
Asch also discovered that if only one confederate gave the correct
answer while the rest of the confederates still gave the wrong
answer, conformity was dramatically lower (only 5–10 percent of
the test subjects conformed). This shows that social support can play
a key role in fighting conformity.
THOUGHTS ON CONFORMITY
When the experiment was over, the test subjects were asked why
they had followed along with what the rest of the group was saying.

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Most of the time, the test subjects replied by saying that they knew
the answer was incorrect but they did not want to risk being
ridiculed. Others responded that they actually believed what the
group was saying was true.
What does the Asch experiment tell us about conformity?
Conformity occurs for two main reasons: either because people want
to fit in—this is known as normative influence—or because of
informational influence, where people believe the group 
must
be
more informed or understand more than they do. Both types of
influence can have powerful impacts on individuals within a group
setting. While many psychologists may have suspected that group
dynamics could influence individual perception, it was not until
Asch conducted his famous experiment that the world finally
understood just how much perception could be altered by outside
pressure.

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JOHN B. WATSON
(1878–1958)
Founder of behaviorism
John Broadus Watson was born on January 9th, 1878, in South
Carolina. Watson’s father left the family when he was just thirteen
years old, forcing Watson to grow up on a farm in poverty and
isolation. Watson claimed he was a poor and unruly student as a
child, and that he seemed destined to follow in his father’s footsteps
of a life ruled by recklessness and violence. At the age of sixteen,
however, Watson enrolled at Furman University.
Watson would graduate five years later and move on to the
University of Chicago to earn a doctorate degree in psychology and
philosophy. By 1903, Watson had dropped philosophy and received
his PhD in psychology. In 1908, he began teaching at Johns Hopkins
University as a professor of experimental and comparative
psychology.
By this time, Watson was already beginning to form ideas on what
would later become a completely new branch of psychology:
behaviorism. Inspired by the work of Ivan Pavlov, Watson began
studying physiology, biology, animal behavior, and the behavior of
children. Watson believed that children operated on the same
principles that animals did, though they were simply more
complicated beings. Watson concluded that every animal was a very
complex machine that responded to situations based on its “wiring,”
the nerve pathways that had been conditioned through experience.
In 1913, Watson gave a lecture at Columbia University called
“Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It.” This lecture called for an
extreme revision of the methods of research in psychology,
abandoning introspection for the study of behavior and calling for
behavior to be evaluated separate from consciousness. He called for
psychology to not make distinctions between animal and human
behavior and for it to be an objective, natural science where one
could develop principles by which behavior could not only be

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predicted, but also controlled. In addition, Watson dismissed the
idea that a significant factor in behavior was heredity and disagreed
with the structural ideas of Sigmund Freud. This lecture was later
published as an article in the 
Psychological Review
that same year and
would become known as the “behaviorist manifesto.”
Watson worked at Johns Hopkins University until 1920, when he
was asked to resign because of an affair he was having with his
research associate. By 1924, with his wealth of knowledge in human
behavior and psychology, Watson went into advertising and became
vice president at one of the largest advertising agencies in the
United States, J. Walter Thompson.
Watson spent the last five years of his life living as a recluse on a
farm in Connecticut, and his already troubled relationship with his
children grew worse. Shortly before dying, Watson burned many of
his letters and unpublished papers. He died on September 25th,
1958.
Behaviorism
In behaviorism, it is believed that a person is passive and
simply responds to environmental stimuli through conditioning
(both classical and operant). In essence, an individual is a clean
slate and their behavior is the result of either positive or
negative reinforcement. Because behavior can be observed, it is
much easier to collect and quantify data. Though behaviorism is
no longer as popular as it had been in the mid-twentieth
century, its influence can still be found in parenting methods,
teaching methods, animal training, and changing practices in
people that are harmful or maladaptive.
THE LITTLE ALBERT EXPERIMENT
John B. Watson took a great interest in Ivan Pavlov’s experiment on
dogs and conditioning, and wanted to see if he could take
behavioral conditioning one step further by classically conditioning
emotional reactions in people.

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The participant of the experiment was a nearly nine-month-old
baby that Watson referred to as “Albert B.,” but who is now
commonly referred to as Little Albert. Watson and his research
assistant, Rosalie Raynor—whom Watson would have an affair with
—exposed the baby to a variety of stimuli and recorded the baby’s
reactions. The stimuli included a rabbit, a monkey, a white rat,
burning newspapers, and masks. At first, the child showed
absolutely no fear to any of the stimuli.
The next time Watson exposed the child to the white rat, he
simultaneously used a hammer and hit a metal pipe, which created
an extremely loud noise. The baby began to cry from the noise.
Watson then repeated the pairing of the loud noise with the white
rat. Eventually, the baby began crying just from seeing the white
rat, without any noise being paired with it.
The neutral stimulus was the white rat
The unconditioned stimulus was the loud noise created by the
hammer hitting the metal pipe
The unconditioned response was fear
The conditioned stimulus was the white rat
The conditioned response was fear
As with Pavlov, Watson had shown that it was possible to create a
conditioned response to a neutral stimulus; although in Watson’s
case, the conditioned response was taking place in a human and it
was an emotional, not merely physiological, response. Furthermore,
Watson also noticed a new fearful reaction in Little Albert to all
white objects, which came to be known as stimulus generalization.
For example, following conditioning, the baby in the Little Albert
experiment not only became afraid when it saw the white rat but
also a variety of white objects, from a white fur coat to a Santa
Claus beard.
Doctoral Definitions

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Stimulus Generalization: When a subject responds to stimuli
that are similar to the original conditioned stimulus but are not
identical.
CRITICISMS OF THE EXPERIMENT
Though it was a landmark experiment in psychology, Watson’s Little
Albert experiment has been criticized for several reasons. The baby’s
reactions were not evaluated objectively but were simply the
subjective interpretations of Watson and Raynor, and the
experiment raises many ethical questions. Today, if someone were to
try this experiment, it would be considered unethical by the
American Psychological Association because it evokes fear in a
person, and that is only ethical if the person agrees to participate in
the study knowing in advance that they will be purposely scared as