Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

 
Module 53 
Social Infl uence and Groups 
591
Indeed, because the participants all agreed on the fi rst few trials, the procedure 
appeared to be simple. But then something odd began to happen. From the perspec-
tive of the participant in the group who answered last on each trial, all the answers 
of the fi rst six participants seemed to be wrong—in fact, unanimously wrong. And 
this pattern persisted. Over and over again, the fi rst six participants provided answers 
that contradicted what the last participant believed to be correct. The last participant 
faced the dilemma of whether to follow his or her own perceptions or follow the 
group by repeating the answer everyone else was giving. 
As you might have guessed, this experiment was more contrived than it appeared. 
The fi rst six participants were actually confederates (paid employees of the experi-
menter) who had been instructed to give unanimously erroneous answers in many 
of the trials. And the study had nothing to do with perceptual skills. Instead, the 
issue under investigation was conformity. 
Asch found that in about one-third of the trials, the participants conformed to 
the unanimous but erroneous group answer; about 75% of all participants conformed 
at least once. However, he found strong individual differences. Some participants 
conformed nearly all the time, whereas others never did.
 CONFORMITY CONCLUSIONS 
Since Asch’s pioneering work, literally hundreds of studies have examined confor-
mity, and we now know a great deal about the phenomenon. Signifi cant fi ndings 
focus on:
• The characteristics of the group . The more attractive a group appears to its mem-
bers, the greater its ability to produce conformity. Furthermore, a person’s 
relative status, the social rank held within a group, is critical: The lower a 
person’s status in the group, the greater groups’ power over that person’s 
behavior (Hogg & Hains, 2001).
• The situation in which the individual is responding . Conformity is considerably 
higher when people must respond publicly than it is when they can do so 
privately, as the founders of the United States noted when they authorized 
secret ballots in voting.
• The kind of task . People working on ambiguous tasks and questions (those with 
no clear answer) are more susceptible to social pressure. When asked to give 
an opinion on something, such as what type of clothing is fashionable, a 
person will more likely yield to conformist pressures than he or she will if 
asked a question of fact. In addition, tasks at which an individual is less compe-
tent than others in the group make conformity more likely. For example, a 
person who is an infrequent computer user may feel pressure to conform to 
an opinion about computer brands when in a group of experienced computer 
users.
• Unanimity of the group . Groups that unanimously support a position show the 
most pronounced conformity pressures. But what about the case in which 
people with dissenting views have an ally in the group, known as a social 
supporter,
who agrees with them? Having just one person present who shares 
the minority point of view is suffi cient to reduce conformity pressures (Prislin, 
Brewer, & Wilson, 2002; Goodwin, Costa, & Adonu, 2004; Levine & Moreland, 
2006).