The legendary Asch conformity study re

The legendary Asch conformity study re-considered
Kazuo Mori
Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology
(1,819 words)
The Asch Experiments: The Classical Psychological Study of Conformity
We behave under the influence of others, such as parents, teachers, supervisors,
friends, and even unknown others. We tend to choose the merchandises our favorite stars or
athletes recommend in TV commercials. Many people consult the comments on the Internet
when they choose where to dine in a city, even though they were written by totally unknown
others.
We are a species of social animals. Therefore, it is no wonder we are under the
influence of the society we belong. Researchers in social psychology named this influenced
behavior “conformity,” and have experimentally studied a variety of factors affecting the
conformity behavior in the laboratory.
Among them, the most well-known is the Asch conformity experiment (Asch, 1956).
Solomon Asch [1907-1996: Fig.1] was a Polish-born social psychologist in the US. Asch
presented a series of figures as shown in Fig.2 and asked a participant to choose the line
from the right side that appeared the same length as the line on the left.
It was a simple task, so no one would make an erroneous
choice under normal condition. However, Asch demonstrated that
about 30% of participants made wrong choices when the other
responders answered a wrong line unanimously. Asch had
trained those responders beforehand to pretend they were
participants and give wrong answers to apply social pressure to
the genuine participants who were to answer under pressure.
The Asch experiments have been replicated under various
conditions in a variety of cultural background (see Bond & Smith,
1996). Now, it is regarded as a psychological fact that people tend
to conform to the majority even in a simple perceptual task.
Fig.1: Solomon E. Asch
Fig.2: An example of Asch tasks. (Participants chose the one from the three lines on
the right with the same length as the line on the left.)
K.Mori: Asch conformity study re-considered
The Drawbacks of Utilizing Confederates in Psychological Experiments
It seems easy to replicate an Asch experiment. All we need is to prepare some
confederates who will pretend to be participants responding in a way determined
beforehand. However, it is not so easy. People are not so naïve as to be fooled by the
experimental setting used in the Asch study. The present author tried to demonstrate this
experiment in an introductory psychology class several times. The lecturer thought he would
use the late-comers as naïve participants in the demonstration of the Asch experiment. First,
he explained the study and chose some students to take on the role of the confederates. Then,
when a student came in late, they started the line judgment tasks in the same way as Asch.
Did it work as intended? No. The late-comers detected some unnaturalness in the class
atmosphere and seldom showed the conforming behavior as expected. Those students may
have thought, "It's something strange. Oh, it must be a sort of trick because it is a
psychology class." If it was the case, why didn't Asch's participants think in the same way
when they attended a psychology experiment?
The fundamental drawback of utilizing confederates in psychology experiments is the
fact that people are not so easily fooled even with a group of well-trained confederates acting
naturally. The difficulty of finding and training good confederates reaches the limit in case
of experiments with child participants. That is why there have been few Asch experimental
studies using child participants. The genuine participants and confederates were
unacquainted in the Asch-style experiments, and it is also difficult to manipulate the
interpersonal relationships among the minority (genuine participants) and the majority
(confederates). This represents a crucial disadvantage for examining our conformity
behavior in social psychology. As stated above, we live under the influence of the society we
belong to, but the influences come mostly from our family members or friends, and less from
unfamiliar others like the ones in the classical Asch experiments.
The New Experimental Procedure
without Utilizing Confederates
LCD$Projector
Recently, Mori and Arai
(2010) replicated the original
Half0
transparent$
screen
Asch study without depending on
the
performance
of
actors.
Instead, they used a presentation
trick. Light can be polarized, and
2
1
3
Students$$
with$sunglasses
the polarized light can pass
through a polarizing filter placed
along
4
with
the
polarizing
direction while it cannot pass one
Fig.3: The experimental diagram of Mori and Arai
(2010) (Only the third participant wearing a different
type of polarizing sunglasses observed the standard
line differently from the other three. The top of the
standard line in green can be seen in black or melt
into the background depending on the types of
sunglasses. The third responder, thus, was in the
same situation as the minority participant in the
original Asch experiment.)
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placed perpendicularly. Most 3D
movies use the polarization of
light
by
projecting
slightly
different images on the screen
with two different polarization
directions and letting one of
K.Mori: Asch conformity study re-considered
them be seen separately by the viewers who wear a pair of glasses with two types of
polarizing filters for right and left eyes. In this way, only one of the images goes to the right
eye and the other image to the left eye. The discrepancies between the two images are
converted into a 3D sensation in the perceptual mechanism of our brains. Then, the same
device can be used to present two different images to two different groups of viewers by
letting them wear two different types of polarizing sunglasses. It is noteworthy that the two
groups of viewers would not notice the duality because they watch the same screen together
with sunglasses that appear the same type to our naked eyes.
Mori and Arai (2010) presented the same set of line judgment tasks as Asch had, but
the standard lines (shown on the left) were different in length for one of the four
participants. They had the participants in the minority wear a certain type of polarizing
sunglasses, while the other three, who formed the majority, wore another type. In this way,
only the minority participants observed the standard lines differently from the other three.
As you have noticed, the situation was virtually the same as the one created in the original
Asch experiment (see Fig. 3). Please note that the foursome who participated in the Mori
and Arai (2010) study were friends studying at the same university campus. Therefore, it
was not a simple replication of the Asch study, but an examination of conformity behavior
among friends without utilizing confederates. They found that the minority participants
made statistically more errors than the majority. The conformity occurred under the social
pressure of familiar members as well as strangers.
The Breakthrough of the New Experimental Procedure
The new experimental method has not only reconfirmed the former findings but also
opened a new research area on conformity. Among them was a developmental application.
As stated above, because of the difficulty of finding good child confederates, there have been
few studies examining the conformity of children. Hanayama and Mori (2011) conducted a
series of Asch experiments utilizing the new procedure with six-year-old children. Mori and
colleagues further applied the
new
Asch
procedure
to
7th
graders and found an interesting
gender difference in conformity
development. According to their
studies, Japanese boys became
less dependent as they grew
while girls remained at a similar
level
of
throughout
(Mori,
Fig.4: A scene from the Fujisawa et al. (2010)
experiment. (One of the participants was chosen
randomly to wear the fNIRS headgear. He was
answering the Asch tasks under the social pressure
of his friends with none of them being aware of the
presentation trick.)
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conformity
their
tendency
development
Ito-Koyama,
Arai,
&
Hanayama, 2014).
What is going on in our
brains when we make a decision
under
a
conflicting
condition,
such as the Asch task situation?
Now, researchers can probe the
K.Mori: Asch conformity study re-considered
brain activities by utilizing sophisticated brain imaging techniques such as fMRI. However,
fMRI is not suitable for this problem because it can measure the brain activities of only one
participant lying on a cot in the fMRI tunnel. Therefore, Fujisawa and his colleagues used
fNIRS to measure the brain activities of a solitary participant in the new Asch procedure
(Fig.4, Fujisawa, Hosokawa, Nagata, & Katayose, 2010). The fNIRS is another type of brain
imaging technique emitting near infrared (NIR) light beams from the skull surface and
measuring the amount of reflection from the brain. The more active the brain areas are, the
more amount of blood with hemoglobin (Hb) there is. The Hb reflects the light more. Then,
the more reflections come back to the detectors, the more active these areas are. It could be
done with the original Asch procedure with a group of actors, but it would be unnatural to
ask a genuine participant to wear the sophisticated headgear without him or her becoming
suspicious of the experimental purpose. In the Fujisawa study, to reduce the possibility of
evoking suspicion, the target participants were chosen randomly among those who came to
the laboratory together. They found an increased rate of Hb in the frontal pole (ch02, 05, 13
& 15) of the participants under social pressure in the Asch experiment (Fig.5). The frontal
parts of the brain were working actively under social pressure.
The new experimental procedure allows researchers to manipulate the inter-personal
relations among the groups in the Asch conformity study. We assume that people with a
lower social status may conform to high-status people. It is more reasonable for a
subordinate to defer to his/her boss than for the boss to his/her subordinates. However, how
do we prove this experimentally? It would be difficult to ask one’s bosses to participate as
actors in the Asch experiment. Mori and Uchida (2015) carried out a series of Asch
experiments with Japanese junior high school pupils in the new, without-confederate
procedure. They first divided the pupils into three groups according to their scholastic levels;
High, Middle, and Low. Then, they made five different groupings of pupils for the conformity
experiments. A Low-level pupil was grouped either with three High- or Low-level pupils,
and a High-level pupil with either High- or Low-level classmates. Middle-level pupils were
grouped with the same scholastic level pupils to serve as the control groups. The
experimental results showed that Low-level pupils tended to conform more frequently
irrespective of the scholastic levels of the majorities than High-level pupils did.
Fig.5: The brain activities under the normal (A) and the social pressure (B) (The red parts
reflected more NIR light to show there were more amount of Hb. Fujisawa et al., 2010)
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K.Mori: Asch conformity study re-considered
The Asch Study Re-considered: Progress and Puzzlement While the new experimental procedure opened a new horizon of the conformity
research and helped to discover new findings, it also threw doubts on the past findings
obtained with the original Asch procedure. For example, Mori and Arai (2010) found that
the minority participants showed conformity even when some majority participants had
made errors. According to the standard dogma of conformity, the social pressure would be
effective only when the majority answered unanimously. However, the error rates were
almost equal irrespective of the presence of the errors of the majority. In the new
experimental procedure, all the participants were friends of each other, so the embarrassing
situation might have led the majority of participants to make some errors deliberately to
break the awkward situation. Hodges and Geyer (2006) pointed out that a participant in the
Asch original study showed signs of suspicion concerning the experiment. They proposed an
alternative interpretation of the Asch results pointing out that the participants should have
behaved in a pragmatic way to balance the mutually contradictory values during the
experiment. In short, the Asch experiment appears simple, but the factors involving the
actual behaviors of the participants are much more complicated than Asch originally
thought. As Ben Goldacre (2010) wrote in his column, "Popular science tends to talk as if we
have clear answers, but genuine studies constantly produce magnificently conflicting
results." The Asch study has become a legend, appearing in every social psychology textbook.
However, the findings of the Asch experiments were not so legitimate as we believed.
References
Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of Independence and Conformity: I. A Minority of One Against a
Unanimous Majority. Psychological Monograph: General and Applied, 70 , Whole No.
416.
Bond, R. & Smith, P. B. (1996). Culture and conformity: A meta-analysis of studies using
Asch’s (1952b, 1956) line judgment task. Psychological Bulletin, 119, 111-137.
Fujisawa, T. X., Hosokawa, T., Nagata, N., & Katayose, H. (2010). Brain imaging under
group pressure using the Asch experiment: An fNIRS study. The Japanese Journal of
Research on Emotions, 18, 73-82. [In Japanese]
Goldacre, B. (2010). Good scientific research often ends up making a glorious mess. The
Guardian, Friday 5 November 2010.
Hanayama, A. & Mori, K. (2011). Conformity of six-year-old children in the Asch experiment
without using confederates. Psychology, 2 , 661-664.
Hodges, B. H., & Geyer, A. (2006). A nonconformist account of the Asch experiments: Values,
pragmatics, and moral dilemmas. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10 , 2-19.
Mori, K. & Arai, M. (2010). No need to fake it: Reproduction of the Asch experiment without
confederates. International Journal of Psychology, 45 , 390-397.
Mori, K., Ito-Koyama, A., Arai, M., & Hanayama, A. (2014). Boys, be independent!
Conformity development of Japanese children in the Asch experiment without using
confederates. Psychology, 5 (7), 617-623.
Mori, K. & Uchida, A. (2015). Scholastic Achievement Levels and Conformity of Junior High
School Students in the Asch Experiment. Manuscript submitted for publication.
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