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.)

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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

Recently, Mori and Arai (2010) replicated the original Asch study without depending on the performance of actors. Instead, they used a presentation trick. Light can be polarized, and the polarized light can pass through a polarizing filter placed along with the polarizing direction while it cannot pass one 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

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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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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 conformity tendency throughout their development (Mori, 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

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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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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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.