Sticking to Your Guns or Conforming to Social Pressure in a Study, “A Minority of One Against a Unanimous Majority” by Solomon E. Asch

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Conforming to Social Pressures

How do people conform to social pressures? Will they go along with other’s opinions, or will they stick to their guns and trust their own judgments? To determine the effect of socials pressure on decision making, an experiment was performed to test the hypothesis; If a person is presented with visual information in a group setting and asked questions about their perception of what they see, will they truthfully respond if others in the group unanimously choose the wrong answer? A study titled “A Minority of One Against a Unanimous Majority”, Solomon E. Asch designed an experiment to test the power of social forces to understand the extent of influence they have on psychological function. (Asch)

The experiment was set up by gathering seven to nine individuals in a classroom setting to answer questions about the length of one line on a paper compared to three other lines. The lines were numbered and the participants had to call out the number of the line that they perceived to match the single line on the paper with only one of the lines equaling the single line. Only one of the individuals in the group was actually being tested, the other six to eight individuals were instructed prior to the experiment to give the wrong answer. The experiment contained eighteen different examples for the group to compare. The one “critical subject”, the one person who was pitted against the masses, was always in the minority in picking the correct line. The control group was instructed to act passively to the critical subject’s responses and not act surprised at whatever choice they made. The entire experiment was conducted at three different colleges and consisted of random samplings of the student populat...

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...ed. It is also very hard for most people to go against the majority because doing this, in most situations, causes a person to stand out and be the subject of attention where all eyes are on them.

Although Asch’s experiment cannot be considered the most reliable, the idea opened the door for many to investigate the idea of conformity and how it applies to social pressure. Perception is changed in many different situations that can be tied to conforming to what a majority says. Children are influenced in their decision making because they are concerned about what their friends think or do. Drug usage and other risky behaviors can also be attributed to conforming to how a group thinks or acts. Witnesses in court cases or even at crime scenes will also sometimes conform their thinking to deal with the pressures put on them to “see things” a certain way.

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