Question

how does this test show peer pressure to conform would influence the judgement and individuality of a test subject.

Asch experiment*

Answer 1

Solomon Asch (1951) conducted an experiment in which he investigated the extent to which social pressure from a majority group affect a person to conform.

According to him, the major limitation of Sherif’s (1935)experiment on conformity was that there was no right answer to the autokinetic experiment.

In his experiment to study conformity, 50 male students participated in a line judgment task. A naive participant was put in a room with seven associates. The associates had been instructed in advance to their responses when presented with the task. The real participants were unaware of this and believed that the other seven associates were also actual participants just like them. The real participant always sat at the end of the row and gave his or her answer last.

The participants were shown three comparison lines. Each person had to tell publicly which line (A, B or C) was most like the target line. The answer was always evident. Out of 18 trials, the associates gave the wrong answer on 12 trails (known as the critical trials). Asch also conducted controlled trials in which there was only a "real participant."

Asch assessed the number of times each participant conformed to the majority view. He found that on average, about one third (32%) of the participants went along and conformed with the majority and gave a clearly incorrect answer on critical trials.

In the 12 critical trials, around 75% of participants conformed at least once, and 25% of participant never conformed. In the control group condition, where there was no pressure to conform with others, less than 1% of participants gave the wrong answer.

After the experiment when the subjects were interviewed, most of them said that they did not really believe that they are conforming answers, and had gone along with the group for fear of being ridiculed by others. A few of them even said that they actually did think that the answers by the group were actually correct.

So, the two main reasons people conform are because they:

want to fit in with the group (normative influence)

or

believe the group is better informed than they are (informational influence)