People Love To Fall In Line - Conformity Studies Quiz

Answer: Solomon Asch

Solomon Asch was an American-Polish social psychologist whose biggest contribution to the field was his experiments on group pressure and conformity in the 1950s. He was a Gestalt psychologist, believing that the whole is not only greater than the sum of the parts but that the whole fundamentally changes and influences the individual parts. Asch started his conformity experiments at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania where he taught for nineteen years.

Answer: The length of a line

In the first experiment on group pressure, one test subject was placed with seven other male college students. Everyone except for the one test subject was an actor. The students were shown a series of lines - line A and three other lines of varying lengths. One of the other three lines matched the length of line A. Line A was drawn on a separate piece of paper and students were asked which of the other three lines was the same length as line A.

The actors were told how to respond ahead of time and in some circumstances gave the correct answer and in others, gave an incorrect answer.

The test subject was asked the same question and was being watched to see if they would answer with the group or not.

Answer: Seventy-five percent

There are some videos of the test subjects participating in these perception experiments and being asked about their answers after. It's pretty fascinating. The group was asked to give their answer a number of different times and at first, most test subjects gave a correct answer, even if that meant going against the group.

The actors were instructed to turn and look at the test subject if they gave an answer that didn't correspond to the group. When the group exerted any kind of pressure (not even verbal pressure), seventy-five percent of the test subjects went against what their own eyes told them, and on at least one occasion, answered with the group.

Answer: Providing an unseen, written response instead of a verbal response

There were some variations on the original conformity experiment that changed the response of the test subject. In some cases, the test subject was told to write their answer down instead of having to verbally give it. This decreased the likelihood that they went along with the group, ostensibly because it took away the pressure of publicly going against the group.

Another variation was when one of the actors gave a correct answer while the rest of the group gave an obvious incorrect answer to the perception test. Even having one other person as a "partner" made a difference in the level of conformity the test subject exhibited.

Answer: Obedience

Milgram, influenced by the conformity experiments, conducted a number of studies on obedience while at Yale University. In Milgram's experiments, there was one test subject and two actors. The test subject was told that they were to ask a series of questions to another person and every time they gave an incorrect answer, they were to deliver a shock to the person.

The test was conducted by an "expert" who was monitoring the test and directing the test subject. Unbeknownst to the test subject, the expert was also an actor.

The test subjects were told to administer levels of electricity that could have been lethal had they been real and shockingly, sixty-five percent of participants did as they were told by the expert and delivered maximum voltage.

Answer: National Geographic

There are tons of videos available online where people are conducting their own informal conformity experiments, from high school students to TV shows. The "National Geographic" show "Brain Games" conducted their own experiment in an eye doctor's office.

They filled it with actors who were all given instructions before an unwitting participant enters. Every time a beep plays in the office, the actors stand up and sit down. Surprisingly, on the third beep, the test subject stands up and sits down with the group.

She continues to do this until she is the ONLY person in the waiting room and she continues to do it! When she is alone, another test subject who has no idea what is happening, comes in and watches the first test subject stand up and sit down.

He asks her why she's doing what she's doing, she answers that she doesn't know but that everyone else was doing it, and then he follows her lead and does it too. If this is indeed a real experiment, it is pretty incredible!

Answer: Fire

There is another video from a British television show available online in which test subjects are brought into a hotel meeting room where they think they are to answer questions via a survey about online shopping. As they're sitting there waiting for the survey to start, they see smoke coming from under the door to an adjoining room.

The smoke is followed by a fire alarm. When test subjects were alone in the room, they got up and left immediately (as is sensible to do). However, actors were brought in to the room and were instructed not to react or leave.

When the test subjects sat in the room with actors, they reacted quite differently.

Answer: No

In this informal experiment on social conformity, most participants did absolutely nothing. One participant sat for twenty minutes, looking around for cues from someone else... a time that the fire department states would have been deadly because of the danger of asphyxiation. One participant didn't stay in the room the whole time but he stayed there for over twelve minutes before leaving, again putting himself in serious danger if the situation were real.

Answer: Woolworths fire

In 1979, a fire in a Woolworths shop in Manchester killed ten people. The fire occurred during the day and the shop was full of patrons. However most people were able to get out of the shop. As investigators were sifting through the wreckage, it appeared that the people who perished in the fire were located in the cafeteria.

The assumption is that they were afraid to leave because they hadn't paid. It appeared that no-one wanted to be the person to break the rules or go against the norm.

Answer: Bandwagon Effect

The term "bandwagon effect" is the tendency to adopt behaviors or values because the group has done so. A trend or fad becomes more popular or widespread because no-one wants to be left out and so people "hop on the bandwagon." This phrase has its origins in the presidential campaign of Zachary Taylor.

A popular clown at the time invited Taylor to join his circus bandwagon and as Taylor became more popular and his campaign more successful, his political opponents were encouraged to "jump on the bandwagon" in the hopes of also being successful.

The conformity experiments of the early 1950s and beyond are great examples of the bandwagon effect.