1. Asch Conformity Experiment
By: Katelyn Bacsi, Lauren Borders, and Justin Bingham

2. Psychologist Involved:
Solomon Asch was the psychologist that came up with the idea. He believed people behave based on how they perceive the world, not how it is actually. He was born on Sept. 14, and died on Feb. 20, He won the Guggenheim Fellowship Award for Social Sciences.

3. Purpose of the Experiment:
The purpose of this experiment is to see how social pressure in a majority group can influence the decision of a person.

4. summary Series of psychological experiments conducted in the 1950s.
The experiments revealed the degree to which a person's own opinions are influenced, in which people were willing to ignore reality and give an incorrect answer in order to conform to the rest of the group.
performed at Swarthmore College

5. Procedure
In each experiment, a naive participant was placed in a room with several other accomplices who were in on the experiment. Subjects were told that they were taking part in a "vision test." A total of 50 participants were part of Asch’s experimental condition.
The accomplices were told what their responses would be when the line task was presented. The naive participant, however, had no indication that the others were not real participants. After the line task was presented, each would verbally announce which line (either A, B, or C) matched the target line.There were 18 different trials and the accomplices gave incorrect responses in 12, which Asch referred to as the "critical trials." The purpose of these trials was to see if the participants would change his answer in order to conform to how the others in the group responded.
The study also included 37 participants as a control. This involved each participant giving their response to the line task with only the experimenter in the room and no group of accomplices.

6. Results
⅓ of the people experimented on by being put into this situation conformed to the group. They conformed even though they clearly knew the answer was wrong.
Less than 1% of the test subjects actually got an answer wrong without the pressure.
Many of the people that conformed to the majority group admitted that they knew the answer was wrong, but they didn’t want anybody to think they were odd.
Only a few ever said that they thought the majority group’s answer was actually correct.

7. problems Size of groups Size of the lines used
When answering privately answers were different
If person with a lot of intelligence or high class was in group answers changed in participants
All of the test subjects were male students in the same age group
Subjects weren’t protected from psychological stress which could happen if they disagreed with the majority

8. More problems Individualism hadn’t became popular until the 1960’s
The experiment took place in 1951
Perrin and Spencer conducted the exact same experiment in and only 1 out of 396 people conformed to the majority
This proves that Asch’s experiment is no longer correct.

9. Would we have participated in experiment?
No, Lauren and I wouldn’t have because only men were used in the experiment.
Justin probably would have participated.