Are You Eager To Conform?

How most of us are willing to submit to the leading opinion in a group.

If you are heavily influenced by the group you take part in, to the extent that you are willing to submit to the leading opinion in the group, we talk of conformity. In the 1950s, pioneering Polish-American social psychologist Solomon Asch (1907–1996) conducted now famous experiments on conformity which played out differently from what he thought they would. Asch hypothesized that people would not conform to the opinion of a group if the objective evidence showed that the opinion was a clear-cut falsehood. It was surprising to Asch that the opposite turned out to be true.

Try looking up some videos of these experiments — which have been replicated by others numerous times — and be amazed by what happens. The general idea of the experiments is the following. A group of people is shown a first card with a line drawn on it of a certain length. Then another card is shown, with three lines on it, all of different lengths. Only one of the three lines equals the line on the first card in length. The group members are asked one by one which of three lines matches the first card’s line. As you can see in the image below, the answer is pretty obvious.