Conforming To The Majority

When we are part of a group, we can sometimes find ourselves in minority regarding certain perspectives. This is a fact of life and all of us are used to it. If we decide that the majority is a source of information much more reliable than we are, we can change our mind and we can submit to the majority's opinion. But imagine that you are in a situation in which you are absolutely sure that your opinion is the right one and the rest of the group sticks to the incorrect opinion. Would you give in to the social pressure and conform? This is the type of conformation that Solomon Asch, a well-known psychologist, decided to investigate in a series of classic studies.

In Asch' standard procedure, a volunteer participant was sited at a table with another 7 persons, which were all accomplices of the experimenter. A poster with 3 vertical lines of different measures was presented to the group and it was asked to decide which line has the same length as the line presented in another poster. Every individual announced his decided one by one, and the volunteer participant was last but one. The correct decision was more than obvious and at the majority of times everyone gave the right answer. But at some previous established situation, the accomplices were instructed to offer the same wrong answer. With this, Asch observed the level of conformation he could obtain from the participants.

The results were striking. Even though the correct answer was all the time obvious, the participant conformed to the general wrong opinion of the group one third of the time; about 75% of the participants conformed at least once. More, the group did not have to be large in order to produce such a conformation. When Asch modified the number of the group from 3 to 16 he observed that a group containing 3 or 4 accomplices was as efficient in producing the same results as a group of 16.

Why didn't the obvious attribute of the correct answer assure support for participant's independence against the majority? Why isn't the confidence of a person in his capacity a strong force against conformation? According to a way of argumentation, exactly the obvious character of the correct answer is the one that brings strong forces of conformation.

Different opinions in real life usually imply difficult or subjective judgments. For example we are submitted to choose between economical politics or between two paintings. In these cases we expect from time to time to have different opinions and we know that being in a minority in a certain issue is something plausible, even though is uncomfortable. But the situation of the Asch' experiment is much more extreme. Here, the participant is confronted with unanimous disagreement over a physical simple fact. Imagine what it means to have a different opinion than the majority in such conditions. Like the way the judgments of the group seem unaccountable to the participant, the same way he might think the group would feel about his. The members of the group will certainly consider him incompetent. In the same manner, if the participant has repeatedly a different opinion, this thing would appear as a way of directly expressing a doubt over the competence of group members. This thing would need extreme courage when the self perceptive capacities are suddenly and inexplicably put under a question mark. The fear of "what would they think about me?" and "what do they think I think about them?" inhibits the different opinion and generates a powerful force of conformation. One of the most important findings from this experiment is that the pressure to conform is less powerful when the group is not unanimous. If even only one accomplice detaches from the majority, conformation decreases from 32% of the times to 6%. Surprisingly, the nonconformist doesn't have to offer the correct answer!

In conclusion, we all know that we are different and as a result of this we have different opinions. This frequently happens in every day life and it does not bother us that much. What is interesting to observe from the experiment conducted by Solomon Asch is that when we find ourselves in a situation in which our opinion is the only one different from an unanimous group, we fall under the pressure and we conform to the majority in approximately 32% of the situations.