Conform: How To Escape The Urge To Conform

Learnings from the classical study on conformity by Solomon Asch.

In 1952, Solomon Asch, a social psychologist ran a simple experiment to show how much influence a silent majority can have on an individual.

If you are a psychology student, you must have read about this experiment, in brief, during your course on social psychology and conformity. Textbooks, much like everything else in life, only give a snapshot of the complexities of the process.

So why not go deep into an experiment which showed so many things apart from the gullibility of humans?

The Experiment

The experiment was simple. 8 men were seated next to each other and shown 4 lines on a standardized piece of paper.

Each participant took turns to guess which line out of A, B and C matched the standard line in length. The difference between the line heights was designed to make it easy to identify the correct response. But there was a twist.

Of the 8 participants, 7 had been instructed beforehand to guess the incorrect line as their response. This left out one participant called “the critical subject” who had an important decision to make.

The Forces on the Critical Subject

At this point, the critical subject had two opposing forces acting on him.

1. The first force was his internal senses telling him what the correct response was. He could see what the right answer was but, this certainty was opposed by the other force

2. The second force was the social pressure of those around him. Each one of them had given an answer the critical subject knew to be incorrect.

What does the subject do now? Does he yield or remain independent of the social pressure?

The Results

Turns out, a lot of people, nearly 75% yield when faced with the choice between social pressure and individual senses. The remaining 25%, by contrast, remain independent of the responses of those around them.

What sets the two types of people apart?

Asch interviewed a few participants from the ‘independents’ and the ‘yielders’ to understand what made the two of them different. The differences between the two were largely driven by personality and upraising.

1. Independents commonly faced the stress of going against social pressure too but they overcame that by falling back on the value of individualism. They didn’t call their fellow ‘participants’ incorrect. They simply said, “I said it as I saw it. They said it as they saw it.”

2. Independents were also fiercely principled in life. They stood by their perceptions because they didn't want to compromise the experiment due to social pressure. It was more about honesty than fitting in for them

3. Lastly, they displayed high levels of self-confidence compared to those that yielded.

What Can We Learn From This?

When students read Asch’s study in social psychology, it is easy to think that humans are predisposed to conform to the social setting irrespective of the circumstances.

That is simply not true.

Asch showed that even one person who agrees with the critical subject’s response makes it more likely for the critical subject to stick to his opinion.

Even one voice of support can make us overcome adverse circumstances.

Secondly, you always most of the time have a choice.

There will always be opposing forces acting on you in the outside world. It doesn’t have to mean you have to go with the flow. You have the ability to choose to go against the current and make a route of your own.

You just need to believe in yourself more than you believe in others.

Can you do that?

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I recently started reading the original papers from classical studies in Psychology and am amazed by how much textbooks leave out. I will try and share more stories from these papers and offer some insight that a textbook might miss out on.

Also.. Psychology with Arjun completes one year next week!

I cannot believe it’s been a year already. I have enjoyed telling these stories to you and look forward to more such stories in the year to come. Thank you so much for your support.

I have something exciting for the one-year celebration! Can you guess what it is?

You can share your thoughts by replying to this email or in the comment section :)

Until next time,

Arjun

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