Conformity and Asch Experiment

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According to Wikipedia, Conformity is:

Conformity is the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to group norms. Norms are implicit, specific rules, shared by a group of individuals, that guide their interactions with others. People often choose to conform to society rather than to pursue personal desires because it is often easier to follow the path others have made already, rather than creating a new one.

In other words, Conformity is basically yielding to group or social pressure. Group pressure can be of many forms like bullying, teasing, criticism etc.

Solomon Asch was one of the first scientist that worked on conformity and in turn influenced Miligram experiments. He is best known for his conformity experiments. His main finding was that peer pressure can change opinion and even perception. 

Conformity, indicates agreement to the majority, which are brought by a desire to ‘fit in’ or to be liked (normative) or because of a desire to be correct (informational), or simply to conform to a social role (identification).

Following are the types of conformity:

1. Compliance: When an individual accepts influence of another person or group in a hope to achieve a favourable reaction from them. He expects to gain specific rewards or approval and avoid specific punishment or disapproval by conformity.
2. Internalisation: When a person accepts influence because the content of the induced behavior - the ideas and actions of which it is composed - is intrinsically rewarding. He adopts the induced behavior because it is congruent [consistent] with his value system.
3. Identification: When an individual accepts influence because he wants to establish or maintain a satisfying self-defining relationship to another person or group.
4. Ingratiational: This is when a person conforms to impress or gain favor/acceptance from other people.

Asch's Experiment

The following questions were asked by Asch in this experiment: 

1. To what extent do social forces alter people's opinions? 
2. Which aspect of the group influence is most important–the size of the majority or unanimity of opinion?

Asch's conformity experiment was conducted with 123 male participants. They were told that they were a part of a visual experiment. Every participant was put into a group with 5 to 7 confederates (people who knew the true aims of the experiment). The participants were unaware about the confederates. The group was shown a card with a line on it, followed by another card with 3 lines on it labeled a, b, and c. The participants were then asked to say which line matched in length the line on the first card. The "real" participant answered last or penultimately and the confederates answered first. For the first two trials, the subject would feel at ease in the experiment, as he and the other "participants" gave the obvious, correct answer. However, after the fourth trial, all of the confederates respond with the clearly wrong answer at certain points such that in 12 of the 18 trials they all gave the wrong answer. The participant could thus either ignore the majority and go with his own senses or he could go along with the majority and ignore the clearly obvious fact. The aim was to see whether the real participant would change his answer and respond the same way as the confederates or stick with what his eyes plainly told him.

Asch found that some 1/4 of all subjects successfully withstands this form of social pressure, 1/20 completely succumbs, while the remainder conforms to the majority's manifestly incorrect opinion only in some experimental rounds. Asch suggested that this procedure created a doubt in the participants' mind about the seemingly obvious answer. 

This is how Asch showed conformity through his experiment.