Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority
Asch's monograph reports the line-judgment studies, among the most repeated experiments in psychology. A participant sat with a group of others, all of them working for the experimenter, and judged which of three lines matched a standard, a task so easy that people working alone almost never erred. On most rounds the others answered correctly; on a set of critical rounds they unanimously gave the same wrong answer. A substantial proportion of participants went along with the group at least once, and a minority did so repeatedly. Two details are usually left out of the retelling. Most answers across the whole study were still correct, so the result is not that people simply conform, and the effect collapsed when a single other person broke the unanimity, which makes the pattern about isolation rather than about majority size. Asch was as interested in what allowed people to resist. This page describes the studies from public material, because the 1951 monograph has no abstract.
Asch's monograph reports the line-judgment studies, among the most repeated experiments in psychology. A participant sat with a group of others, all of them working for the experimenter, and judged which of three lines matched a standard, a task so easy that people working alone almost never erred. On most rounds the others answered correctly; on a set of critical rounds they unanimously gave the same wrong answer. A substantial proportion of participants went along with the group at least once, and a minority did so repeatedly. Two details are usually left out of the retelling. Most answers across the whole study were still correct, so the result is not that people simply conform, and the effect collapsed when a single other person broke the unanimity, which makes the pattern about isolation rather than about majority size. Asch was as interested in what allowed people to resist. This page describes the studies from public material, because the 1951 monograph has no abstract.
Written from the public account of the experiments.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
Asch, S. E. (1951, 1956). Line-judgment studies. 123 American male students; wrong answers on 37 per cent of critical trials; 75 per cent conformed at least once; 5 per cent every time; roughly two thirds of responses independent.
Where we use it
- The Invisible Weight of Belonging, Why We Belong
Reliability of this reference
The link below is the right work, with one detail that does not line up. The citation covers both the 1951 book chapter and the 1956 monograph. Only the monograph has a DOI, and the quoted figures come from it. Worth opening before quoting a figure from it.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1037/h0093718
DOI: 10.1037/h0093718