Solomon Asch

• Polish-American Gestalt psychologist (1907-1996)
• Best-known for work on conformity

Conformity Experiments

Perhaps his best-known experiment was the Asch conformity experiment.

• One “real” participant and other “confederates” (sometimes called stooges) were asked to choose which of 3 lines was the same length as a reference line.
  • Confederates gave the wrong answer, and Asch found that majority of the time the real participant conformed to the wrong answer, at least part of the time.

Misrepresentation

• The experiment is often misrepresented in psychology textbooks, according to a 2015 survey by Richard Griggs:

• Most famously conducted at Swathmore College, but took place in at a variety of colleges

Origin from Childhood

Asch was inspired for his conformity experiment from his childhood, according to the New York Times:

Variations

After the initial experiment, Asch conducted a series of variations that involved varying the following variables:

• “Ununanimous” majorities.
• Withdrawal of a “true partner.”
• Late arrival of a “true partner.”
• “Compromise partner” (who answered with majority sometimes, correctly sometimes).
• Majority size.

Source: https://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/soc_psych/asch_conform.html

Impression Formation

• Asch was interested in how people form impressions of other people

Warm vs. Cold

• In one experiment, two groups of people were given the exact same list of traits about a person except one, cold vs. warm
  • Group A: intelligent-skillful-industrious-warm-determined-practical-cautious
  • Group B: intelligent-skillful-industrious-cold-determined-practical-cautious
• Group A tended to have more positive opinions than Group B
  • Other words did not have this effect, so “cold” and “warm” are considered central characteristics and not peripheral characteristics

Prestige Suggestion

• Asch argued that readers interpret a quote based on the author

Lorge Critique

• Irving Lorge’s subjects rated a set of 50 quotations on a 5-point scale of “agreement” or “disagreement” with the statement.
  • Quotes were followed by the names of two public people.
• Lorge’s main conclusions was that “an unchanged object of judgment undergoes a change of evaluation.”
  • The prestige of the author was viewed as acting arbitrarily on the statement regardless of the content or merit of the statement.
• Asch reinterpreted Lorge’s findings and suggested that there was “a change in the object of judgment, rather than in the judgment of the object.”

Sherif Critique

• Muzafer Sherif (article on him coming soon!) conducted an experiment, very similar to Lorge, in which he investigated how prestige affects the evaluation of literary materials

• College students were asked to rank a set of prose passages according to their literary quality

• Each passage also included the name of a well-known author

  • However, all of the passages were actually written by the same author
  • Participants rated the authors earlier in terms of their literary standing
  • Sherif found that passages which were identified with highly acclaimed authors received higher rankings.

• Asch suggested that Sherif’s results could be largely influenced from the environment of a laboratory experiment

  • Because the experiment was designed to have each of the passages have very few differences between them, participants were faced with a dilemma when asked to distinguish between them
  • The experimenter and other neighboring participants may appear to find the task obvious, so the participant attends to any clues that might help him make the decision
  • In fear of looking ridiculous, the participant might now approach the task as, “Which of these am I expected to like and dislike?”
  • With the only information that varies being the author, the participant might make conclusions about the quotes based on this one piece of information that varies.

Miscellanous

• Asch was Stanley Milgram’s advisor at Princeton University
• Asch proposed with Sheldon Ebenholtz the idea that associations in the mind are formed symmetrically
  • Order of things listed in free recall doesn’t correlate with the order they were learned