home

=**Solomon Asch and Conformity (1951)**=

**Summary:**
In 1951 Solomon Asch,a social psychologist, became famous for his conducting of the "Asch Conformity Experiments". The purpose was to find is social pressure could cause a person to say something that was obvioulsy incorrect in the presence of other conformists. One of the experiments was having 19 people in a room, who were in on the experiment, saying the wrong answer to a problem and one person, who was a test subject, had no idea what was going on and conformed to what the rest of the people did. These experiments proove that people conform to what others are doing all of the time.

**Real Life Application/ Examples:**
Examples of conformity in everyday life would be wearing what is in style at the time instead of wearing what you prefer. Smoking is another example of conformity. A lot of people pick up smoking because other people do it.

What We Could've Changed to Make the Experiments Better:
We would've had about the same number of people as Asch did in his Problem Experiment but, instead of having only one person who knew about it, we would've had 15 people who didn't know about it and see if the majority of the group would conform to what the rest of the people were answering.

Similar Experiments:
The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments performed by psychologist Stanly Milgram of Yale University. It measured the willingness of subjects to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts which conflicted with their own personal conscience. Professor Milgram elaborated a theory explaining his results. The theory of conformism based on the Solomon Asch Conformity Experiments, describing the fundamental relationship between the group of reference and the individual person. A subject, who has neither ability nor expertise to make decisions, especially in a crisis, will leave decision making to the group and its hierarchy. The group is the person's behavioral model.