The
Asch Conformity Studies
Your response has put you in the 76% majority of people that will conform at least once in the face of a majority coalition!
The experiment you just participated in was derived from studies performed by Solomon Asch (1940, 1956) on conformity and informational influence. Asch created circumstances in which subjects, like yourself, made judgments under conditions in which the physical reality was absolutely clear – but the rest of a group reported that they saw that reality differently (Zimbardo 591). The line-test you just participated in was derived from the line-test Asch used to study conformity. In Asch’s experiment, groups of "subjects" were shown three different lines that varied in length, like what you saw in the previous page (only one person was actually being tested while all the others were actors playing along with the experimenter. People were asked to choose which of the lines was the same length as the standard line, and everybody in the room before the subject agreed that one of the wrong lines was the correct answer. Then, subjects were asked to indicate which of three lines was the same length as the standard line. What Asch discovered was that on average, over many trials, 76% of the subjects conformed with the false majority estimate of the group at least once while only 23% of people never conformed even in the face of a large majority against them. This conformity effect has been found to increase with the size of majority, until it tapers off after a majority of 3 to 1 or so. So your choice puts you in the majority of people who are more likely to conform than most. Perhaps these were the types of pressures soldiers at Nanking faced every day.