In The '50s, Psychologists Gave College Students An Easy Test. Then Everyone Else Started Lying

The 1950s marked a shift in psychology as a discipline, where many researchers began focusing their attention on how people thought, rather than on their behavior. Solomon Asch's conformity experiments are among the most famous experiments to emerge during this period. Asch ran a series of studies to understand how social pressure could cause people to conform to the thinking of a group. Perhaps not surprisingly, the results suggested that people often lie to fit the majority opinion.

During his studies, real participants joined groups of actors under the pretense of participating in a vision experiment. They were then shown two cards, one with a single line drawn in the middle, and another with three lines, one of which clearly matched the line on the first card. The participants were asked to identify the line that matched.

Without pressure from the actors, the participants gave the correct answer more than 99% of the time. However, they gave the incorrect answer in almost 37% of cases when the group of actors gave the wrong answer. About 74% of people gave the incorrect answer at least once. The results were so striking that Asch said, "That we have found the tendency to conformity in our society so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-­meaning young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern."

Asch's experiments showed that participants were influenced by the group consensus and were prone to confirming their opinion to match the opinion of the group. When asked why they gave the wrong answer, many of the participants said that they wanted to "fit in." Asch found that even intelligent individuals succumbed to the pressure of wanting to fit in with the group. 

In Asch's studies, levels of conformity grew as the group size increased but dropped significantly when one other person in the group also disagreed. Conformity also tended to increase as tasks became more difficult since the participants may have been more likely to refer to the group consensus before forming an opinion. Conformity was also more likely when they viewed others as having a higher social status. This may partially be explained by a phenomenon called the halo effect, where we make preconceived notions about an individual based on unrelated traits. 

In later studies that built off of Asch's research, researchers found that conformity usually occurs when there are three or more people in a group and that every other person in the group gives the same answer. Solomon Asch was born in Poland in the early 1900s before coming to the United States in the 1920s. He believed that examining how people make decisions based on group opinion may help understand how Adolf Hitler came to power and allowed the Nazis to consolidate power. Other studies, such as the Stanford prison experiment, also aimed to understand the group psychology that allowed the Nazis to gain power.

Psychology as an area of research has evolved significantly since Asch's original experiments. Some critics point out that his original participants may have been primarily motivated to avoid conflict rather than to conform to the group. Some future studies also found conflicting results. In the 1980s, the experiment was repeated in the United Kingdom by researchers Rodney Perrin and John Spencer. 

Unlike the original results, they found almost no conformity among the participants, with only 1 out of 396 trials showing somebody conforming to the group. In 1985, another research group repeated the study again with a broader group of American and British students. They found more conformity than the 1980 study but not as much as in Asch's original study. 

Psychology is an ever-changing field of research, and scientists are still uncovering many previously unexplained phenomena, such as why we see faces in everyday objects. While some psychological traits tend to be standard across almost all groups of humans, cultural and societal factors can also play a role. Asch's original results may have been heightened by the post–World War II era and the political climate in the United States at the time.