In the last video, I ended by asking whether the level of conformity that Solomon Asch found seemed very high, or fairly high, or fairly low, or very low. For over 20 years after he published his findings, most psychologists thought that it was surprisingly high given how mild the situation was. After all, the experimental participants weren't members of a cohesive group in which they had to, for example, face their friends afterward, or justify their answers, or even interact with members of their group once the study was over. Second, there weren't penalties or financial losses or physical punishments, like electric shock for guessing incorrectly. And third, the correct answers were embarrassingly obvious— so obvious, you'd almost feel weird giving a different answer. That was the prevailing view until 1976, when Lee Ross, Günter Bierbrauer, and Susan Hoffman published an article in the American Psychologist arguing just the opposite. That is, they argued that the Asch experiment created a unique situation in which "the assault on the potential dissenter's judgment reaches an intensity virtually unparalleled outside the laboratory." Why? Well, consider: In daily life the things that we tend to disagree about include politics, religion, books, movies— not the nature of physical reality. Few of us have ever faced a majority who steadfastly contradict the evidence of our senses, where, for example, we say an orange is orange, and the majority says, no, it's blue. And we say, "Orange." And they say, "Blue." "Orange." "Blue." "Orange." "Blue." "Orange!" Simply never happens. Also, the experimental participants were at a loss to explain the majority opinion on the basis of either situational forces or dispositional differences. Unless they saw through the conspiracy, they simply had no good explanation for what was going on. Ross, Bierbrauer, and Hoffman argued that, in this sense, Asch had created a thoroughly unique "attribution crisis" for the participants. People had no good explanation for their group's behavior, and they feared that the group would be equally at a loss to explain any dissent on their part. Here's how one of Asch's participants described it: "This is unlike any experience I have had in my life. I'll never forget it as long as I live." Interestingly, this revisionist view of Asch's research is very consistent with how Asch himself saw the situation. In December of 2012, I looked through some of his papers at the Center for the History of Psychology, and by his own hand, he described the situation as "Extreme when a majority contradicted the evidence of a person's senses about a virtually undeniable matter of fact." He also noted that the conflict created severe tension and concern, and in another note, he said that it was "Frightening to have one's perceptions appear strange." This might seem obvious in hindsight, but remember the hindsight bias that we discussed earlier. One of the most revealing tidbits I found in the archive is that in the beginning, Asch himself didn't realize the power of the situation. Here's what he wrote. "While planning the study, I was quite uncertain as to whether the investigation could at all be done. It seemed to me that the action of the majority would appear so unreasonable and bizarre that the subjects would quickly see through, laugh the majority out of court and dismiss them as unworthy of respect. This did not happen. In fact, it was chastening to observe how easy it was to entangle individuals in the difficulty, and thus to bring them under the sway of the forces. The means were absurdly simple." As you might imagine, there have been literally hundreds of conformity studies and dozens of spin-offs since Asch first published his experiments. In fact, in the 1990s, Rod Bond and Peter Smith published a meta-analysis of 133 different studies from 17 countries in an effort to take stock of the research literature, and the analysis was particularly interesting because Bond and Smith were able to simultaneously examine different factors to see which ones had a significant effect on conformity levels. So, for example, they found that when you put women and men in the Asch situation, either in single-sex groups or mixed-sex groups, women tend to conform somewhat more than do men—a gender gap that has not closed significantly over the decades. Overall, however, conformity levels have steadily declined since the 1950s. And the meta-analysis found that conformity increases as majority size increases, from 2 people all the way up to 13 people. Another thing that Bond and Smith found was that conformity is more likely when the majority is made up of ingroup members (that is, members of your own group— for example, friends or family members) than when it's made up of outgroup members. And finally, one last factor worth noting—and they studied others as well—is the role of culture. In general, collectivist countries like Japan, that tend to put group goals ahead of personal goals, show higher rates of conformity than do individualist countries like the United States. Now, which of these various factors is most important when it comes to conformity? Let's pause so that you can take a guess, and then I'll share what Bond and Smith concluded. The correct answer is culture. According to Bond and Smith, there's a huge difference between individualist and collectivist cultures when it comes to conformity, probably in part because, while we in the United States and in other individualist countries tend to view conformity somewhat negatively, people in collectivist cultures often see it in terms of harmony, or cooperativeness, or even tactfulness. And this may also help to explain some of the gender differences in conformity. So, for example, American males often see nonconformity and uniqueness as positive characteristics, but others may see the very same behavior as selfish or as deviant. So, we have to be very careful about the labels that we use. One person's conformity may be another person's effort to be accommodating or to be supportive of others. Now, before this video ends there's just one more topic that I would like to address, so hang on for just a few more minutes. The research we've discussed so far focuses on the influence a majority has on a minority, often one or two people, but an equally important question concerns the influence of a minority on the majority. In 1969, Serge Moscovici and two colleagues published a landmark study that examined minority influence using a variant of the Asch procedure. Moscovici was born in Romania and spent time in a forced labor camp during World War II, and later became a friend of Milgram's. So, like Asch and Milgram, he was personally interested in the Holocaust and the interplay between individual and group behavior. What Moscovici and his colleagues showed is that a consistent minority can have a significant influence even when it's not particularly powerful or prestigious. In Moscovici's experiments, the group consisted of two confederates and four experimental participants. In other words, it turned the Asch procedure on its head. Everyone was seated together and shown a series of slides in what appeared to be an experiment on color perception. On each trial, group members judged the color and light intensity of the slide. The confederates were seated either in the first two positions or in the first and fourth positions (by the way, this variable turned out not to have an effect). All the slides were various shades of blue, but the confederates were instructed to judge them as green. What Moscovici found was that, even though a control group only mistook the slides for green twice in 792 judgments— that is, the slides were very clearly blue— and even though all the participants had been previously checked to ensure that they had no serious visual impairments, majority group members judged the slides as green on 8% of the trials, and 32% of majority group members judged them as green at least once. In other words, a minority was able to exert a substantial degree of influence on the majority. There was just one key requirement: the minority had to be consistent. If the pair of confederates labeled some slides blue and some green, majority group members were only swayed by the minority 1% of the time. The minority only had a significant influence when it consistently judged all the slides as green. Still, this is an empowering result. With Asch, we've already seen that just one person dissenting from the majority can dramatically reduce the pressure that people feel to conform. And now with Moscovici, we've seen that a consistent minority can get majority group members to judge the color blue as green. So, the message is "individuals count." Minority perspectives have an effect— not always and maybe not immediately— but more often that it might seem. In fact, when I first learned about Moscovici's results, it inspired me to join with a couple of friends and create a performance group that you may have heard of: Green Man Group. I'll let you figure out which one is me. Just kidding! Seriously, I hope that you've enjoyed this video. The next video is going to continue our exploration of the tension between individuals and groups, with a discussion of deindividuation and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Also, if you haven't finished the next assignment, this is a very good time to do it, because it brings together many of the topics that we've been exploring: the psychology of persuasion, social influence, and of course, conformity. It's packed with social psychology. Does it seem green in here?
