In 1951, a psychologist called Solomon Asch wanted to test whether people would say something obviously wrong just to fit in.

He did a series of experiments to test this, and the results might surprise you.

First, take a look at these lines:

Asch’s “vision” test.

Which line — A, B, or C — is the same as the target line?

It’s not a trick question, and there’s only one correct answer. Keep your answer in your head.

Welcome to my vision test

Asch invited 50 students from Swarthmore College to participate in his vision test.

They were told they would sit in a room with a group of 5–7 other students, and had to answer out loud which line was the same as the target line.

Except, there was a twist they didn’t know about: Everyone else in the group was part of the experiment.

Before the real participants came in, Asch and the fake participants agreed to give a wrong answer to the line test.

Asch wanted to see if this would make the real participants give the wrong answers too.

Who conformed?

Asch ran 18 trials in the original experiment. On 12 of them, he told the fake participants to give the wrong answer.

On these trials, 75% of the real participants conformed at least once, and only 25% never conformed.

When looking at all the trials for all the participants added together, the number is a lot smaller.

Out of all the trials, around 32% of real participants conformed with the wrong answer. That’s almost 1 in 3 people.

Photo by Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash.

Did they just think it was true?

Asch tested for that with a ‘control’ group.

In the ‘control’ group, nobody was told to give the wrong answer.

In this case, the participants only gave the wrong answer 1% of the time. Without pressure from the group, participants were much more likely to give the correct answer.

So why did they give the wrong answers?

Asch interviewed the participants after the experiment, and found that they gave the wrong answers for 2 reasons:

1. Normative influence

Normative social influence is when we go along with others in a group in order to be liked.

The majority of Asch’s participants said that they didn’t really believe the wrong answer, but they went along with it because they didn’t want to be mocked or seen as peculiar.

In other words, they said the wrong answer because they wanted to fit in.

2. Informational influence

Informational social influence is when we go along with others in a group because we believe they must be right.

Some of Asch’s participants said they really believed that the group’s answer must be correct, and that’s why they went along with the wrong answer.

The effect of group size on conformity

Over the following years, Asch repeated his line test, but changed some variables to see what factors increase conformity with the group.

In 1952, he took a look at the effect of changing the size of the group.

He found that:

When there was only 1 fake participant, 3% conformed with the wrong answer

conformed with the wrong answer When there were 2 fake participants, conformity increased to 13%

When there were 3 or more fake participants, conformity increased to 32%

There was no difference when he increased the group to more than 3. This suggests that we’re more likely to be influenced by other people’s opinions when they’re in a group of 3 or more.

Photo by Icons8 team on Unsplash.

Does having an ally help?

In the previous studies, all the fake participants had given the wrong answer. Asch wanted to see how conformity might be different if there was 1 fake participant who gave the correct answer. He called this a dissenting voice.

In 1965, he repeated the line test again, but this time he had a fake participant who actually gave the right answer.

He found that when he did this, only 5% of people conformed. This means that having just one ally, reduced conformity by a whole 80%.

What does this mean for you?

Several studies have been done afterwards by other psychologists that have echoed Asch’s original findings: people are likely to go along with the group when something is wrong because they want to fit in, or because they believe the group must be right.

Consider the positions you might be in that involve group pressure — it’s not just in the line test:

Are you more likely to ‘like’ a social media post, if it already has a lot of likes?

Are you more likely to ‘follow’ an influencer, if they already have a lot of followers?

Are you more likely to speak up about a political event — such as the Charlie Hebdo attacks — if everyone else is speaking about it?

When you say you disapprove of Macron’s marriage, or you think Corbyn is reaping antisemitism in the Labour party: is it because you really think so, or because a lot of people around you are saying it?

Asch’s study was way back in the 1950s and 1960s. Since then, the proliferation of social media has meant that a lot of us are living in echo chambers: we’re more likely to hear and read one side of the story, rather than multiple, and to be surrounded by people and journalists who voice similar opinions to one another.

This means that the effect of conforming to a group is only greater, because we’re less exposed to dissenting voices.

If you want to check yourself, ask yourself why you believe something. Is immigration good or bad for our economy? Why? What’s the evidence?

When you ask yourself why, you can begin to see whether you believe something because you’re convinced it’s right, or because — like many of us — you’re going along with the group.

Finally — which line is the same as the target line?

Here it is again: