Asch Conformity Experiments

Words: 1211
Pages: 5

But could such a large amount of conformity still exist in today’s society? After all, Asch’s experiments, though still containing information prevalent to our generation, were done in the 1950s, a time where the need to conform to society was at its peak. Once the drive for individualism hit America in the 1960s, it steadily increased in strength with each new decade. We must also be aware that this was a study done in the United States, rather than results of a global scale. As time has drug on, the world has become smaller and smaller, making culture-fixed experiments less helpful than before. Thankfully, the Asch conformity experiments are timeless classics that can be reproduced over and over again, allowing us to catch a glimpse of the growth that society has made over the decades. One …show more content…
This particular variation was based off of the “Mori technique” which was developed in 2003. Some key differences from Asch’s work include the fact that all participants were unwitting subjects, unlike Asch’s experiment that only had one unsuspecting subject. Also, each participant in the Tokyo experiment were given a pain of sunglasses and asked to look at a movie screen where the lines would be projected. Unknown to the subjects, one of the pairs of sunglasses blotted out line length while all the others allowed the full size to be shown. After the completion of this experiment, it was discovered that approximately 4.04% of the participants went along with the group decision while the other 96.86% stuck with their personal perspective (Mori). This is a surprisingly large difference from Asch’s 33.3% conformity, particularly since it is widely believed that Japan has a much stronger conformity-minded culture than the US. Perhaps such statistics can be viewed as a sign that the ‘lemming phase’ in our society is finally coming to an