Social Pressure and Perception
Imagine
yourself in the following situation: You sign up for a psychology
experiment, and on a specified date you and seven others whom you
think are also subjects arrive and are seated at a table in a small
room. You don't know it at the time, but the others are actually
associates of the experimenter, and their behavior has been carefully
scripted. You're the only real subject.
The
experimenter arrives and tells you that the study in which you are
about to participate concerns people's visual judgments. She places
two cards before you. The card on the left contains one vertical
line. The card on the right displays three lines of varying length.
The
experimenter asks all of you, one at a time, to choose which of the
three lines on the right card matches the length of the line on the
left card. The task is repeated several times with different cards.
On some occasions the other "subjects" unanimously choose
the wrong line. It is clear to you that they are wrong, but they have
all given the same answer.
What
would you do? Would you go along with the majority opinion, or would
you "stick to your guns" and trust your own eyes?
In
1951 social psychologist Solomon Asch devised this experiment to
examine the extent to which pressure from other people could affect
one's perceptions. In total, about one third of the subjects who were
placed in this situation went along with the clearly erroneous
majority.
Asch
showed bars like those in the Figure to college students in groups of
8 to 10. He told them he was studying visual perception and that
their task was to decide which of the bars on the right was the same
length as the one on the left. As you can see, the task is simple,
and the correct answer is obvious. Asch asked the students to give
their answers aloud. He repeated the procedure with 18 sets of bars.
Only one student in each group was a real subject. All the others
were confederates who had been instructed to give incorrect answers
on 12 of the 18 trials. Asch arranged for the real subject to be the
next-to-the-last person in each group to announce his answer so that
he would hear most of the confederates incorrect responses before
giving his own. Would he go along with the crowd?
To
Asch's surprise, 37 of the 50 subjects conformed to the majority at
least once, and 14 of them conformed on more than 6 of the 12 trials.
When faced with a unanimous wrong answer by the other group members,
the mean subject conformed on 4 of the 12 trials. Asch was disturbed
by these results: "The tendency to conformity in our society is
so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people
are willing to call white black. This is a matter of concern. It
raises questions about our ways of education and about the values
that guide our conduct."
Why
did the subjects conform so readily? When they were interviewed after
the experiment, most of them said that they did not really believe
their conforming answers, but had gone along with the group for fear
of being ridiculed or thought "peculiar." A few of them
said that they really did believe the group's answers were correct.
Asch
conducted a revised version of his experiment to find out whether the
subjects truly did not believe their incorrect answers. When they
were permitted to write down their answers after hearing the answers
of others, their level of conformity declined to about one third what
it had been in the original experiment.
Apparently,
people conform for two main reasons: because they want to be liked by
the group and because they believe the group is better informed than
they are. Suppose you go to a fancy dinner party and notice to your
dismay that there are four forks beside your plate. When the first
course arrives, you are not sure which fork to use. If you are like
most people, you look around and use the fork everyone else is using.
You do this because you want to be accepted by the group and because
you assume the others know more about table etiquette than you do.
Conformity, group size, and cohesiveness
Asch
found that one of the situational factors that influence conformity
is the size of the opposing majority. In a series of studies he
varied the number of confederates who gave incorrect answers from 1
to 15. He found that the subjects conformed to a group of 3 or 4 as
readily as they did to a larger group. However, the subjects
conformed much less if they had an "ally" In some of his
experiments, Asch instructed
one of the confederates to give correct answers. In the
presence of this nonconformist, the real subjects conformed only one
fourth as much as they did in the original experiment. The
dissenter's answers made the subject more certain that the majority
was wrong. And the real subject now experienced social pressure from
the dissenter as well as from the majority. Many of the real subjects
later reported that they wanted to be like their nonconformist
partner (the similarity principle again). Apparently, it is
difficult to be a minority of one but not so difficult to be part of
a minority of two.
Some
of the subjects indicated afterward that they assumed the rest of the
people were correct and that their own perceptions were wrong. Others
knew they were correct but didn't want to be different from the rest
of the group. Some even insisted they saw the line lengths as the
majority claimed to see them.
Asch
concluded that it is difficult to maintain that you see something
when no one else does. The group pressure implied by the expressed
opinion of other people can lead to modification and distortion
effectively making you see almost anything.
Implications
for us and the oppressed animals
The
more there will be people who will claim that our society has to stop
killing animals for food, the easier it will be for others to agree
with this claim, because they will see that there is not unanimity in
the society on this issue. If this claim is never expressed it
will be very difficult for people to agree with the opinion that we
have to stop killing animals for food. Creating a public debate on
this issue by making the claim that slaughterhouses have to be banned
will create a situation where there will be more discussion on
the subject and more people will be aware of our claim and
because of the Asch effect the practice will be seen less and less
normal. The conversion to veganism strategy without the creation of a
public debate will have a very little effect. Every time when we
make a flyer, when we are interviewed, when we debate etc. we have to
clearly state that we demand the end of the killing.
killing.
