Conformity: Is it still present ?

Team Members: Priyam Agarwal & Ankit Chakraborty

We have studied about the prevalence of conformity in behavioral social psychology in our course. We wanted to redo the Ascher conformity experiments to see whether it still exists within our community especially IITians who considered crème de la crème of our country.

Conformity is the act of changing opinions, making decisions and acting to "fit in" the social group

one wants to be associated with. In layman terms it is the "act of going with the flow". It arises

from the basic human desire to be correct and the desire to be liked by others.

A number of different studies have been done on the phenomenon of conformity, the most famous

of which is the Ascher's conformity experiments . In the experiment, a group of college students 

were selected and asked simple questions all but one of which were confederates. It was found that

many participants had a distortion of perception and actually believed that the confederates' incorrect answers were true.

In an another experiment: the Autokinetic effect experiment  a small spot of light projected onto a screen in a dark room and participants were to estimate the distance of movement of light . It was that groups of participants confirmed towards a common result although the light in reality was still.

We selected a group of confederates and the number of real participants (who were unaware of the goal of the experiment) was varied between experiments. In each experiment , the participants were asked simple questions and the participants had to answer the questions loudly. The confederates were first to go who gave a pre-decided answer and the real participants were the last to answer.

It was found that conformity is still present in our society and the level of conformity depends upon the confederate to real participant ratio. It was also found that a very few participants didn't conform with the majority view and relied on their own judgement. These 'divergents' were quite confident and slightly protective of their views.

This experiment could have been better if we could have managed to gather participants from different age group, socioeconomic status and their level of education.