The Asch Conformity Experiments, conducted by psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s, demonstrated the power of conformity. (从众) in groups and showed that even simple objective facts cannot resist the pressure of group influence.
In the experiments, groups of university students were asked to participate in a perception test. In reality, all but one of the participants were “confederates”, cooperators with the experimenter who only pretended to be participants. The study was about how the remaining student would react to the behavior of the other “participants”.
The participants of the experiment were presented with a card with a simple vertical (垂直) black line on it. Then, they were given a second card with three lines of varying length labeled A. B, and C. One line on the second card was the same length as that on the first, and the other two lines were obviously longer and shorter.
Participants were asked to state out loud in front of each other which line, A, B, or C, matched the length of the line on the first card. In each experimental case, the confederates answered first, and the real participant was seated so that he would answer last. In some cases, the confederates answered correctly, while in others, they answered incorrectly.
Asch intended to see if the real participant would be pressured to answer incorrectly in the instances when the confederates did so, or whether their belief in their own perception and correctness would outweigh the social pressure provided by the responses of the other group members.
Asch found that one-third of real participants gave the same wrong answers as the confederates at least half the time. Forty percent gave some wrong answers, and only one-fourth gave correct answers in defiance of the pressure to conform to the wrong answers provided by the group.
In interviews following the trials, Asch found that for those who answered incorrectly, in conformance with the group, some believed that the answers given by the confederates were correct, some thought that they were suffering a lapse(失误) in perception when they originally had the answer different from the group, and others admitted that they knew that they had the correct answer, but conformed to the incorrect answer because they didn’t want to break from the majority.
12. What are the participants asked to do in the experiment?
A.Label the cards with different letters. | B.Pick out two lines of the same length. |
C.State the reason for matching the cards. | D.Identify the longest vertical black line. |
13. What’s paragraph 5 mainly about?
A.The result of the experiment. | B.The design of the experiment. |
C.The purpose of the experiment. | D.The procedure of the experiment. |
14. What does the underlined part “in defiance of” in paragraph 6 mean?
A.In spite of. | B.For fear of. | C.In response to. | D.On account of. |
15. Why did the real participants give a wrong answer?
A.They misunderstood the question. | B.They believed their own judgment. |
C.They failed to resist group influence. | D.They wanted to be different from others. |