Page 39 - The Social Animal

Conformity 21

self was an incredibly easy one. It was so easy that, when individuals
were not subjected to group pressure but were allowed to make a se-
ries of judgments of various sizes of lines while alone, there was al-
most a complete absence of errors. Indeed, the task was so easy, and
physical reality was so clear-cut, that Asch himself firmly believed
that there would be little, if any, yielding to group pressure. But his
prediction was wrong. When faced with a majority of their fellow
students agreeing on the same incorrect responses in a series of 12
judgments, approximately three-quarters of the participants con-
formed at least once by responding incorrectly. When we look at the
entire spectrum of judgments, we find that an average of 35 percent
of the overall responses conformed to the incorrect judgments ren-
dered by Asch’s accomplices.
Solomon Asch performed his classic experiment more than 50
years ago. Although the results were powerful, it is tempting to dis-
miss his findings on the grounds that American college students
are quite different now. Specifically, with the advent of computers
and the Internet you might think we have grown more sophisti-
cated and, therefore, much less susceptible to this kind of group
pressure. Not so. Over the years, the Asch experiment has been suc-
cessfully replicated a great many times. Just a few years ago, in a
particularly striking demonstration on national television, Anthony
Pratkanis repeated the Asch experiment precisely as Asch did it 50
9
years earlier. The participants in Pratkanis’s experiment were par-
ticularly sophisticated college students, most of whom considered
themselves nonconformists. The striking results were almost iden-
tical to Asch’s.
Resisting group pressures is very difficult and this shows up in
not only on the faces of the participants, but also in their neurolog-
ical activity. In a recent experiment, Gregory Berns and his associ-
ates 10 replicated Asch’s procedures while monitoring participants’
neural activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
These scans indicated a major difference between participants who
yielded to and those who resisted group pressure. Subjects who re-
sisted showed a great deal of activity in the amygdala, a region of the
brain associated with pain and emotional discomfort. Going against
the group is painful.
The situation created by these experiments is especially in-
triguing because, unlike many situations in which we may tend to