When teachers first introduced you to the notion of conformity, they probably started with the Asch research (1956). This is understandable, because the studies are simple, beautiful and memorable.
To recap: several participants in a room were shown a picture of a line and asked to pick which of three other vertical lines matched it in length (see Figure 1). The test was designed to be easy, and the answer was obvious (line C in our example). But the twist was that all but one of the ‘participants’ were confederates — people paid to pretend to be participants. Their job was to call out the wrong answer (A). Asch was interested in how the naïve participant responded to this unusual situation. Did the naïve participant back their original judgment — what they knew to be true — or did they change their answer to fit in with the majority?
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