Sociology Reading: The Asch Conformity Experiments

 The Asch Conformity Experiments consisted pretty simply of a number of experiments conducted on university attendees to attempt to study the effects of peer influence on something as simple as objective fact. The experiments were conducted as follows. There was a large group of students, all of whom but one were in on the experiment. each student was shown the same card with three lines of varying length and was asked to identify which of the lines was longest.  The goal was to see if the one student who wasn't in on the experiment would choose what was clearly the longest line despite seeing the rest of his peers chose an obviously incorrect answer.  The result may be surprising to some and it was that more than seventy-five percent of the students chose an incorrect answer at least once. In interviews conducted after the experiment, some of the participants genuinely believed that the shorter lines were longer simply because of their peers while some others simply chose the incorrect answer in order to agree with the majority.

I think that the result of this experiment has very important real-world consequences. And I think this effect is something that we have all observed at least once or twice especially online. People have a tendency to lose their ability to think critically when presented with a large group of people that they identify with saying something or another thing. 

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