cucumber's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Solomon Asch - Conformity Essay Writtten by Lexy D. Steal and die! Every time you pick a shirt off a rack in a fashionable store even though it feels just a little too short or tight for you, every time you get your hair cut like Jennifer Aniston’s, every time you buy the latest makeup colours at the drug store because they are “in for spring,” you should give Solomon Asch a nod. Why? Because he introduced the world to the notion of conformity and the effects of peer pressure on our decisions. You may not realize it, but every time you change a personal preference or opinion in order to fit in, you conform. Is it a bad thing? That depends on you. It is a bad thing if you are the type of person wh prides themself on their identity, on being an individual. It is fine if you want to be popular, cool, or blend in. It is very easy to fit into our society, Asch discovered as a result of his 1950s experiment, as long as you are willing to sacrifice your beliefs. His time was not one of media saturation and world-wide pressure like the one we live in today, but if anything his ideas are more true now than ever before. Solomon Elliott Asch was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1907. When he moved to the United States of America and landed in New York City at the age of 13, he knew little English and could speak none. He taught himself to read and write this foreign language by reading books by his favourite author, Charles Dickens. This, along with the years spent enrolled in school, gave him a good grasp of the English language and he went on to study at City College in New York. He studied further at Columbia University, where he received a Doctorate in 1932. In 1952, he wrote Special Psychology, a textbook that defended the objective reality of social facts, a contrast to the predominantly individualist-based viewpoint of the day. He began to wonder about how much of an impact society had on people, and started experiments to judge whether or not people would actually ignore their own feelings in order to avoid contradicting the other people they were around. (Grolier, “Asch, Solomon.”) Asch’s experiments were simple. Subjects were asked to select what they felt was the most correct answer from a series of simple problems and questions—questions in which the right answer was usually glarily obvious. Asch wanted to find out whether subjects would have a pressure to conform if others heard their answers. When he devised his famous experiment, known simply as the Asch Experiment, he assembled test groups of eight people: seven actors and one “real” subject, blind to the fact that the others were actors. The actors were instructed to agree unanimously on the wrong answer each time. He asked all eight people to respond to a series of questions, with the seven actors answering before the eighth. Seventy-five per cent of the real subjects yielded to the majority at least once. One-third consistently chose the wrong answer in order to fit in. When surveyed in private, the subject had less than a one per cent margin of error. (Coon, 656) Solomon Asch had proven just how much importance we place on “fitting in.” The fact that people were willing to discard what they could see easily with their own eyes just because others told them they were wrong is sad, although not surprising. How often when walking down the street or a hallway of a school are you able to tell what’s cool without asking anyone or having any previous knowledge of the latest “pop culture?” Probably pretty often, despite your age, race, or gender. Hoops are in, bangs are in, baggy pants are in, baseball caps are in. So all the students, adults, pop stars, and celebrities like these styles? Probably not. Do many of them wear these fashions anyway? Yes. Why is this? In our culture, fashion has assumed a place of great importance. If a teenage girl wears something it is a reflection of many things: personal prefences, her music style (a rap girl rarely hangs out with dance girls, and the type of clothing she wears tells the story of what beat makes her feet move) and even who her friends are. Imagine seeing four girls standing in a circle wearing tight jeans, baggy sweatshirts with names like ROOTS, GAP, and TOMMY emblazoned across them, hoop earrings dangling from their ears surrounded by strands of long, straight hair. Then imagine a girl standing with them wearing baggy jeans hanging off her waist, a tight white tank top, a bandana covering her spiky bleached hair, and a nose ring. Would you see this girl as an outsider, or assume she is part of the group? If this girl truly wanted to be seen as one of them she would probably trim her pants down a little, get a name brand shirt, take out the ring and brush out the spikes. She probably would not feel comfortable doing it, but she would rationalize it to herself that being accepted would take the place of individuality in her happiness. This is conformity: “an individual’s compliance with a group of judgement, perhaps counter to his own judgement.” (Encyclopedia Brittanica, “Conformity.”)
In Asch’s time, the question would have been less a matter of clothing style or amount of piercings, but more an intellectual one. This was a time of men to whom intellectualism was the basis for determining self-worth. If these seven others all chose an answer different to what you were going to say, does this make you wrong? Probably. And these men, concerned with appearing smart at all times, felt they would appear stupid if they chose an answer contrary to what seven others chose. Their fears were well founded: Asch also conducted a reverse experiment at the same time, in which there were seven real subjects and one actor (told to always say the wrong answer after all the others had said the correct one.) The eighth subject was met with “derisive laughter and sidelong glances.” (Coon, 657) An effect like this shows us why we often choose to yield to peer pressure rather than speak our own mind. No one wants to be laughed at, but it is amazing that Asch’s experiments worked so well. These were informal studies with a group of eight randomly selected people. The person being surveyed would only spend about fifteen minutes of his life with these other individuals, yet they still felt a desire to be part of the “group” and make a good impression. Our world of Jennifer Anistons and Tommy Hilfigers is much changed from Asch’s world of Bob Cratchetts and startched suits. Our fashions and pressures may change, but our sence of society remains the same. Whether you learn English from Dickens of learn romance and interaction from watching the tv show Friends, some values still hold true. People from all cultures and societies want to be seen as normal and be accepted by their peers. Whether or not you see conformity as an evil, you conform without realizing it. Before A Christmas Carol was written and long after we forget Jennifer Aniston’s name, conformity has and will exist. Embrace it, wonder about it, try to live your life avoiding it. Just thank Asch for bringing it into our conscious, and letting us all fit into a group—a group of conformers—even when we can’t fit into anything else. As Tiny Tim said, “God bless us every one.” WORKS CITED “Asch, Solomon.” Grolier Encyclopedia. 24th May, 2001. http://gme.grolier.com/cgi-bin/gme_bp?assetid=00180-0&assettype=t “Conformity.” Encyclopedia Brittanica. 24th May, 2001. http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/4/0,5176,115064+1,00.html “Conformity.” Grolier Encyclopedia. 24th May, 2001. http://gme.grolier.com/cgi-bin/gme_bp?assetid=0119080-0 Coon, Dennis. Essentials of Psychology. 7th Edition. Toronto: Brooks/Cole, 1997. 3:01 a.m. - 2001-06-13 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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