Conformity

President John F. Kennedy and several of his key advisers met in March 1961 to discuss a Central Intelligence Agency plan for the invasion of Cuba. The consensus of the group was to proceed with the invasion. At least one adviser, Arthur Schleshinger, had serious doubts about the wisdom of the plan, but he did not argue strongly for his position.

In a laboratory experiment, Solomon Asch brought together groups of college students and told them they would be participating in a study on visual perception. Their task was to match the length of a standard line against three comparison lines. This was easy to do, as only one of the comparison lines was the same length as the standard. Each group actually contained only one real participant. The other group members were confederates who had been instructed to give unanimously incorrect responses on most of the trials. The real participant responded next-to-last and hence was exposed to group pressure when the other members chose an incorrect comparison line. Asch also included a control condition in which participants made judgments privately, without any group pressure. He found that participants exposed to group pressure agreed with the erroneous majority approximately 33% of the time, whereas control participants made errors less than 1% of the time.

[Page 168]Both Schlesinger and the participants in Asch's experiment found themselves opposed by a unanimous group of peers. They were placed in a conflict between saying what they really believed and agreeing with the other members of the group. They resolved this conflict by conforming to the group.