Conformity

Dangerous Conformity

     When I was scrolling through the articles listed on the link that I found on PowerSchool, the one about "The Asch Conformity Experiments" caught my eye immediately. Specifically, the word "conformity" caught my eye, because conformity happens to be one of my biggest pet peeves. It annoys me so much when someone goes against their true beliefs and mindlessly agrees with the group just to fit in. So, this article intrigued me. I read it over and was interested in what I saw. The article explained that in the Asch conformity experiments, there was a test done on a group of 5-6 people, all but one of the people being in on the experiment, leaving one person out of it. They pretended like they were testing random people on their "perception of lines," and they showed the group one line, and then they revealed line A, line B, and line C. Either line A, B, or C matched the line they showed the group, and the group had to choose which line matched. At first, everything went fine; the "confederates" (collaborators with the experimenter who pretended to be participants) all gave the same responses, which were correct in the beginning, and the test subject gave the right answers with confidence. But, then things changed. The confederates then started choosing the wrong answers, but they all gave the same wrong answer. Quoting from the article, "Asch found that one-third of the test subjects gave the same wrong answers as the confederates at least half the time. Forty percent gave some wrong answers, and only one-fourth gave correct answers in defiance of the pressure to conform to the wrong answers provided by the group."
     I had trouble believing these statistics, so I researched further. I turned to YouTube, so I could observe real footage of these experiments. I found videos of not only the Asch conformity experiments, but of other conformity social experiments. In the video I watched with footage from the Asch conformity experiments, the real participants really did conform with the group when they were all wrong, except for when there was at least one other person who also said the right answer when everyone else was wrong. I kept searching and found another experiment; in this experiment, a group of people were sitting in a room, all of them "confederates" except for one, when a fake fire would start and smoke would start coming into the room from under a doorway. But, when the confederates saw the smoke and the alarm went off, they were instructed to do nothing. When a test subject sat alone in the room and the smoke starting coming in, they all immediately ran away to find help, but when the test subject was around the confederates who didn't move or react at all, not one single test subject got up to find help as soon as they saw the fire, because nobody else did. They simply sat there while smoke filled the room, to the point that, according to the Fire Brigade, they would have died from asphyxiation because they'd sat there for that long. The average time of how long a subject would sit in the smokey room before leaving was 13 minutes.
     I am baffled by these experiment results, but even more than I am baffled, I am irritated. How could we, as humans, be so afraid of going against the group that we would be willing to risk our lives just to conform? But in reality, when I put some thought to it, I realized I would probably do the same, which only irritates me more. It's mind-blowing how far humans will go just to avoid risking deviation from the norm, even if that means risking your life.


Sources:
https://www.thoughtco.com/asch-conformity-experiment-3026748
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyDDyT1lDhA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjP22DpYYh8