The Asch Line-Judgment Studies and Milgram’s study Review

Conformity Research
Students Name:
Institutional Affiliation
Date:
Conformity Research
Introduction
Conformity can be described as a social influence that involves a change of beliefs to fit a certain group. The Asch conformity experiments involve a series of experiments that were conducted during the late 1950s by Solomon Asch. Asch used a line judgment task and placed a naïve student in a room with other confederates, who had agreed to provide similar responses in advance. The Milgram experiment sought to understand how far people can go to obey instructions even though it involved harming other people. This series of experiments depicts how an individual's opinion can be influenced by those in a group or a setting. This paper will discuss what the experiments discovered about the social conditions of social influences under which people conform, what the studies discovered about tactics to increase or decrease conformity and a reflection on these studies' ethical dilemmas.
Social Influences under Which People Conform
Individuals conform due to various conditions and types of social influences. The Asch conformity experiment shows that individuals may conform due to normative social influence. Normative social influence occurs when individual yields to group pressure because they desire to fit in the group. For instance, in this experiment, the naïve student publicly accepted the views of the group by he seems to be rejecting the views privately. Normative social influence can be described as a function of the social impact theory, which entails three basic components (Toelch & Dolan, 2015). These components include the immediacy of the group, the strength of the group, and the number of individuals exerting influence in the group.
Immediacy refers to how close the group is to the individual and space when the influence is taking place. The group strength describes how close the participants of the group are important to an individual when the influence is taking place. The number of individuals in the group also affects conformity. In the experiment, the subject yields to pressure by believing that a group of seven cannot be wrong. Normative social influence may result in public compliance, saying or doing something without believing in it wholly.
Milgram's experiment suggests that individuals can be obedient when they recognize a sign of authority(Milgram Experiment, 2007). As a function of social impact theory, the strength of the authority will dictate how obedient an individual will be. For instance, when the teacher and learner were in the same room, the shock rate dropped by 40%. There was a reduction in shock rate by 30% when the learner and teacher were holding hands, and this shows how immediacy influenced conformity.
Tactics to Increase or Decrease Conformity
Various tactics can be used to increase or reduce conformity. According to the experime...