This video, we're going to be going over the Solomon Asch line study, a very famous study in psychology that demonstrated the power of conformity. So we're going to define conformity as changing one's behaviors, attitudes, or beliefs to more closely match those of a group. And typically, this is done in relation to a group that you really want to fit into or be accepted by. So you are willing to change something about yourself, your behaviors, or your beliefs in order to fit into that group and be accepted by them. As I mentioned, this was famously demonstrated by a series of experiments by Solomon Asch back in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties.
We're going to go over one of his original study designs and talk about the results of his research. So we're going to begin with our participants, kind of getting into the players here. So obviously we have our participants come into the lab and they are introduced to seven Confederates. So these are all trained actors who work for Asch and they are introduced as a group of total strangers. So they're all introduced as a big old group of participants who are going to be doing the study together.
So in terms of the actual methodology or the procedure, the participants were all seated around a table and they were asked to do a very simple task. All they had to do was match the length of a line. So it looked a little something like this. So they're all seated around this table and they would be shown these three lines labeled a, b, and c and they were shown a target line and all they had to do was say which of these three lines matched the target line. So this was deliberately designed to be a very easy task, and we'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute.
So what would happen is for the first couple of trials, the Confederates were always called on first. They were kind of called on like in a circle. And for the first two trials, the Confederates always gave the correct answer and when it was the participant's turn, they would also give the correct answer because it's a very easy task. But then, once in a while, there would be a trial where all of the Confederates would give the exact same wrong answer. So for example, if we were looking at this lineup of lines, they might all say a matches the target line.
Obviously incorrect. And so the goal here was to see if the participants would conform to that incorrect answer. So to get into the results, we absolutely did see some conforming. So on about 37%, so a little over a third of those wrong answer trials, participants did conform to the incorrect response. And what he found was that about seventy-five percent of participants gave the wrong answer at least one time.
Now it's worth noting he did test participant accuracy when they were alone just to make sure, and participants had excellent accuracy on this task. They had about 99% accuracy. Again, it was designed to be very easy because we wanted to be sure that participants weren't genuinely confused or genuinely unsure of the right answer. These participants knew the correct answer and they were willing to conform to the group anyway. So the big conclusion here is that participants were willing to be wrong.
They were willing to publicly say incorrect information in order to conform to the group. And what's really powerful about this is that these were total strangers. You know, imagine the power of conformity when you're thinking about a group that you really want to be accepted by, a group that you care about and are motivated to make them all accept you. So this was a really powerful demonstration of how strong conformity can be. Alright, so in our next video we're going to go over this in a bit more detail.
We'll talk about some factors that can influence conformity and we'll get a little bit more into why people conform in the first place. Alright, see you there.
