Recovering_irrationalist comments on Asch's Conformity Experiment - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (56)
Surely there's more than social conformity/conflict aversion at work here? In the experiment in the video, an expectation of pattern continuation is set up. For most questions, the 4 spoken words the subject hears before responding do correspond to the apparently correct spoken word response. I'd expect subconcious processes to start interpreting this as an indicator of the correct answer regardless of social effects and be influenced accordingly, at least enough to cause confusion which would then increase susceptibility to the social effects.
I'd expect this effect to also be reduced where the subject is writing down his answers, as that takes out of the equation the close connection between hearing spoken numbers and speaking spoken numbers.