Waters 1
Lindsey Waters
Professor Sandlin
English 102
6 November 2016
Conformity in The Work Place: Everyone Likes You But Yourself.
Conformity is the act of changes ones attitudes, behaviors or beliefs in order to fit into a
group or a norm that is around them. In the work environment there is an immense amount of
pressure on individuals to conform. This pressure reveals itself in several major ways, this begins
even before an individual is hired. For example, have you ever gone to an interview and done
research on the company to find out what may be important to them? If so, you likely did this in
order to ensure that you fit that image that this company has set for their employees. In doing
this, you have fallen victim to conformity.
In 1951 A psychologist name Solomon Asch wanted to seek out solid evidence that
conformity was real, so he performed a social experiment. In Asch’s experiment he had 50 male
college students participate in what they believed was a vision test. They were given a single line
on one side of the page and three more lines on the other side of the page labeled A, B, and C.
Their task was simple, to point out which line (A, B, or C) was the same length as the line on the
other side of the page. He took one naïve person and grouped him in with a group of seven
confederates. The confederates got together beforehand and decided which wrong answer they
would unanimously give. Meanwhile the eighth participant would be under the impression that
he was in a room full of real participants. So what were the results of this? Would the naïve
individual change his answer simply because everyone else was saying it? According to Saul
Waters 2
McLeod, writer for Simply Psychology, “Asch (1956) found that group size influenced whether
subjects conformed. The bigger the majority group (no of confederates) the more people
conformed, but only up to a certain point. With one other person (i.e. confederate) in the group
conformity was 3%, with two others it increased to 13% and with three or more it was 32% (or
1/3)”.” The answer was yes.
After the experiment was concluded the naïve man was told what the experiment was
actually testing he was asked if he knew that the others in the group were giving the incorrect
responses. The answer was yes, but that was not the fascinating part to Asch. The naïve subject
would give responses about how he either doubted himself because he felt outnumbered and
there was no way he could be the only one seeing the correct response, the other men couldn’t be
all wrong. But the most common response were things along the lines of “I knew I was right but
