Asch And The Milgram Experiment

Throughout the years, many sociologists have researched the conformity within society. The two experiments that remain important and significant are the Asch Experiment and the Milgram Experiment. Both of these experiments researched the basis on why or even how conformity appears in society. The Asch Experiment was an experiment that was done by Soloman Asch in 1951 that took students from Swarthmore College to test if one participant would conform to the majority’s opinion, even if the answers were knowingly wrong. Asch was able to take one participant that thought he was taking a ‘vision test’ into a room with 7 other people who were told to give a wrong answer to a question. The test was displayed as a line test where each person one
A popular example of why he wanted to do this experiment was due to the Nazi era where Germans conformed to the killings and slave labor of Jews despite their own moral values or person conscience. The experiment had 40 males from ages 20 to 50 years of age from all different parts of society. They started with having the participant as the ‘teacher’, and an actor as the ‘learner’; the teacher was to ask the questions to the learner and every time the learner got a question wrong the teacher was to send electric shock to the learner. Although the learner was just an actor and not actually receiving electric shock, the teacher/participant thought this was real. They also had an experimenter which was to give a series of what they called ‘prods’ that were to be said whenever the teacher did not want to execute the shock, for example one prod was for the experimenter to say “please continue”, or “you have no other choice to continue”. The results were astounding that 65% of the teachers/participants continued the electric shock all the way to 450 volts. (McLeod, S. A.,
In high school I didn’t want to be apart of the normal girls that were promiscuous, I wanted to be my own person and only become intimate with someone not out of others opinion, but out of my own decision. A lot of times, in doing so, I was made out to be an outcast throughout my first 2 years of high school. Although, during my last 2 years there were other situations where I felt I should conform to some of the decisions that my friends were making, because I felt that if I didn’t I would become an outcast again. I would say that I was both a conformist and a nonconformist throughout high school, depending on what situation I was in. I believe that I was more in the nonconformist side due the fact that I made my own decisions on whether if that was okay on my morals to conform to the majority of my peers, or whether the decision would conflict with my own valued morals. My influence of being a nonconformist or even a conformist was just that I wanted to be myself and make my own decisions in life no matter if it made me an outsider or