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Opinions and Social Pressure

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Opinions and Social Pressure
“Opinions and Social Pressure”
By Solomon Asch “Opinions and Social Pressure” written by Solomon E. Asch is a journal article reporting Solomon Asch’s experiment on “How, and to what extent, do social forces constrain people’s opinions and attitudes?” (Asch, 20)

Although conformity is inevitable, is there a possibility of indifference because of personality, education and social pressures? “Social influences shape every person’s practices, judgments and beliefs are a truism to which anyone will readily assent.” (Asch, 20) Solomon Asch’s experiments in the 1950’s set a line up for how people in the real life make decisions based on facts. In the journal article, Solomon Asch presented many facts, which create truth to his thesis “How, and to what extent, do social forces constrain people’s opinions and attitudes?” Experiments were conducted to prove Asch’s theory of the way each person makes a decision and why. The experiments are as follows “A group of seven to nine young men, all college students, are assembled in a classroom for a "psychological experiment" in visual judgment. The experimenter informs them that they will be comparing the lengths of lines.” (Asch, 19) The experiments conclude that the test subjects are usually convinced due to the unanimous group of decision makers. As the experiments begin everyone agrees unanimously. In the middle of the experiments, the answers from the test subjects start to change. This begins with the experiments and the test subjects all agreeing and as the experiment goes into the second phase of asking the question they are being asked to answer the test subjects have a second look and at least one test subject disagrees. Towards the end of the experiments, while reading Solomon Asch’s “Opinions and Social Pressures”, “…this study provides clear answers to a few relatively simple questions…” (Asch, 25) Each person has degrees to which they will conform.

In conclusion, Solomon Asch’s found there were vast

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