Chapter 17 of PSYCHOMarketing by Roger Nichols
In the mid-1950s, Solomon Asch conducted an experiment to research the degree to which social pressure from a large number of people could influence a person’s decision. The trials uncovered how much a person’s opinion is impacted by the opinions of others. Asch found that individuals were eager to overlook reality and give a wrong answer with a specific end- goal of fitting in with a group of people. The experiment was carried out with male students from Swarthmore College. Subjects were given two pictures and were asked which line was the same in each. One out of eight male students selected for the experiment was a genuine participant; the other seven were told beforehand what to expect and the answer to choose. The student was oblivious to the fact that the participants’ behavior was scripted. They were arranged in rows, and the genuine student was positioned at the end of the row so he would be the last person to answer.
The experiment was carried out 12 times, with different cards. The fake participants unanimously chose the same answers in most of the trials. On some occasions, they chose the right answer; other times they picked the wrong one. The result showed that about 75% of the real participants ended up picking the wrong answer because they were trying to fit in with the group. Asch also carried out eight other experiments in a controlled condition in which all the participants were real subjects. The results showed that only 1% of the participants went along with the incorrect majority’s answers.
After the experiments, the real participants were interviewed on why they felt compelled to choose the wrong answer even when they were right. They admitted they lied because they feared their co-participants would ridicule them for choosing a different answer. Some of them said they felt the others were correct because many of them picked the same answer. Thus, the experiment established that humans feel pressured to go in the direction of other people’s opinions or choices for two reasons:
(1) to fit in with a group, and (2) because they believe the group is more privy to information than they are. According to Burnkrant and Cousineau (1975), social group influence and pressure have been found to be significant factors in individuals’ behavior and their tendency to conform to the norms of a group. This is also prevalent in marketing, where people go for the popular (and sometimes) expensive brand because the people in a group they would like to fit in with would choose it.