Category: Social psychology

Psychology of love and relationships: The brain map of love, the role of kissing, how couples come to look similar, what kills a relationship and more…

“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The psychology of love and relationships has been examined by poets, philosophers, writers and many other artists over the years.

From the initial moment of attraction to growing old together, here are 10 psychology studies that all lovers should know.

1. Falling in love takes one-fifth of a second

It takes a fifth-of-a-second for the euphoria-inducing chemicals to start acting on the brain when you are looking at that special someone.

Brain imaging studies of love suggest that 12 different areas of the brain are involved.

When looking or thinking about a loved one, these areas release a cocktail of neurotransmitters across the brain, including oxytocin, dopamine, vasopressin and adrenaline.

The brain gets a similar ‘hit’ from love as it does from a small dose of cocaine.

2. Psychology of love: brain map

The first study to look at the neural difference between love and sexual desire finds remarkable overlaps and distinct differences.

The results showed that some strikingly similar brain networks were activated by love and sexual desire.

The regions activated were those involved in emotion, motivation and higher level thoughts.

This psychology of love suggests that sexual desire is more than just a basic emotion, but involves goal-directed motivation and the recruitment of more advanced thoughts.

Love is built on top of these circuits, with one key area of difference being in the striatum. This area of the brain is typically associated with the balance between higher- and lower-level functions.

3. Psychology of love: kissing helps us choose

Two studies of kissing have found that apart from being sexy, kissing also helps people choose partners–and keep them.

In a survey, women in particular rated kissing as important, but more promiscuous members of both sexes rated kissing as a very important way of testing out a new mate.

But kissing isn’t just important at the start of a relationship; it also has a role in maintaining a relationship.

The researchers found a correlation between the amount of kissing that long-term partners did and the quality of their relationship.

This link wasn’t seen between more sex and improved relationship satisfaction.

4. Couples look more similar after 25 years together

People who live with each other for 25 years may develop similar facial features.

One study on the psychology of love has found that over 25 years of marriage the facial features of couples became more similar, as judged by independent observers.

This may be because of similarities in diet, environment, personality or even a result of empathising with your partner over the years.

5. Psychology of love: long distance relationships

Contrary to the received wisdom, long distance relationships can work, according to research on the psychology of love.

Two factors that help keep long distance relationships alive are that these couples:

• Tell each other more intimate information.
• Have a more idealised view of their partner.

As a result, those in long distance relationships often have similar levels of relationship satisfaction and stability as those who are geographically close to each other.

6. Four things that kill a relationship stone dead

For over 40 years the psychologist Professor John Gottman has been analysing the psychology of love.

He’s followed couples across decades in many psychological studies to see what kinds of behaviours predict whether they would stay together.

There are four things that kills relationships stone dead: repeated criticism, lots of expressions of contempt like sarcasm, being defensive and stonewalling, which is when communication almost completely shuts down.

7. Modern marriages demand self-fulfilment

The face of marriage has changed significantly over the years, according to research.

It used to be more about providing safety and solidity, now people want psychological fulfilment from their marriages.

More than ever people expect marriage to be more of a journey towards self-fulfilment and self-actualisation.

Unfortunately in the face of these demands, couples are not investing sufficient time and effort to achieve this growth.

The study’s author, Eli Finkel explained:

“In general, if you want your marriage to help you achieve self-expression and personal growth, it’s crucial to invest sufficient time and energy in the marriage. If you know that the time and energy aren’t available, then it makes sense to adjust your expectations accordingly to minimize disappointment.”

8. A simple exercise to save a marriage

If your relationship needs a little TLC, then there may be no need to go into therapy, suggests research on the psychology of love.

Instead, watching a few movies together could do the trick.

A three-year study finds that divorce rates were more than halved by watching movies about relationships and discussing them afterwards.

The study’s lead author, Ronald Rogge, said:

“The results suggest that husbands and wives have a pretty good sense of what they might be doing right and wrong in their relationships. Thus, you might not need to teach them a whole lot of skills to cut the divorce rate.

You might just need to get them to think about how they are currently behaving. And for five movies to give us a benefit over three years–that is awesome.”

9. The post-divorce relationship

Even after divorce, relationships don’t necessarily end, especially if there are children.

A study of co-parenting post-divorce has found it can go one of five ways, the first three of which are considered relatively functional:

1. Dissolved duos, where (usually) the father disappears.
2. Perfect pals, where parents continue to be best friends.
3. Cooperative colleagues, where couples move on but remain on a good footing with each other.
4. Angry associates, where the fighting continues after the divorce.
5. Fiery foes, where children become pawns in the fight and usually suffer as a result.

10. Psychology of love: the little things

Finally, as we live in a highly commercialised world where we’re encouraged to think love can be bought and sold, it’s worth remembering that often it’s the small things that can make a difference.

A survey on the psychology of love of over 4,000 UK adults found that simple acts of kindness are often appreciated the most.

Bringing your partner a cup of tea in bed, putting the bins out or telling them they look good naked may all do a lot more than a box of chocolates or bunch of flowers (although these won’t hurt!).

Psychology of love

As the German poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke said:

“Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.”

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The definition of deindividuation is when aspects of a situation cause people’s sense of themselves to recede, allowing them to change their behaviour.

Deindividuation in psychology is one of the reasons that people behave differently in a crowd.

When in a crowd people experience deindividuation: a loss of self-awareness.

When deindividuation takes hold people can feel less responsibility and may become anti-social or even violent.

Deindividuation definition

The psychologist Leon Festinger was the first to use the term deindividuation in a 1952 paper.

Festinger wrote that deindividuation in a group or crowd brings about a loosening in people’s behaviour.

People often enjoy being in groups which are deindividuated as they lose their sense of self.

Common examples of deindividuation are:

• When people are dancing in a nightclub, they move and behave in ways they never would in other situations.
• The online disinhibition effect causes people to behave in different ways when they are online than when they are interacting face-to-face.
• People in military units are conditioned to behave in ways that would not be normal elsewhere.

Example of deindividuation research

Psychologists have investigated deindividuation in a variety of ways.

One of those is in the context of cheating and how deindividuation affects it.

People will cheat for all sort of different reasons in all sorts of different ways — in love, in their finances and at work — but social psychologists are particularly interested in the general features of situations in which people cheat.

It’s this question that inspired Professor Ed Diener and colleagues in the 1970s to carry out a classic social psychology study of children’s honesty at Halloween.

Trick or treat?

Diener and colleagues monitored 27 houses in Seattle on the evening of Halloween, as kids came trick-or-treating (Diener et al., 1976).

Just inside the door on a table were two bowls, one filled with candy bars, another with pennies and nickels.

As children arrived in their costumes they were told to take one candy bar each, but not to touch the money.

The host then told the children she had to go back to her research in another room.

Actually, though, she was looking through a peep-hole in the door to see how much candy and/or money they would take.

But this wasn’t just a test of the kids honesty, it was a test of how various situational factors would affect what they did.

Before leaving the room, each of the hosts in each of the houses created a number of different experimental conditions.

The three major factors the experimenters wanted to examine were the effect of being in a group, anonymity and shifting the responsibility for any cheating:

1. Groups: children naturally arrived either alone or in groups (so this condition was only quasi-experimental).
2. Anonymity: sometimes the kids were asked by the host for their names and addresses, other times not.
3. Shifted responsibility: sometimes all the children were told that the smallest child the host could see was responsible if any extra candy or money was taken.

Over the night 1,352 children entered the 27 houses across Seattle, some alone and some in groups, many emboldened by their Halloween costumes.

In each house the host, after the experimental manipulation, left the room and watched the children, waiting to see how the anonymity and responsibility shifting would affect whether they cheated, and by how much.

Anonymity and deindividuation

The good news is that overall, across all the conditions, about two-thirds of the children were completely honest and didn’t take even a single extra candy bar or touch the pennies and nickels.

But the effects of anonymity, being in a group and responsibility shifting were dramatic:

As you can see, when children came alone and were identified, only 8 percent cheated.

However when they came in a group, were anonymous and the responsibility for any cheating had been shifted to the smallest child, the average rate of cheating shot up to 80 percent.

The results suggested that each of the factors were not just additive but interacted with each other to encourage an even larger percentage of children to cheat.

The researchers teased out some further intriguing subtleties from the data they collected.

They were also interested in why the children cheated: was it just because they were in a group, or was it also because the leader cheated and the others copied?

Their results suggested there was indeed a modelling effect because in groups where the first child cheated, the other children were also more likely to cheat.

4 factors predicting cheating

This experiment is a powerful demonstration of deindividuation: when aspects of situations cause people’s sense of themselves, including their ethical and moral codes, to recede and allow them to be easily influenced by the actions of others.

Deindividuation may be at least partly responsible for social loafing, people’s tendency to slack off when working in a group.

But social loafing is the least of the charges ranged against deindividuation.

The phenomenon has been blamed for all kinds of social disorder, especially the antisocial, destructive behaviour sometimes seen in crowds (although according to some scholars the combustibility of crowds has been exaggerated, cf. 7 myths of crowd psychology).

Whatever the judgement on deindividuation, this classic social psychology study does give us four specific situations which make people more likely to cheat:

• when in a group,
• when anonymous,
• when they can copy someone else
• and when responsibility can be shifted elsewhere.

It also demonstrates that these factors can interact with each other to make it even easier for cheating to occur.

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Prepare for an interview the scientific way with these 10 tips straight from psychological research on schmoozing, mental imagery and more…

In a competitive marketplace it’s harder than ever to prepare for an interview so that you stand out from the others.

You will have followed all the usual advice about how to prepare for an interview: researched the organisation beforehand, dressed professionally, arrived early, avoided vomiting on the interviewer and all the rest.

Now you’re in the interview and starting to talk, how can you impress them?

Hiring decisions are made on more than just skills and experience.

It’s also about gut feelings and instinctual reactions.

All sorts of subtle psychological factors come into play; so here are ten techniques which can help you give the interviewer the feeling that you are the one.

1. Schmooze but don’t self-promote

Schmoozing is good.

One study looked at 116 students just out of college trying to get their first job (Higgins & Judge, 2004).

The students who did best at interview were the most ingratiating: they praised the organisation, complimented the interviewer, showed enthusiasm, discussed common interests, smiled and maintained eye contact.

In contrast, blatant self-promotion was surprisingly ineffective.

It made little difference going on about skills, abilities and the positive events they’d been responsible for.

It also didn’t help much taking charge of the interview or having impressive university scores.

So, although employers often say that work experience and qualifications are the most important factors in choosing the right person for the job, this study begs to differ.

What most predicted whether they were considered a fit for the company was their ability to schmooze.

It’s influence tactics that win the day (find out more in my series on the psychology of persuasion).

2. Demonstrate being in control at interview

Interviewers often ask questions about how you dealt with difficult situations in the past.

You’ve probably prepared an answer, but does it display the qualities the interviewer is looking for?

To answer impressively, research suggests you should emphasise how you controlled these difficult situations, rather than letting them control you (Silvester et al., 2003).

Employers want to see you are taking the initiative yourself.

3. Talk to yourself to prepare for an interview

Most of us talk to ourselves from time-to-time to aid performance in many areas of our lives.

It’s often said that talking to yourself is a sign of madness or certainly that you’ve been reading too many dodgy self-help books.

Well, it may be a bit cheesy, but in the context of job interviews—and when it’s called ‘verbal self-guidance’—it does seem to work (Latham & Budworth, 2006).

You can say things to yourself like “I can enter the room in a confident manner,” and “I can smile and firmly shake the interviewer’s hand” when preparing for an interview.

And you can implement other points mentioned here or elsewhere in the same way.

Just don’t talk to yourself out loud and in front of the interviewer…

4. Prepare for an interview with mental imagery

If top athletes can successfully use mental imagery to improve their performance, then why not job interviewees to prepare for an interview?

In one study, half the participants were instructed to visualise themselves feeling confident and relaxed when preparing for an interview (Knudstrup, Segrest, & Hurley, 2003).

Then they imagined the interview went well and they were offered the job.

Those who used mental imagery when preparing performed better at a simulated job interview than those who didn’t.

The mental imagery group also experienced less stress during the interview.

5. Positive body language but avoid fake smile

Think about the type of body language when you prepare for an interview.

All the usual positive body language can help make a good impression: smiling, eye contact, forward lean and body orientation.

All of these nonverbal behaviours have been shown to positively affect interviewer ratings (Levine and Feldman, 2002).

That said, try to avoid too much fake smiling.

False smiling during an interview results in less favourable evaluations than does genuine smiling (Woodzicka, 2008).

The same may well be true for all body language that might appear too fake.

6. Prepare a firm handshake for the interview

While we’re talking about body language and preparing for an interview, we might as well mention the handshake.

It’s difficult to believe a handshake makes that much of a difference, but the research begs to differ.

Stewart et al. (2008) found that a good quality handshake did affect hiring recommendations.

In this study the importance of a firm shake was greater for women.

7. Be defensive at interview if required

Often the advice to prepare for an interview is to avoid being defensive.

People say you shouldn’t make excuses for holes in your experience or apologise for your shortcomings.

This isn’t always true.

In fact, some research suggests you shouldn’t worry about being defensive if the situation calls for it.

When problems emerged in a simulated job interview, applicants who made excuses, expressed remorse and promised it wouldn’t happen again, were rated higher than those who avoided being defensive (Tsai et al., 2010).

8. Be upfront about weaknesses

We’ve all got weak spots in our CVs, but is it best to try and cover them up or to be upfront and honest when thinking about how to prepare for an interview?

Given that liking is the most important factor in job interviews, the problem becomes how to reveal those weak spots without damaging the interviewer’s liking for us.

Jones and Gordon (1972) tested whether damaging revelations are best made at the start or end of an interaction.

They found that when someone was upfront about weaknesses, those listening liked him more than if he or she concealed it until the end.

It seems that we find honesty refreshing so interviewees should be upfront about their weakness.

Exactly the reverse is true for strengths.

Coming out with your biggest achievements upfront is boastful; these make a better impression if left to the end, as though they had to be dragged out of you.

There may also be a memory effect at work here.

When you leave the interview on a high, that is the impression that the interviewers carry of you into their deliberations.

9. Prepare to cut out fillers in an interview

Fillers are utterances like ‘er’ and ‘like’.

One study has found that interviewees who overuse the word like, and put in, like, too many, errr, fillers, were found less professional and were less likely to be hired (Russell et al., 2008).

When preparing for an interview, imagine talking as fluently as you can.

10. Prepare to be unique at interview

You’ve learnt the same old responses to the same old interview questions.

But is this wise if you want to stand out from the crowd?

One recent study has found that interviewees who answer standard questions in novel ways are at an advantage (Roulin et al., 2011).

Across different job types, ages and levels of education, they found that interviewer’s ratings were higher for those who gave novel answers.

This may be because novel answers are easier to recall and being memorable is a good thing—as long as it’s for the right reasons.

Coaching helps prepare for an interview

If you’re still not getting success at interview, then think about interview coaching.

Coaching can encourage you to exhibit the right body language, ingratiate yourself with the interviewer and better communicate your skills and experience.

Research suggests coaching can help people improve their interview performance with the correct preparation (Maurer et al., 2008).

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Social facilitation is the finding from social psychology that people’s performance can improve on some tasks when other people are present.

Social facilitation is a social psychological finding that in some circumstances the presence of other people can improve performance.

While people are prone to social loafing when they can hide in a group, when they are being individually judged on the performance, it can make them work harder.

So, audiences or the presence of other people does not always improve performance — it depends on the exact circumstances.

Social facilitation examples

Everyday examples of social facilitation include:

• A cyclist going faster when in a group with others.
• An actor performing better in front of a full audience than in rehearsals.
• An athlete who performs better in competition than when practising alone.

But the history of social facilitation research does not start with these examples, but with ants.

History of social facilitation research

When an ant builds a nest on her own she does so with little enthusiasm.

She moves as though tired of life, bored with the whole business of excavating earth, perhaps dreaming of a better life elsewhere.

But give our ant a co-worker and she is transformed into a dynamo, a workaholic, an Olympian amongst insects.

Soon she is digging at five times the rate or more…

Ants aren’t the only ones to display social facilitation.

Four decades before S. C. Chen reported his ant findings in 1937, the psychologist Norman Triplett had already noticed much the same social facilitation behaviour in cyclists.

Cycling and social facilitation

Triplett scoured the records of the ‘League of American Wheelmen’ and found that racing cyclists rode faster when paced or in competition.

Analysing the results of many races he found that, on average, cyclists with a pacemaker covered each mile about 5 seconds quicker than those without — social facilitation again.

He suspected it was more than just the purely physical effect of slipstreaming behind another cyclist, that the effect was also psychological — something to do with the mere presence of other people.

Is social facilitation more than just competition?

Two decades later Gordon Allport — one of the founders of personality psychology — did just that.

He had participants write down as many words as they could that were related to a given target word.

They were given three one-minute periods and told they were not in competition with each other.

Again, participants reliably produced more words when others were present than when alone, revealing a social facilitation effect.

To test his hunch Triplett (1898) set children winding a thread on a reel, sometimes on their own and sometimes against others.

What he found confirmed his social facilitation theory: the children went faster when in competition.

While interesting, though, the finding that people work faster in competition is hardly ground-breaking, but what if the competitive element could be removed and effect of mere presence could be measured?

While Allport’s experimental procedure might not have completely eliminated the effects of competition, subsequent studies, and there were many, certainly did.

This boost to people’s performance when watched by others became known as social facilitation and for a few decades it was all the rage in psychology.

Social inhibition

Unfortunately, social facilitation experimenters soon discovered that human psychology is a fraction more complicated than ant psychology.

Most worryingly, experimenters failed to find the expected social facilitation in a whole range of other tasks, for example when people were asked to learn lists of nonsense syllables or navigate a complicated maze.

It emerged that when the tasks were harder their performance wasn’t improved, quite the contrary, it got worse.

People seemed to be experiencing not social facilitation but social inhibition.

They were choking and so were the psychologists who all but abandoned social facilitation research as a bad lot.

Social facilitation and drive theory

It wasn’t until the 1960s that research on social facilitation was revived by the noted psychologist Professor Robert Zajonc.

He thought that the contradictory results from social facilitation experiments could be explained by a new approach called ‘drive theory’.

Zajonc said that when other people are watching us we get more alert and excited and this excitement fires up what he called our ‘dominant response’.

Examples of dominant responses are things like well-practised skills or particular habits.

If this dominant response fits with the situation then our social facilitation occurs, but if the dominant response is inappropriate then we tend to perform poorly.

This theory explained the evidence quite well but critics thought it too simplistic, arguing that it’s not just whether an audience is present or not, it is also how we react to that presence.

To help account for this cognitive process, a new theory was put forward by Robert S Baron in the 1980s.

Distracted and conflicted

Distraction-conflict theory argues that when other people are watching us it creates an attentional conflict between the task we are performing and the watching others.

When the task is easy we can successfully narrow our focus to the task at hand and so our performance improves, probably because of the drive effect to which Zajonc refers.

When the task is tricky, though, we suffer from attentional overload and our performance gets worse.

Pessin (1933) had already noted just this effect when people performed tasks with flashing lights and loud noises distracting them instead of an audience.

Here at last, 100 years after Triplett had children winding fishing reels, came a theory that in concert with Zajonc’s drive theory, has the potential to explain the social facilitation effect: when and how an audience either improves our performance or worsens it.

Distraction-conflict theory in particular makes the complex effects of an audience much easier to understand because it focuses on how we manage our attention.

The psychology of attention, though, is a strange beast affected by all kinds of factors that consequently also tweak the social facilitation effect:

1. Audience evaluation. How we evaluate the audience determines our reaction, for example, is the audience watching closely or are they just passing through? Huguet et al., (1999) unsuprisingly found that attentive audiences are more distracting than inattentive audiences.
2. Opposite sex audience. People usually find opposite sex audiences more distracting and so men are more inhibited on difficult tasks (but better on well-practised tasks) when watched by women and vice versa.
   
3. Mood. Good moods may in certain circumstances facilitate performance and bad moods inhibit them (Mash & Hedley, 1975).

And the list goes on. If it affects attention it’s likely to affect the social facilitation/inhibition effect.

Groups: good or bad for performance?

Whether other people improve or worsen performance naturally depends on the exact circumstances of the group.

Research in social loafing finds that when people are involved in, for examples, an additive task like pulling on a rope, they slack off, often by more than 50 percent.

In this situation, groups are bad for performance partly because individuals can hide.

In contrast, social facilitation/inhibition effects come to the fore when individuals can be picked out of the bunch, when they are being judged on their performance alone.

Like ants the presence of others can push us on to greater achievements, but, because we are human, it can also push us towards disaster.

Psychological research suggests it all depends on managing attention, channelling the body’s physiological response and how good we are at the task itself.

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The definition of social loafing in psychology is that the more people there are in a group, the less work they do — but it can be reduced.

Groups can be fantastically unproductive because they provide such wonderful camouflage.

Under cover of group work people will slack off, happy in the knowledge others are probably doing the same.

And even if they’re not: who’ll know?

What is social loafing?

This is the meaning to what psychologists have nattily called social loafing and it was beautifully demonstrated by a French professor of agricultural engineering called Max Ringelmann as early as the 1890s.

Ringelmann, often credited as one of the founders of social psychology, had people pull on ropes either separately or in groups of various sizes and he measured how hard they pulled.

He found that the more people were in the group, the less work they did (see graph).

Notice that people did about half as much work when there were 8 others in the group than they did on their own.

Social loafing around the world

Since Ringelmann’s original study many others have got the same result using different types of tasks.

Most entertainingly Professor Bibb Latané and colleagues had people cheering, shouting and clapping in groups as loud as they could (Latané et al., 1979).

When people were in groups of six they only shouted at one-third of their full capacity.

The lazy so-and-sos.

The effect has been found in different cultures including Indians, Taiwanese, French, Polish and Americans, it’s been found in tasks as diverse as pumping air, swimming, evaluating poems, navigating mazes and in restaurant tipping.

However social loafing is less prevalent in collectivist cultures such as those in many Asian countries, indeed sometimes it is reversed.

It’s not hard to see why this finding might worry people in charge of all kinds of organisations.

But note that social loafing is most detrimental to the productivity of a group when it is carrying out ‘additive tasks’: ones where the effort of each group member is summed.

Not all tasks fit in to this category.

For example a group problem-solving session relies on the brains of the best people in the group – social loafing wouldn’t necessarily reduce productivity in this group as markedly.

Causes of social loafing

These are some of the standard explanations put forward for the social loafing effect in psychology:

• People expect each other to loaf. Whether consciously or unconsciously people say to themselves: everyone else is going to slack off a bit so I’ll slack off a bit as well because it’s not fair if I do more work than the others.
• Anonymity. When groups are larger the individuals become more anonymous. Imagine you’re doing something on your own: if it goes well you get all the glory, if it goes wrong you get all the blame. In a group both blame and glory is spread, so there’s less carrot and less stick.
• No standards. Often groups don’t have set standards so there’s no clear ideal for which to aim.

These explanations naturally beg the question of how people would behave if they didn’t expect each other to loaf, they weren’t anonymous and there were clear standards – after all groups do often work under much better conditions than those induced in some laboratory studies.

Indeed lab studies by psychologists have often been criticised for giving people boring or meaningless tasks and for putting them in random groups.

How to reduce social loafing

Still people in groups clearly do loaf in real life so here are a few factors found to be important in reducing social loafing:

• Task importance. Studies have shown that when people think the task is important they do less loafing. Zacarro (1984) found that groups constructing ‘moon tents’ (don’t ask me!) worked harder if they thought the relevance of the task was high, thought they were in competition with another group and were encouraged to think the task was attractive.
• Group importance. When the group is important to its members they work harder. Worchel et al. (1998) had people building paper chains in two groups, one which had name tags, matching coats and a sense of competition. Compared to a group given none of these, they produced 5 more paper chains.
• Decreasing the ‘sucker effect’. The sucker effect is that feeling of being duped when you think that other people in the group are slacking off. Reducing or eliminating this perception is another key to a productive group.

This is just three, many more have been suggested, including: how easily each member’s contribution can be evaluated, how unique each individual’s contribution is and how individually identifiable they are.

The drift is that people can be made to work harder by cutting off their natural tendency to hide in the group.

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The Solomon Asch conformity effect experiment shows the extraordinary lengths people with go to just to conform with other people’s behaviour.

The Solomon Asch conformity experiments were a series of social psychological experiments carried out by noted psychologist Solomon Asch.

The Asch conformity experiment reveals how strongly a person’s opinions are affected by people around them.

In fact, the Asch conformity experiment shows that many of us will deny our own senses just to conform with others.

We all know that humans are natural born conformers – we copy each other’s dress sense, ways of talking and attitudes, often without a second thought.

But exactly how far does this conformity go?

Solomon Asch conformity experiment

Do you think it is possible you would deny unambiguous information from your own senses just to conform with other people?

Have a look at the figure below.

Compare the line on the left with the three lines on the right: A, B & C.

Which of these three lines is the same length as the lonesome line on the left?

It’s obviously C.

And yet in Asch’s conformity experiment conducted in the 1950s, 76 percent of people denied their own senses at least once, choosing either A or B.

What kind of strong-arm psychological pressure tactics made them do this?

The fascinating thing about this experiment was that its creator, renowned psychologist Solomon Asch, set out to prove the exact opposite.

A previous experiment by Muzafer Sherif (see his well-known Robbers Cave experiment) had found that when people were faced with making a judgement on an ambiguous test, they used other people’s judgements as a reference point.

This makes perfect sense.

If I’m not sure about something, I’ll check with someone else.

But this is only when I’m not sure.

The situation is quite different when I have unambiguous information, such as when I can clearly see the answer myself.

Other people’s judgement should then have no effect – or at least that’s what Asch thought.

Procedure of Asch conformity experiment

To test his theory he brought male undergraduates, one at a time, into a room with eight other people who were passed off as fellow participants (Asch, 1951).

They were then shown three lines with another for comparison, similar to the figure above.

Participants in the Asch conformity experiment were asked to call out which line – A, B or C – was the same length as the reference line.

This procedure was repeated 12 times with participants viewing variations of the above figure.

What the participants didn’t realise was that all the other people sat around the table were in on the game.

They were all confederates who had been told by the experimenter to give the wrong answer.

On half of the trials they called out the line that was too short, and on the other half the line that was too long.

The real experimental participant in the Asch conformity experiment, who knew nothing of this, was actually the sixth to call out their answer after five other confederates of the experimenter had given the wrong answer.

Results of Asch’s experiment

The results of the Asch conformity experiment were fascinating, and not at all what Asch had been expecting:

• 50 percent of people gave the same wrong answer as the others on more than half of the trials.
• Only 25 percent of participants refused to be swayed by the majority’s blatantly false judgement on all of the 12 trials.
• 5 percent always conformed with the majority incorrect opinion (we all know people like that, right?!)
• Over all the trials the average conformity rate was 33 percent.

Explaining Asch’s conformity effect

Intrigued as to why participants had gone along with the majority, Asch interviewed them after the experiment.

Their answers are probably very familiar to all of us:

• All participants in the Asch conformity experiment felt anxious, feared disapproval from others and became self-conscious.
• Most explained they saw the lines differently to the group but then felt the group was correct.
• Some in the Asch conformity experiment said they went along with the group to avoid standing out, although they knew the group was wrong.
• A small number of people in the Asch conformity experiment actually said they saw the lines in the same way as the group.

Factors that influence conformity effect

The findings of the Asch conformity experiment were so startling they inspired many psychologists to investigate further.

Here are a few of their findings:

• Asch himself found that if the participant only had to write down their answer (while others called theirs out) conformity was reduced to 12.5 percent.
• Deutsch and Gerard (1955) still found conformity rates of 23 percent even in conditions of high anonymity and high certainty about the answer.
• Those who are ‘conformers’ typically have high levels of anxiety, low status, high need for approval and often authoritarian personalities.
• Cultural differences are important in conformity. People from cultures which view conformity more favourably – typically Eastern societies – are more likely to conform.

The variations on the Asch conformity experiment go on and on, examining many possible experimental permutations, but the basic finding of the Asch conformity experiment still remains solid.

While there’s no surprise that we copy each other, it’s amazing that some people will conform despite the evidence from their own eyes.

Imagine how much easier it is to encourage conformity when ambiguity levels are much higher, as they often are in everyday life.

Conformity is a mixed blessing

Whatever the results of the Asch conformity experiment, conformity itself is something of a mixed blessing.

In many situations we need conformity.

In fact, many aspects of our social lives would be much harder if we didn’t conform to a certain extent – whether it’s to legal rules or just to queuing in the post office.

The dangers of conformity, as in the Asch conformity experiment, are only too well-known, just take a look at the implications of the Milgram experiment for a glimpse at what humans will do in the name of conformity.

Sometimes it really is better if we think for ourselves rather than relying on what others say and do.

How does conformity affect us all?

It certainly bears considering how our own lives would be different if, one day, we decided not to conform, or even to suddenly started conforming.

Would things get better or worse for you?

Many people find their inability to conform is a real problem in their lives while others find it more difficult to break away and do their own thing.

Some social psychologists think the pressure to conform is even greater than that revealed in the Asch conformity experiment.

→ This post is part of a series on the best social psychology experiments:

1. Halo Effect: Definition And How It Affects Our Perception
2. Cognitive Dissonance: How and Why We Lie to Ourselves
3. Robbers Cave Experiment: How Group Conflicts Develop
4. Stanford Prison Experiment: Zimbardo’s Famous Social Psychology Study
5. Milgram Experiment: Explaining Obedience to Authority
6. False Consensus Effect: What It Is And Why It Happens
7. Social Identity Theory And The Minimal Group Paradigm
8. Negotiation: 2 Psychological Strategies That Matter Most
9. Bystander Effect And The Diffusion Of Responsibility
10. Asch Conformity Experiment: The Power Of Social Pressure

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