University Name, PSYC1001: Rationale Assignment on Asch's Study

This assignment presents a student's rationale for a study on Solomon Asch's conformity experiments. The introduction reviews existing literature on conformity, obedience, and social influence, highlighting key studies like those by Mori & Arai (2010) and Hertz & Wiese (2016), and Brandstetter et al. (2014). The student critically analyzes these studies, focusing on the varying degrees of conformity observed with different agents (humans, robots, etc.) and task ambiguity. The rationale section proposes a novel experiment to investigate how social discussions influence conformity, comparing groups of humans and robots in real-life scenarios. The student aims to understand whether individuals conform to robots in emotionally charged situations, considering the limitations of robots in understanding human emotions and morality. The assignment demonstrates an understanding of conformity principles and a creative approach to extending existing research.

Running head: RATIONALE ASSIGNMENT ON SOLOMAN ASCH’S STUDY
RATIONALE ASSIGNMENT ON SOLOMAN ASCH’S STUDY
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

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Introduction
Conformity is one of the three types of social influences that include obedience and
compliance. It involves the change in the beliefs of the individual to fit in with a social group.
Sometimes individuals give in to group pressures. Individuals succumb to such group pressure
even when they know that the entire group is wrong. Conformity is that group pressure when
people agree with the stand that the majority takes so that they can fit in with the group (Hodges,
2017). Solomon Asch conducted an experiment to understand the influence of conformity on a
group. There were three comparative lines of different lengths and the task of the group was to
state which comparative line was similar to the target line. It was found that about one-third of
the participants conformed even when the group answered incorrectly.
Author information
To further understand how conformity plays a role in influencing an individual’s
performance in group, several experiments have been conducted by many researchers. Three
such studies are highlighted in this paper. The first paper is presented by Kazuo Mori and Miho
Arai that is title as “No need to fake it: Reproduction of the Asch experiment without
confederates”. Another paper titled “Influence of Agent Type and Task Ambiguity on
Conformity in Social Decision Making” is presented by Nicholas Hertz and Eva Wiese. The
third paper that would be reviewed in this paper is “A peer pressure experiment: Recreation of
the Asch conformity experiment with robots” that is presented by Jürgen Brandstetter and
colleagues.
Abstract
The paper by Mori and Arai presents the study without using any confederates. The
results showed that the minority women conformed with the majority while the minority men did

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not (Mori & Arai, 2010). The answers of the participants were the same irrespective of what the
majority responded.
The study by Hertz and Wiese investigated whether non- human agents were able to
induce social pressure similar to the human agents. It focused on examining whether the physical
appearance of an agent that was similar to humans induced conformity or whether conformity
was modulated because of task ambiguity. In order to understand the process, participants were
asked to perform a task where they had to compare lines, along with various agents of various
degrees of humanness that included humans, robots and computers (Hertz & Wiese, 2016). The
task was either of high or of low ambiguity. 62 participants who were undergraduate students
were recruited. The task ambiguity was manipulated as the participants were assigned randomly
to the tasks that were less ambiguous. All the participants performed with all the agents at
random intervals. The results showed that there was low conformity with every agent that had
significant differences in conformity between the tasks that had high as well as low ambiguity.
However, there was no influence of the degree of humanness on the conformity rates.
The second paper presented by Brandstetter and colleagues discusses whether robots are
able to create conformity with the help of group pressure. This study was a recreation of the
Solomon Asch experiment and explored three dimensions of study. The first aspect was whether
robots can create conformity in humans and that if, there was any significant difference between
individuals conforming to the group of other human and that of the robots. Next, they
investigated if group pressure can create differences in verbal judgments that is analogous to
visual judgment. Thirdly, they investigated whether conformity differed in ambiguous and non-
ambiguous situations. The results showed that participants exhibited conformity with human
peers in the visual as well as the verbal tasks and did not conform with the robot peers

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(Brandstetter et al., 2014). Social influence of the robot was not a significant predictor of both
the visual and verbal judgment of the tasks. Moreover, conformity was found to be higher in an
unambiguous situation.
Rationale
All of the above experiments stated the difference in the level of conformity when the
degree of humanness was varied. The experiments stated how the conformity levels differed
when the individuals were asked to perform with robots and both the experiments dealt with the
degree of ambiguity of tasks. However, both the experiments lacked to address the problem of
how the social environment of the individual also affects the individuals to conform to the group.
The experiments were carried out in a particular laboratory setting that included the robots and
other individuals. However, whether the individuals would have the same degree of conformity
when they are outside this laboratory setting is a question that needs to be addressed. Therefore,
the experiment that I would like to conduct would be to identify the issues that affect conformity
of individuals in outside environment setting.
Moreover, robots are devoid of any human emotion and therefore it is important to
understand whether individuals would conform with the robots even when they are given the real
life situation at hand. When the question arises to understand the important aspects of human
life, then it becomes important to take into consideration the fact that robots cannot think the way
humans can, that is; they do not have the human emotions to understand the problem of a
particular situation. Humans take into the aspect of morality and spirituality into concern too that
the robots would be unable to do as they think more on logical and scientific terms. Robots
would analyse every situation in a right or wrong basis. However, humans would not do the same
and this experiment would be an interesting take on conformity. Therefore, the final experiment

4RATIONALE ASSIGNMENT ON SOLOMAN ASCH’S STUDY
that I would like to propose is the analysis of how important social discussions affect the degree
of conformity between the individuals and the robots. There would a comparison between a
group of individuals with another group of individuals and a group of robots. The level of
conformity would then be analysed by comparing the degree of level of conformity between the
two groups. The results would then be interpreted and analysed.

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References
Brandstetter, J., Rácz, P., Beckner, C., Sandoval, E. B., Hay, J., & Bartneck, C. (2014,
September). A peer pressure experiment: Recreation of the Asch conformity experiment
with robots. In 2014 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and
Systems (pp. 1335-1340). IEEE.
Hertz, N., & Wiese, E. (2016, September). Influence of agent type and task ambiguity on
conformity in social decision making. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and
Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting (Vol. 60, No. 1, pp. 313-317). Sage CA: Los
Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications.
Hodges, B. H. (2017). Conformity and divergence in interactions, groups, and culture.
Kazuo Mori & Miho Arai (2010) No need to fake it: Reproduction of the Asch experiment
without confederates, International Journal of Psychology, 45:5, 390-397, DOI:
10.1080/00207591003774485