This is a sequence of animations broken into five parts on the topic of Conformity.
  1. Part 1 of 5: An animation where conformity is defined and applied to an example.
  2. The on-screen text says "Conformity occurs when people yield to real or imagined social pressure. For example, if you maintain a well-groomed lawn only to avoid complaints from your neighbors, you're conforming to social pressure. However, if you maintain a nice lawn because you genuinely prefer a nice lawn, that's not conformity."
  3. Part 2 of 5: Solomon Asch, and his classic experiment, is introduced. On screen, the participants and the experimental stimuli are illustrated.
  4. The on-screen text says "In the 1950s, Solomon Asch devised a classic experiment that reduced ambiguity about whether subjects were conforming. Asch's subjects were male undergraduates recruited for a study of visual perception. A group of seven participants were shown a large card with a vertical line on it and then asked to indicate which of three lines on a second card matched the original "standard line" in length. Try it yourself - click the line on the right that matches the length of the standard line on the left."
  5. Part 3 of 5: The details of Solomon Asch's classic experiment on conformity are described and animated. On screen, the participants and the experimental stimuli are illustrated.
  6. The on-screen text says "The person in the sixth chair was the only genuine subject. All the other people in the group were accomplices of the experimenter. The accomplices gave accurate responses on the first two trials. On the third trial, line number 2 clearly was the correct response, but the first five “subjects” all said that line number 3 matched the standard line. Over the course of 15 trials, the accomplices all gave the same incorrect response on 12 trials."
  7. Part 4 of 5: The data from the control group and experimental group are compared. On screen, a simple bar graph with this data is shown.
  8. The on-screen text says "Bear in mind, the line judgments were easy and unambiguous, as the data shown here demonstrate. Only 5% of control group students, who were not exposed to social pressure, made any errors whatsoever over the course of many trials. So, when the participants agreed with the accomplices, they weren't making honest mistakes -- they were conforming."
  9. Part 5 of 5: A more nuanced review of the data is performed On screen, a bar graph with data from Asch's experiment is shown.
  10. The on-screen text says "How did the subjects respond to group pressure? As you can see here, they varied considerably in their tendency to conform. Of the 50 participants, 13 never caved to the group, while 14 conformed on more than half of the trials. Averaged across all 50 participants, conformity was seen on 37% of the trials. Given how easy the line judgments were, most social scientists viewed the findings as a dramatic demonstration of humans' tendency to conform."
  11. End of animated sequence.