"But the human mind," he added, is "an organ for the discovery of truths rather than of falsehoods." Prof. Henry Gleitman of the University of Pennsylvania's psychology department said Dr. Asch was a man who understood better than most how individuals can do regrettable things in the desire to get along but who nonetheless thought that "people would behave humanely, morally, if appropriately informed," (Bond & Smith, 1996, pg. 113) He also served as a professor for 19 years at Swarthmore College, where he worked with well-known Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler. During the 1950s, Asch became famous for his series of experiments, known as the Asch conformity experiments, which demonstrated the effects of social pressure on conformity (Gleitman, Rozin & Sabini, 1997). .
In psychological terms, conformity refers to an individual's tendency to follow the unspoken rules or behaviors of the social group to which he or she belongs. Researchers have long been interested in the degree to which people follow or rebel against social norms ("Social Psychology", n.d.). During the 1950s, Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments designed to demonstrate the power of conformity in groups. In Asch's experiments, students were told that they were participating in a 'vision test' (Asch, 1956). They did not know what they were going to be subjected to, the other participants in the experiment were all confederates, or assistants of the experimenter. At first, the confederates answered the questions correctly, but eventually began providing incorrect answers. Asch told the participants that the purpose of the experiment was to test one's visual abilities. The real purpose was to test levels of conformity in group situations (Asch, 1956). There was a group of nine participants in each trial; however, eight of these were confederates, meaning that they knew the real purpose of the experiment but they pretended to be participants.
