The group was then given two images. One was an image of three lines of varying length and the other was an image of one line which matched the length of one of the lines. .
They were shown multiple variations of images, and were presented those images several times. The participants had to say which lines matched in length in the two images that were presented. They had to give their answers aloud. The real participant always answered last. At first, the confederates gave the correct answers as to which of the lines were matching in length. After a few trials, they unanimously started giving the incorrect answer to see if this would affect what the real participant said. There were 18 trials in total. The confederates gave wrong answers on 12 of those trials, which were called the 'critical trials' (Asch, 1956).
According to Asch the results of the experiment revealed that one third of the participants conformed with the confederates on the critical trials even though the answers the confederates were giving were clearly wrong. Over the 12 critical trials approximately 75% of participants conformed at least once and 25% of participant never conformed. In the control condition, the participants were asked to write down the correct match between the lines, without sharing their answers with the group (Asch, 1956). The results showed that the participants were very accurate, giving the correct answers 98 percent of the time. Therefore, the reason as to why they conformed could not be that they were unable to make accurate judgments themselves.
At the conclusion of the experiments, participants were asked why they had gone along with the rest of the group. In most cases, the participants stated that they knew the rest of the group was wrong, they did not want to risk facing ridicule (Asch, 1956). A few of the participants suggested that they actually believed the other members of the group were correct in their answers.
