TITLE:
Group versus Individual Reward in the Asch Experiment without Confederates
AUTHORS:
Yuki Fujita, Kazuo Mori
KEYWORDS:
Asch Experiments, Conformity, Rewarding Procedure
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.5 No.5,
May
27,
2017
ABSTRACT: This
study examined whether rewarding participants’ principles would affect
conformity of the minority responders in the Asch experiment. Twenty groups of
four university male students (N = 80; 19 - 24 years old; mean age, 20.7 and SD, 1.32)
participated in the Asch conformity experiments without using confederates, as
developed by Mori and Arai (2010). Participants were randomly assigned: one of each foursome to the minority condition and
the remaining three to the majority condition. In the half of the groups, the
participants were told they would be rewarded individually depending on their
each performance (Individual Reward condition). The other half were told to be
rewarded group-wise (Group Reward condition). The results showed that the
minority responders of the Group Reward groups conformed to the majority, while
no minority responders conformed to the majority in the Individual Reward
groups.