Social Conformity was briefly mentioned in class on its connection to information cascades. A famous experiment was done by Solomon Asch in 1951. Participants were faced with this situation. They signed up for a visual experiment and were seated in a room with seven other participants. Unknown to the participant, the seven others are confederates (associates with the experimenter) and everything is scripted so that the participant is the only real subject. The experimenter starts by placing two cards before each person. One card contains one vertical line, while the other card contains three vertical lines of different length. One by one, each participant is asked out loud which line in the second card is the same length as the first card. This is repeated over and over several times. The real subject is placed next to last so that he hears the answers of all the others before him. The confederates unanimously choose the wrong line each time and surprisingly the real subject follows suit just like in an information cascade and chooses the same wrong one. When questioned later, subjects revealed that they thought they were choosing the wrong one but imitated the others based on the information they saw. Social conformity is also fragile similar to information cascades. When the experiment was changed and the subject had just one other person that spoke up and chose the correct answer instead of going along with the herd, the percentage of the conformity drastically reduced.
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