The Asch-Conformity Experiment - A Conceptual Replication

This study aims at a conceptual replication of the Asch conformity experiment. The Asch Conformity experiment is one of ‘the’ classics of social psychology. The experiment provided strong evidence for informational, social influence: More than 1/3 of participants originally conformed to the opinion of a majority when asked for their perceptive assessment of a task (assessment of line lengths). This study has been replicated several times, a clear replication does not seem to exist at present. Since social structures changed rapidly and strongly in the light of current multiple social crises (energy crisis, war in Ukraine, Covid 19 pandemic, etc.), we argue that a replication is again specifically indicated. We will thus conceptually replicate Asch’s experiment, but not in a real-life situation, but in a virtual online MS Teams meeting setting. We suggest that this modification of the experiment is an important one, as during the Covid 19 pandemic, social meetings were largely online, primarily for students, and specific findings need to be generated for this form of social reality. The replication of that experiment in the online group meeting seems relevant in view of the advancing digitalisation as well as the Covid 19 pandemic, as both university teaching and a large part of social life took place online, especially intensified by the latter.
Our study is divided into two areas of interest: On the one hand, with regard to the replication crisis prevailing in social psychology, the conformity experiment conducted by Asch (1956) is to be replicated in order to check whether the results of that time can be reproduced in the year 2022/23 as well as in the online setting that became of great importance in the light of the Covid 19 pandemic.
Second and on the other hand, we aim at exploring whether there is a relationship between possibly observed conforming response behaviour and the personality factors of the HEXACO-PI-R-100 by Ashton & Lee (2018). Thus, such research interest opens up a further scientific perspective in that not only social influences such as peer pressure are evaluated as a source of conformity, but also the individual personality structure is considered as a determinant to be taken into account.