Male university students were led to believe they were in a study of simple visual perception. They were shown cards with three lines of differing lengths and asked to indicate which of the three lines was the same length as the standard line. The lines were different enough so that mistakes were rare, and their relative sizes changed on each series of trials.

The participants were seated next to last in semicircles of six to eight other students. Unknown to the participants, the others were all experimental confederates - accomplices of the experimenter- who were following a prearranged script. On the first three trials, everyone in the circle agreed on the correct comparison. However, the first confederate to respond on the fourth trial matched two lines that were obviously different. So did all members of the group up to the participant. That student had to decide if he should go along with everyone else’s view of the situation and conform or remain independent, standing by what he clearly saw. That dilemma was repeated for the naive participants on 12 of the 18 trials. The participants showed signs of disbelief and obvious discomfort when faced with a majority who saw the world so differently.

Roughly one fourth of the participants remained completely independent - they never conformed. However, between 50 & 80% of the participants conformed with the false majority estimate at least once, and a third of the participants yielded to the majority’s wrong judgments on half or more of the critical trials.

OH LITTLE GIRL, I DON’T CARE NO MORE

I KNOW THIS FOR SURE

I’M WALKING OUT THAT DOOR

.. Yeah.