The Power of Social Influence: Evidence from the Lab and the Field

Descriptive Norms can have a strong influence on the behavior of individuals. This was already demonstrated in the seminal papers by Solomon Asch (1951, 1955, 1956). Asch placed a naïve subject together with six confederates into a room and instructed them to judge the length of lines. The confederates were instructed to give wrong answers. The experiment showed that on average 36% of the naïve subjects were influenced by the group and provided also wrong answers when the group did so. The findings of Asch did receive a lot of attention and were replicated many times. However, most replication were conducted with university students in the US, leaving the question whether Asch’s result are still valid today and whether they can be replicated outside the US. In this paper we replicate and extend the study of Asch. First, we replicate the original Asch experiment using five confederates and one naïve subject in each group (N = 210). Second, in a randomized trial we incentivize the decisions in the line experiment and demonstrate that monetary incentives lower the error rate. Third, we confront subjects with different political statements and show that the power of social influence can be generalized to matters of political opinion. Fourth, we investigate whether intelligence, self-esteem, the need for social approval, and the Big Five are related to providing conforming answers. Finally, we conduct a field experiment and demonstrate that conformity can also be observed outside the lab. We find an error rate of 33% for the standard length-of-line experiment which replicates the original findings by Asch. In the incentivized condition the error rate decreases to 25%. For political opinions we find a conformity rate of 38%. However, besides openness, none of the investigated personality traits are convincingly related to the susceptibility of group pressure.