Group versus Individual Reward in the Asch Experiment without Confederates

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.

The power of social influence: A replication and extension of the Asch experiment

“…Fujita and Mori [ 7 ] analysed the effect of individual vs collective payoff in the Asch experiment. They found that the conformity effect disappears in the individually incentivized condition.…”

“…However, also this study suffered from low sample sizes since there were only 10 subjects in the individualized minority incentive condition. Furthermore, Fujita and Mori [ 7 ] used the fMORI method and report that some subjects might have noticed the trick.…”

“…Hence, the studies using incentives yield inconclusive and contradicting results: Particularly, Baron et al [ 5 ] found both an accuracy-increasing and accuracy-decreasing effect of monetary incentives depending on task difficulty. Bhanot and Williamson [ 6 ] found an increased conformity rate, and Fujita and Mori [ 7 ] found that the conformity bias disappears in the individually incentivized condition. Overall, we follow the economic notion that monetary incentives matter and expect that rewards for nonconformity decrease group pressure (H 2 ).…”

“…Bhanot & Williamson [ 6 ] conducted two online experiments and found that incentivizing correct answers increases the number of conforming answers. Fujita and Mori [ 7 ] compared group reward and individual rewards in the Asch experiment and found that conformity vanished in the individual reward condition. Thus, the existing evidence on the role of incentives is inconclusive, calling for further investigations of the effect of incentives.…”

“…To provide a conforming but wrong judgment in the original Asch experiment has no consequences, giving rise to the interesting question of whether the finding of Asch still holds when correct answers are rewarded. So far, the effect of incentives in the Asch decision situation has only been investigated rarely [5][6][7], with inconclusive evidence. Baron et al [5] report that use of monetary incentives actually increased conformity when the task was difficult.…”