Conformity refers to the idea of humans following the actions or behaviors of a group of people that they familiarize themselves with. This concept is most relevant to young teenagers who are trying to figure out their identity or personality as they may be prone to following the actions of their peers in order to fit in. These conforming actions may disagree with one’s true morals or beliefs due to the fear of being different. Solomon Asch’s experiments with conformity help to determine how powerful the idea of conformity is on personality traits in adolescents. His experiments focused on perceptual conformity, a type of conformity that deals with the perception of senses such as taste, touch, and smell. During one of his experiments he had a volunteer sit down next to 7 other staged participants. He then gave each participant the same card and ask them to remember the length of the line on the given card. After he let the participants observe the first card, he took it away and gave them a new card with three lines of differing lengths. One of the lines on the card was clearly the same length as the line on the previous control card.
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