Procedures: The participants were presented with an unambiguos task, a line judgement task. Participants were presented with two cards. One had on it a 'standard' line: on the other were three comparison lines (see image to the right). They were asked to judge which of the comparison lines were equal in length to the standard line.

This was done with a control group of 37 people, where the pressure to conform was removed. It was also done with an experimental group containing 6-8 confederates and 1 paricipant, who was second to last to answer. At first the confederates gave the correct answer, then they changed to giving the same unanimous wrong answer.

Findings: In the control group 35 of the participants made no errors, 1 made a single error. Only 0.7% of the judgements were incorrect.

In the experimental groups 37% of the judgements were incorrect. Of the 125 participants, only 25% gave the correct answer every time, compared to the 95% result from the control group.

Evaluation: It was an UNAMBIGUOUS TASK so that it showed clearly public acceptance from normative social influence rather than informational influence.

It lacked EXTERNAL VALIDITY. This situation was artificial and unlikely to occur in everyday life, therefore the participants acted in a different way to how they would usually act and the results could not be generalised to the real world.

There is vast CROSS-CULTURAL SUPPORT from further similar studies.

It is limited in that fact that it may just reflect the social norms of the place (USA) and the era. Therefore the ZEITGEIST may have had a bearing on the results.

The majority of results actually reflected an independant reaction rather than conformity (63% of judgements were in fact correct). There was a marked increase in conformity, but the majority still chose to be independant of the confederate group.