Asch Conformity Experiment Simulator

Asch Conformity Task

Unanimous confederates 3

Trial speed 1.0x

Trials run

Conformed

Live error rate

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Published rate

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How it works

Solomon Asch (1951) showed subjects a reference line and three comparison lines, then asked them to name the one matching the reference — a task so easy that solo subjects erred under 1% of the time. The twist: a subject answered last, after a room of confederates who had secretly been told to unanimously call out the same wrong line. Each trial here draws a fresh comparison card, has the confederates announce the wrong answer in sequence, then samples whether the simulated subject conforms using Asch's own published error rates by group size.

P(conform | n confederates) ≈ AschCurve(n)
  n=0 → ~1%   n=1 → ~3%   n=2 → ~13%
  n=3 → ~32%  n≥4 → plateaus ~32%
subject_answer = conform ? wrongLine : correctLine  (Bernoulli draw)

Unanimous confederates — group size facing the subject; conformity rises steeply from 1 to 3 opponents, then plateaus — adding a 10th confederate barely moves the rate, a real finding, not a simplification.
Live error rate — this run's rolling percentage of trials where the subject picked the group's wrong line, plotted trial by trial against the published curve for the current group size.
Published rate — the reference point taken directly from Asch's 1951 data for the selected group size; the live dot should hover near it over many trials.

Real-world relevance: this single-confederate-count curve explains why unanimous small groups (juries, committees, eyewitness lineups) exert outsized pressure toward agreement — and why a single dissenter breaks the effect almost completely.

Subject Confederate — wrong answer Published curve Live experiment