Compare methods

	Asch Conformity Paradigm	Bystander Intervention Paradigm
Field	Social Psychology	Social Psychology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1956	1968
Originator	Solomon Asch	Bibb Latane & John Darley
Type	Experimental paradigm for normative social influence	Experimental paradigm for emergency helping
Seminal source	Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 70(9), 1-70.	Latane, B., & Darley, J. M. (1968). Group inhibition of bystander intervention in emergencies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 10(3), 215-221.
Aliases	Asch Line Experiment, Conformity Paradigm, Majority Influence Task	Bystander Effect Experiment, Diffusion of Responsibility Paradigm, Emergency Helping Paradigm
Related	3	3
Summary	The Asch conformity paradigm, established by Solomon Asch in the 1950s, demonstrates the power of group pressure to make people publicly endorse a manifestly false judgment. A naive participant joins a group of confederates for a simple perceptual task -- matching the length of a standard line to one of three comparison lines, where the correct answer is obvious. On certain critical trials the confederates unanimously give the same wrong answer, and the experimenter measures how often the lone real participant goes along with the majority against the evidence of their own eyes. Asch found that a substantial proportion of participants conformed at least once, even on an unambiguous task, while systematic variations revealed that conformity rises with majority size up to a point and collapses when unanimity is broken. The paradigm became the canonical demonstration of normative social influence.	The bystander intervention paradigm, pioneered by Latane and Darley in 1968, experimentally demonstrates the bystander effect: the counterintuitive finding that individuals are less likely to help in an emergency when other people are present. In their classic studies a participant encounters a staged emergency -- smoke filling a room, a person apparently having a seizure, or a fall -- either alone or in the company of others (sometimes passive confederates). The dependent measures are whether and how quickly the participant intervenes. Helping reliably declines, and slows, as the number of bystanders increases, an effect Latane and Darley explained through diffusion of responsibility, pluralistic ignorance, and audience inhibition. They formalized the path to helping as a sequence of decisions, each of which the presence of others can derail. The paradigm reshaped understanding of prosocial behavior and emergency response.