Compare methods

	Asch Conformity Paradigm	Milgram Obedience Paradigm
Field	Social Psychology	Social Psychology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1956	1963
Originator	Solomon Asch	Stanley Milgram
Type	Experimental paradigm for normative social influence	Experimental paradigm for obedience to authority
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.	Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371-378.
Aliases	Asch Line Experiment, Conformity Paradigm, Majority Influence Task	Obedience to Authority Experiment, Milgram Shock Experiment, Destructive Obedience 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 Milgram obedience paradigm, devised by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s, measures the extent to which ordinary people will obey an authority figure's commands to harm another person. A naive participant is assigned the role of teacher and instructed by an experimenter to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to a learner (a confederate) for errors on a memory task, with a switchboard labeled up to 450 volts and ominous warnings. No real shocks are delivered, but the participant believes they are, and the learner's scripted protests escalate to screams, then silence. When participants hesitate, the experimenter issues standardized prods to continue. Milgram found that a majority of participants obeyed to the maximum voltage despite visible distress, a result that overturned assumptions about individual conscience and became one of the most influential and controversial demonstrations in the history of psychology.