Conformity, and the Psychology Behind “Everyone Is Doing It”
Solomon Asch occupies a fascinating place in the history of social psychology because he took something that most people experience every day, the pressure to agree with a group, and turned it into something that could be measured in a laboratory.
Born in Warsaw in 1907 and raised in the United States after his family immigrated when he was a child, Asch eventually became one of the major figures in American social psychology. His career was also shaped by the intellectual atmosphere of the mid-20th century, particularly the influence of Gestalt psychology and his work at Swarthmore College.
Rather than treating people as isolated decision-makers, Asch became interested in how our perceptions and judgments change when other people enter the room. His most famous work produced what is commonly called Asch’s conformity theory, or the Asch conformity paradigm, demonstrating that people will sometimes knowingly give an incorrect answer simply because a group has given that same incorrect answer first. In his classic line-length experiments, participants were shown a target line and several comparison lines and asked which one matched it. The answer was intentionally obvious. Yet when several other people in the room, actually working with the researchers, confidently selected the wrong line, many participants eventually followed the group.
The experiment was deceptively simple, but its implications were enormous.
Asch discovered that conformity was not simply a matter of people being unable to think for themselves. People could see the correct answer and still publicly choose the wrong one because the social environment had changed the psychological stakes of being correct. His work also demonstrated something particularly interesting about resistance to conformity: having even one other person disagree with the majority could dramatically reduce the pressure to conform.
That finding gives Asch’s research an especially interesting place in the history of marketing, because modern advertising rarely has to convince us that something is objectively true. Instead, it often tries to convince us that other people already believe it, use it, want it, or approve of it. The basic psychological question Asch investigated was therefore much bigger than choosing the wrong line in a laboratory. It was about what happens to our judgment when our judgment collides with the judgment of everyone around us.
This is where Asch’s research becomes incredibly useful for understanding modern consumer behavior. Marketing campaigns have become extraordinarily good at turning social influence into a selling tool. Consider the familiar phrases plastered across advertisements and websites: “America’s #1 choice,” “Best seller,” “Join millions of satisfied customers,” “Everyone is talking about it,” or the little digital badge announcing that 12,000 people purchased an item this week. These messages are not merely providing information about a product. They are providing information about what other people are doing, and that distinction matters.
Asch’s experiments help explain why a consumer standing alone in front of a shelf, scrolling through an online store, or comparing restaurants on a phone may suddenly feel more confident about a choice when the choice appears socially validated. Reviews, ratings, testimonials, influencer posts, follower counts, customer photos, “trending now” labels, bestseller rankings, and even long checkout queues can function as modern versions of the social pressure Asch studied.
The underlying message is often subtle: You don’t have to figure this out entirely by yourself. Look at what everyone else has decided.
This connects closely with what contemporary marketers call social proof, the tendency to use other people’s behavior as evidence about what we should do, particularly when we are uncertain. Asch showed that social information can interfere with even a very simple perceptual judgment. Marketing takes that lesson into situations where the “correct” choice is far less obvious. There is no objectively correct pair of sneakers, restaurant, streaming service, energy drink, or smartphone. When consumers face uncertainty, the behavior of other people can become a shortcut for deciding what is valuable, desirable, popular, trustworthy, or safe.
This also explains why brands work so hard to create visible communities around their products. A product can become more attractive when consumers see other consumers using it, because ownership itself becomes evidence that the product belongs in the social world they want to enter.
The same principle appears in influencer marketing, where the influencer effectively becomes the person in the room saying, “This is the choice.” The audience does not necessarily need to believe the influencer is objectively correct. They only need to perceive that someone they identify with has already made the decision. Asch’s work also gives marketers a warning: social influence is powerful, but it is not unlimited. His research found that conformity decreases when people have even a small amount of social support, which suggests that consumers are not simply programmable creatures waiting for advertising instructions.
People can resist the crowd when they have confidence, alternative information, or another person validating an independent choice.
For marketers, that means the most effective campaigns may not simply shout that everyone loves a product. They create an environment in which the consumer can imagine themselves as part of a particular group. In that sense, Asch helped reveal one of the most valuable lessons in consumer psychology:
people do not make choices in a vacuum.
We buy products, brands, experiences, and identities while constantly observing the people around us. Sometimes advertising sells the object itself. Other times, much more cleverly, it sells the feeling that choosing the object means choosing what everyone else has already chosen. The product may be sitting on the shelf, but the real psychological merchandise is belonging.