Boys, Be Independent!

The Asch studies (Asch, 1956) have been replicated in different cultures (See Bond and Smith, 1996, for a review.) However, only a few studies have been carried out to examine the development of conformity, mostly because of the technical limitation regarding the availability of good child confederates. Costanzo & Shaw (1966) conducted a developmental study of conformity using the Crutchfield paradigm (Crutchfield, 1955) with four age groups; 7-9, 11-13, 15-17, and 19-21 year-olds. They participated in groups of four at a time, sitting in an individual booth and giving their answers by pushing one of five buttons. They were given factitious information by means of a flashing light indicating the answers of the other participants. In this way, the equivalent of the Asch experiment was done without using confederates. The results showed that conformity peaked at early adolescence (11-13 years.) Walker & Andrade (1996) conducted the Asch experiments with five different age groups (3-5, 6-8, 9-11, 12-14, and 15-17) by training three child confederates for each age group and having them answer as the experimenter asked them to. The results showed that the percentages of conformity decreased with the ages, 85% for 3-5 year-olds, 42% for 6-8, 38% for 9-11, 9% for 12-14, and 0% for 15-17. However, it is doubtful whether the confederates acted properly in the experiments. Recently, Mori & Arai (2007) replicated the Asch (1956) experiment with a new presentation technique (Mori, 2007) that enabled them to present two different visual stimuli without the participants noticing the duality. By presenting two different stimuli to groups of three and to one solitary participants, they replicated the Asch experimental situation without using confederates. They also produced basically the same results as Asch (1956). The present study was designed to examine the development of conformity by applying the Mori and Arai paradigm to two different age groups: junior high school students and elementary school children.