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Morality on Zoom: An Asch experiment in an online setting
Several people in a meeting claim that a particular behavior is morally acceptable. You disagree, but would you dare to express your opinion? Would it make a difference if the discussion took place online rather than face to face? Associate Prof. Mariola Paruzel-Czachura (PSPS Audit Committee member; University of Silesia), Dominika Wojciechowska (Manchester Metropolitan University) and Dr. Dries Bostyn (Ghent University) investigated moral conformity using the Asch paradigm in the previously unexplored context of online video meetings.
Mariola Paruzel-Czachura
Dominika Wojciechowska
Dries Bostyn
INTRODUCTION | One of the classic studies that has become firmly established in the history of psychology is Solomon Asch’s experiment on line-length judgments. Participants were given a seemingly simple task: to indicate which of several lines was the same length as a standard line. Although the correct answer was obvious, many participants changed their response after repeatedly hearing the other participants give the same incorrect answer. The findings provided evidence for conformity—the tendency to change one’s own opinions or behavior in response to perceived social norms. It is likely that participants in Asch’s experiment began to doubt their own judgment after repeatedly hearing answers that differed from their own. Subsequent research has also shown that conformity is not limited to simple perceptual tasks. The influence of others’ opinions can also be observed in attitudes and moral judgments, which are often considered much more resistant to change.
Previous research has also highlighted the importance of the physical presence of others. Direct, face-to-face contact with people expressing their views was associated with a greater tendency to conform. Today, however, an increasing proportion of our interactions take place online—during work meetings, classes, or conversations with family and friends. This form of communication is unique: on the one hand, we can see and hear other people, but on the other, they are not physically present in our surroundings. Therefore, Prof. Mariola Paruzel-Czachura, Dominika Wojciechowska, and Dr. Dries Bostyn set out to examine whether the moral conformity effect can also be observed in online communication settings.
HYPOTHESIS | The researchers predicted that participants in the video meeting would be more likely to adjust their responses to the unanimous position of a group of strangers than participants in the control condition.
METHOD | The study was conducted via the Zoom platform and included 120 participants. Participants were randomly assigned to either the experimental or control condition. In the experimental condition, participants joined a meeting with a researcher and four research confederates (two women and two men), who acted as other study participants. The task of everyone present at the meeting was to answer “yes” or “no” to 12 moral dilemmas. The participant always responded last, after hearing the responses of the other participants. In the control condition, participants answered the same moral dilemmas, but did so only in the presence of the researcher.
For eight experimental dilemmas, the research confederates deliberately gave answers that were opposite to those that had been most common in previous studies. For example, if the majority of participants in previous research had answered “yes” to a given dilemma, the confederates answered “no”. The remaining four dilemmas served as filler questions. In these cases, responses were more varied, which was intended to increase the credibility of the research situation.
Example of an experimental dilemma (Greene et al., 2008): You are a doctor. You have five patients, each of whom is about to die due to a failing organ of some kind. You have another patient who is healthy. The only way that you can save the lives of the first five patients is to transplant five of this young man’s organs (against his will) into the bodies of the other five patients. If you do this, the young man will die, but the other five patients will live. Is it appropriate for you to perform this transplant in order to save five of your patients? – all research confederates answered “yes”.
Example of a filler dilemma (Greene et al., 2008): You are a young architect visiting one of your construction sites with your boss. Your boss is a despicable individual who makes everyone around him miserable including you. It occurs to you that if you were to push him off of the building you are inspecting he would fall to his death and everyone would think it was an accident. Is it appropriate for you to push your boss off of the building in order to get him out of your life? – half of the research confederates answered “yes”, while the other half answered “no”.
RESULTS | The analyses examined whether participants’ responses differed between the experimental and control conditions for experimental dilemmas and filler dilemmas. No significant differences were observed in responses to the filler dilemmas, whereas differences emerged for the experimental dilemmas. The researchers found a statistically significant conformity effect in half of the analyzed experimental dilemmas (4 out of 8). For the remaining four dilemmas, the differences did not reach statistical significance, however, they were also in the predicted direction.
Additionally, an analysis combining all dilemmas confirmed the presence of a conformity effect. Participants more often provided responses that were inconsistent with those that had been dominant in previous studies but consistent with the position presented by the group.
SUMMARY | Can we remain faithful to our own moral beliefs during online meetings? The results of the first study using the classic Asch paradigm in an online video-conferencing setting show that this is not always the case. The moral conformity effect emerged in half of the analyzed dilemmas, as well as in the analysis including all tasks combined. This means that even in online environments, other people’s opinions can influence our judgments about what is morally right and what is not. For some individuals, opposing a unanimous group proved difficult, even when the group’s position was inconsistent with the responses most commonly observed in previous research. These findings show that social pressure does not disappear when interactions move to the online world, which constitutes an increasingly important space for our everyday interactions.
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