Crutchfield situation

Essentially, the Crutchfield Situation was an attempt to improve upon the methodology employed in the Asch conformity experiments.

According to Forsyth, an additional criticism of Asch's design was that “participants in the Asch studies stated their choices aloud under the watchful eyes of all the other members, and this procedure likely increased their feelings of embarrassment and of being evaluated.”[1] Crutchfield's design eliminated the need for many confederates, and protected against the potential of subjects’ feeling embarrassed by stating answers aloud, by placing participants into individual side-by-side cubicles.

After being sat into their individual cubicles, participants would make judgment decisions about various stimuli that were projected onto the wall in front of them.

As explained by Crutchfield in his own words, each participant's response “information would appear on the other panels in the form of signal lights, among five rows of eleven lights, each row corresponding to one of the five panels.

During the procedure, Crutchfield led each participant to believe that he or she would give their judgement responses last.