Crutchfield situation
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The Crutchfield Situation was an experimental procedure and apparatus created by Richard S. Crutchfield in 1955 to study conformity. Essentially, the Crutchfield Situation was an attempt to improve upon the methodology employed in the Asch conformity experiments. One of the major criticisms concerning the Asch studies was the need for many accomplices (i.e., confederates) in order to study one participant. 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. The partition walls in each cubicle blocked participants from seeing each other (see Figure 1).
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. For example, one slide showed various shapes (e.g., a star and a circle), and the participants were asked to judge which shape had the greater area. The major difference between the Crutchfield Situation and Asch Situation was in how participants gave their responses. Instead of stating their answers aloud, each participant stated their response by flipping an appropriate switch on an electric control panel installed inside each cubicle. Prior to beginning the study, the experimenter explained that all of the response panels were interconnected such that the response of each participant would be displayed on all other corresponding panels. In other words, the response by the participant in cubicle A would be displayed on the other panels in cubicles B, C, D, and E (and vice versa; e.g., B's response was displayed on A, C, D, and E, etc.). 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."[2]