Final answer:
Participants in Asch's conformity experiment were most likely to test their judgments through a social comparison process, often conforming to the group's incorrect consensus when pressured to verbally express their answer.
Step-by-step explanation:
In Asch's experiment on conformity, participants were most likely to test their judgments through a social comparison process. This means that they assessed the correctness of their own response by comparing it to the responses given by others in the group. Asch's study was not really about visual judgment, but rather an exploration of the influence of peer pressure and the drive to conform. Participants, upon hearing others give an incorrect answer, often chose to disregard their own visual evidence and instead aligned their answer with the group's consensus. This was particularly the case when they were in a setting where they had to verbalize their answer after hearing other unanimous but wrong answers from the associates of the experimenter.
Asch discovered that when the test subjects were allowed to write down their answers rather than speaking them aloud, the instances of conforming to the group's wrong answer dropped significantly. This demonstrates the impact of public vs. private expression of judgment and the associated pressures of conforming to group norms. As such, Asch’s experiments highlight the power of normative social influence and the conditions under which individuals may conform to perceived social norms even against their own better judgment.