1.1 Social Influence | Conformity Flashcards
Definition of conformity.
A change in a person’s behaviour or opinions as a result of real or imagined pressure from a person or group of people
Definition of group size.
Asch increased the size of the group by adding more confederates, thus increasing the size of the majority. Conformity increased with group size, but only up to a point, levelling off when the majority was greater than three.
Definition of unanimity.
The extent to which all of the members of a group agree. In Asch’s studies the majority was unanimous when all of the confederates selected the same comparison line. This produced the greatest degree of conformity in the naive participants.
Definition of task difficulty.
Asch’s line-judging task is more difficult when it becomes harder to work out the correct answer. Conformity increased because naive participants assume that the majority is more likely to be right.
What was Asch’s aim for study?
The extent to which people will conform to others, even in a situation when the answer is certain
What were the findings about conformity - genuine participant conformity?
On average, they agreed with the confederates’ incorrect answers 36.8% of the time
What were the findings about conformity - genuine participant lack of conformity?
25% of the genuine participants never gave a wrong answer therefore never conformed
How did he test group size?
By varying the number of confederates from 1-15 so the total group size was from 2-16
What did Asch find about the relationship between group size and conformity?
Curvilinear relationship - conformity increased with group size but only up to a certain point
Provide statistics for the group size variation.
Conformity with three confederates rose to 31.8% but the presence of more confederates made little difference
Provide statistics for the unanimity variation.
The rate of conformity decreased to less than 25% of the level when the majority was unanimous
