Asch’s Conformity Experiment Flashcards
What was asch’s baseline procedure?
To assess to what extent people will conform to the opinion of others.
What where the variables investigated by asch?
Group size, unanimity, task difficulty
What is group size ?
Whether the size of the group would be more important than the agreement of the group
What is unanimity?
To see if the naive participant would still conform even when a descenter was added
What is task difficulty?
Whether making the task harder would affect the degree of conformity
What was the experimental procedure?
.Asch used a lab experiment to study conformity, whereby 50 male students from Swarthmore College in the USA participated in a ‘vision test’.
.Using a line judgement task, asch put a naive participant in a room with seven confederates/stooges.
.The confederates has agreed in advance what their responses would be when presented with the line task.
. The real participant did not know this and was led to believe that the other seven confederates/stooges were also real participants like themselves
What are the limitations?
.Asch’s participants were American men (women maybe more conformist possibly because they are concerned about social relationships and being accepted
.USA is an individualist culture ( where people are more concerned about themselves that their socia group)
.similar conformity studies conducted in collectivist cultures (such as China where the social group is more important that the individual) have found that conformity rates are higher (Bond and smith 1996)
What is one strength of asch’s research ?
One strength of asch’s research is support from other studies for the effects of task difficulty.
What is the example of research support ?
Todd Lucas et al. (2006) asked their participants to solve ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ maths problems. Participants were given answers from three other students ( not actually real answers). The participants confirmed ( agreed with the wrong answers) more often when the question got harder.
