Asch’s research 1951

Question 1

Asch’s sample consisted of ___ male students at _ different USA colleges.

Answer 1

123
3

Question 2

What type of test did the participants think it was?

Answer 2

A vision test

Question 3

How were the participants deceived?

Answer 3

They were led to believe that the confederates were real participants

Question 4

How were the participants always seated?

Answer 4

2nd to last

Question 5

It was a line judgement task, he placed one naive participant in a room of - confederates (actors), who agreed their answers in advance.

Answer 5

6-8

Question 6

What did Asch want to see?

Answer 6

If the real participants would conform to majority view, even when the answer was clearly incorrect.

Question 7

What did Asch want to see?

Answer 7

If the real participants would conform to majority view, even when the answer was clearly incorrect.

Question 8

Each participant completed __ trials and the confederates give the same incorrect answer on __ trials, called ‘c_______ trials’.

Answer 8

18
12
critical

Question 9

What percentage of participants confirmed at least once?

Answer 9

74%

Question 10

What percentage of participants never conformed?

Answer 10

26% never conformed

Question 11

What happened in the control group?
What percentage of participants have the wrong answer?

Answer 11

Confederates gave correct answers.
Less than 1% of participants gave the wrong answer

Question 12

On average, real participants conformed to give correct answers on __% of critical trials

Answer 12

32%

Question 13

How many of the 18 trials were control?

Answer 13

6

Question 14

What was the task in Asch’s study?

Answer 14

To pick out the line that matches the target line length

Question 15

What three variables did Asch change in the variations of his experiment?

Answer 15

Group size
Task difficulty
Unanimity of the group (if the participant had more support from the group)

Question 16

How did conformity change with group size?

Answer 16

1 confederate = 3%
2 confederates = 12.8%
3 confederates = 32%

Conformity rate, on average, didn’t go higher than 32%.

Question 17

How did conformity rate change with task difficulty?

Answer 17

Conformity increased with task difficulty

Question 18

What is conformity?

Answer 18

When a person changes their attitude or behaviour due to ‘real’ or ‘imagined’ group pressure.

Question 19

Give three cons to Asch’s study:

Answer 19

Lacks ecological validity -> not very realistic of real world conformity.

White American male sample -> ethnocentric and culture biased.

Beta bias -> using only males, assuming females would be the same, it is also androcentric, and gender biased.

Unethical -> as there is a level of deception, this is argued to be unethical.

The % of conformity is quite low, so we could argue that this isn’t good evidence on conformity.