Asch’s Research Into Conformity Flashcards
What was the aim of Asch’s experiment?
To investigate the degree to which individuals would conform to a majority who have obviously wrong answers using a visual perception task.
What was Asch’s procedure?
123 American male students were tested, each one in a group with other apparent participants.
Each participant saw two large white cards on each trial. The line on the left hand card was the standard line.
The lines A B and C were the three comparison lines. One of the comparison lines was always clearly the same length as the standard line. The other two were substantially different (clearly wrong)
On each trial the participants had to say out loud which of the comparison lines was the same length as the standard line
The participants were tested in groups of 6 to 8. Only one was a genuine participant and was always seated either last or second to last in the group. The others were all Asch’s confederates.
The participants each completed 18 trials and the confederates have the same incorrect answer on 13 trials called critical trials.
What were Asch’s findings?
The real participants confirmed to the incorrect answers 36.8% of the critical trials.
75% of the participants conformed on at least one of the critical trial and 25% of the participants never conformed
- Asch also used a control group and found that less than 1% of the participants gave a wrong answer.
According to the participants why did they conform?
Most of the participants said that they knew their answers were wrong but went along with the group to fit it or because they thought they would be ridiculed.(distortion of action)
Other participants said they conformed because they had doubts over their own accuracy (distortion of judgement)
What were the conclusions of the experiment?
-the judgements of individuals are impacted by majority opinions, even when the majority are obviously wrong.
-the participants conformed due to normative social influence and the desire to fit in and avoid rejection.
Evaluate Asch’s experiment?
Ethical issues- participants were deceived as they believed the confederates were also participants who were taking part in a visual line judgement task.
Participants were put through psychological harm- put under the stress of having to decide whether to publicly agree or disagree with the group majority.
Demand characteristics-due to the easy nature of the task participants may have guessed the aim of the study and changed their behaviours. This reduces the validity of the findings.
Asch’s experiment lacked mundane reality and so cannot be generalised to everyday behaviour
Not generalisable as only 123 MALES were used so cannot be applied to all genders. (Beta bias)
Replications of the study have not found the same results- Perrin and Spencer (1980) recreated the study and found that one student conformed in a 396 critical trials. This is very different to the 36.8% conformity rate in Asch’s original study.
Not representative to all cultures-only American males used. America is an individualist culture so bad lower conformity rates, in collectivist cultures like China (Bond and Smith 1996) conformity was higher.
