Asch's study

Question 1

what is the baseline procedure?

Answer 1

Asch devised a procedure to assess to what extent people will conform to the opinion of others.

Question 2

what is the baseline study?

Answer 2

male students with actors. line judgement task. the real participants were deceived. two cards were given to each participant one with three lines and one with a single line which matches the length of one of the three lines. the genuine participant was always second to last. each participant completed 18 trials 12 were critical trials

Question 3

what was his findings?

Answer 3

the real participants conformed to the incorrect answers on 32-36% of critical trials. 74% of participants conformed on at least one critical trial and 26% never conformed. participants were debriefed and many said they knew some answers were incorrect but still conformed

Question 4

Asch’s evaluation

Answer 4

Asch used a biased sample therefore the results can’t be generalised as only male participants were used. Asch’s sample lacks population validity. It has low levels of ecological validity and is also ethically questionable as he broke several ethical guidelines.

Question 5

group size in Asch’s study

Answer 5

see how size of the majority, affects the rate of conformity. these variations ranged from 1 confederate to 15 confederates. with one confederate the real panicipants confomed on just 3%. with two, they conformed on 12•8%, with three confederates, they confomed on
32%. of the critical trials (the same percenrage as Asch’s original experiment) - demonstrates that conformity reaches is highest level win just three confederates. When using 15 confederares the rate of conformity slightly dropped as real participants became suspicious.

Question 6

unanimity in Asch’s study

Answer 6

in one variation of Asch’s experiment, one of the confederates was instructed to give the correct answer throughout. In this variation the rate of conforming dropped to 5%. In another variation, one of the confederates gave a different incorrect answer to the majonry In this variation , confominy still dropped, by 9% this time. This shows that if you break tne group’s unanimous position then conformity is reduced, even if the answer provided by the supporter is still incorrect.

Question 7

task difficulty in Asch’s study

Answer 7

In one variation he made the task more difficult by making the difference between the lines significantly smaller. In this vanianion, Asch found the rate of confomiry increased, although he didn’t report percentages. This is likely to be the result of informational social influence , as individuals look to another for guidance when completing a difficult task
another for guidance unen complerng therask, similar to the results in Jenness’ experiment.

Question 8

one strength of Asch’s study

Answer 8

P: one strength to Asch’s study was that there is research support from other studies for the effect of task difficulty.
E: for example Lucas et al asked participants to solve easy and hard maths problems. Evidence shows that participants conformed more when problems were hard.
T: this means that Asch’s research is saying that the more difficult task the more people conform which is valid as it supported by other research.

Question 9

one limitation of Asch’s study

Answer 9

P: his study was an artificial task and situation.
E: for example line judgment is not a common real life task. Fiske said this is unrealistic.
T: this means that we can’t use Asch’s study to generalise to real life conformity