Asch’s - Variables Affecting Conformity Flashcards
A strength of Asch’s method was that it provided an effective way of investigating the effect of normative social influence
E – Before Asch, social psychologists had studied conformity. However, these studies (like the Jenness jellybean experiment) typically involved ambiguous tasks, where the answer to the task was uncertain.
E – Asch argued that in ambiguous tasks, conformity might arise from participants’ uncertainty, leading them to rely on others for guidance—an effect known as informational social influence (ISI). Asch’s line judgment test, however, used an unambiguous task, meaning when participants conformed by giving the same incorrect answer as the confederates, they were doing so due to the fear of being rejected by the confederetes – normative social influence (NSI) - rather than a belief in the accuracy of the confederate’s judgements (ISI). This is supported by follow-up interviews conducted by Asch. These revealed that many participants gave incorrect answers to be accepted by the group, indicating they were influenced by normative social influence (NSI) rather than informational social influence (ISI). However, Asch also used his line judgement task to investigate informational social influence (ISI). In one variation, Asch increased the difficulty of the task by making the lines closer together. This made the participants less certain of the answer, causing them to look to others for guidance, meaning ISI also contributed to the conformity seen in this variation experiment. Asch’s variation experiments added to our understanding of how NSI influences conformity. In the unanimity variation, Asch showed how a single dissenting voice can undermine the unity of the majority and weaken its power to cause conformity through NSI. His group size variation showed that normative social influence (NSI) strengthens with group size but plateaus around three people.
L - Therefore, Asch’s line judgement test provided a clever method for investigating NSI, a cause of conformity not effectively investigated by earlier social psychologists, as well as the variables affecting conformity.
limitation of Asch’s research is its lack of ecological validity
E - Asch’s study took part in laboratory conditions and required his participants to make judgements on lengths of lines in front of a group of strangers.
E - Asch’s study lacks ecological validity because it was conducted in an artificial lab setting using an unrealistic task—judging line lengths among strangers. As a result, the findings may not reflect how people naturally conform in real-world situations, such as smoking around friends or deciding to wear a mask during the pandemic. Furthermore, Asch’s confederates were not trained actors, and the study’s artificiality may have led participants to suspect the true nature of the experiment. This could have caused them to alter their behaviour to align with or oppose Asch’s aims, introducing demand characteristics and further undermining the study’s ecological validity.
L – Therefore, the artificial nature of Asch’s research may have undermined its ecological validity, meaning we cannot confidently generalise his conclusions on the variables affecting conformity.
limitation of Asch’s research was its population validity
E - Asch’s sample consisted of 123 male US undergraduates.
E – This sample is quite large, increasing the chance that it would be representative of the overall population. However, it remains unrepresentative as it is biased towards a particular type of person: male undergraduates from the US. Consequently, it is difficult to generalise Asch’s findings to other groups of people, such as women, people from other cultures or those who have not attended university. This means Asch’s conclusions on conformity may lack population validity, a type of external validity. Furthermore, the biased nature of Asch’s sample mean that his research could be criticised for gender bias. Asch attempted to make universal claims (meaning a claim that’s meant to be true of everyone, regardless of gender) about conformity, despite only experimenting on men. This is a clear case of gender bias.
L – Therefore, the sampling bias in Asch’s research undermines the extent to which his conclusions on the variables affecting conformity can be considered generalisable and universal.
limitation of Asch’s research is its temporal validity
E – For example, when Perrin and Spencer (1980) replicated the Asch experiment thirty years after the original, using engineering students in the UK, only one student conformed in a total of 396 trials.
E – The profound lack of conformity in the 1980 replication suggests Asch’s findings lacked temporal validity as they were not applicable in a different period. It has been suggested the high level of conformity seen in Asch’s original 1950s experiment was a ‘child of its time’ meaning it was a consequence of the cultural context of 1950s America, where the pressure to conform was much higher than in the context of the 1980s, where individualism was seen as preferable.
L – Therefore, Asch’s conclusions on the variables affecting conformity may not be applicable to the modern world, meaning they lack temporal validity (a type of external validity where results obtained).
Asch’s research is ethically questionable
E - He broke several ethical guidelines, including: deception and protection from harm.
E - Asch deliberately deceived his participants, saying that they were taking part in a vision test and not an experiment on conformity. Although it is seen as unethical to deceive participants, Asch’s experiment required deception in order to achieve valid results. If the participants were aware of the true aim they would have displayed demand characteristics and acted differently. In addition, Asch’s participants were not protected from psychological harm, as many of the participants reporting feeling stressed when they disagreed with the majority. However, Asch interviewed all of his participants following the experiment to overcome this issue, so he did take steps to deal with the ethical issue of harm.
L – Therefore, Asch’s research had clear ethical issues, but to some extent these were understandable, especially as he took steps to mitigate any harm.
Another limitation of Asch’s research was its vulnerability to demand characteristics
E - Asch’s confederates were not trained actors. Given the artificiality of the research setting, it seems likely many participants recognised the confederates for what they were.
E – If the participants did correctly guess their fellow participants were confederates, any conformity they demonstrated could be attributed to them having guessed the aim of the research and altered their behaviour to please Asch. This means Asch’s research would lack internal validity, thereby undermining is conclusions on conformity.
