Asch Study

Question 1

Aim and background to the study

Answer 1

Asch researched into propaganda to why people conform when Hitler was at the height of his power. If WW2 didn’t happen Asch wouldn’t have done his study. Asch experimented with investigating the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform. Asch is researching an unambiguous task which means the answer is obvious.

Question 2

Participants/ Sample

Answer 2

7 confederates and one naive participant in one trial. The confederates have been briefed before on what they were to do. He used 123 male students from a college. The naive participant did not there was confederates and believed they were real participants like themselves.

Question 3

Method/Procedure

Answer 3

The answer for the task was obvious. Each person in the room had to state aloud which comparison like was most likely the target line. The real participant was sat second to last. For the first 6 trials the confederates all gave the right answer to gain trust but for the remaining 12 they gave the wrong answer these 12 were called critical trials. He also had a control group which contained no confederates. It was a lab experiment and told the participants it was a vision test.

Question 4

Manipulated group sizes

Answer 4

In the manipulated version he found that if there was one confederate and one participant the conformity was only 3%, with two others it increased to 13% and with three or more it was 32%.
This shows that is the group was smaller the level of conformity has gone down as in the original it was 32% and in the manipulated version with only two it fell to 3%.

Question 5

Manipulated task difficulty

Answer 5

In this manipulated version he made the lines more closely similar and made the task harder. The results show that if the answer is less obvious people look to others for confirmation, meaning that levels of conformity increase. If the task is more difficult people conform due to informational social influence as people looked for others for the right answer.

Question 6

Manipulated unanimity

Answer 6

Asch made the confederates not all say the same answer meaning they broke unanimity. The results show that when one confederate gave the correct answer on all the critical trials conformity dropped to 5% instead of being 32% on the original trials.

Question 7

Results and conclusions

Answer 7

Over the 12 critical trials about 75% of participants conformed at least once in the experimental condition. 50% of participants conformed in at least 50% of the 12 critical trials. On average 37% of participants conformed in each of the 12 trials . It was seen on 23% of trials.

Question 8

Generalisability

Answer 8

Lacks generalisability as the sample was only white, American males from one area who were all a certain age. We cannot use the results on different ages, genders or ethnicities. However these were probably the only students he could use as many women didn’t go to university and black people didn’t either. Also white males were seen as superior so he may of thought these were the best people to sample and to receive genuine results from. Women were also seen as conformist in society. He also wanted no extraneous variables so this may a reason why his sample was all the same.