asch study, variables affecting conformity Flashcards
what’s the Aim of asch study?
Asch wanted to examine the extent to which social pressure from a majority could cause a person to conform.
what was the procedure of asch study
Asch’s sample consisted of 50 male students from Swarthmore College in America, who believed they were taking part in a vision test. Asch used a line judgement task, where he placed one real naïve participant in a room with seven confederates (actors), who had agreed their answers in advance. The real participant was deceived and was led to believe that the other seven people were also real participants. The real participant always sat second to last.
In turn, each person had to say out loud which line (A, B or C) was most like the target line in length
The correct answer was always obvious. Each participant completed 18 trials and the confederates gave the same incorrect answer on 12 trials, called critical trials. Asch wanted to see if the real participant would conform to the majority view, even when the answer was clearly incorrect.
Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the majority view.
what were the findings
On average, the real participants conformed to the incorrect answers on 32% of the critical trials. 74% of the participants conformed on at least one critical trial compared to 0.04% in a control group, and 26% of the participants never conformed. Asch also used a control group, in which one real participant completed the same experiment without any confederates. He found that less than 1% of the participants gave an incorrect answer.
Asch interviewed his participants after the experiment to find out why they conformed. Most of the participants said that they knew their answers were incorrect, but they went along with the group in order to fit in, or because they thought they would be ridiculed.
what was the conclusion of Asch study
This confirms that participants conformed due to normative social influence and the desire to fit in.
Asch study Evaluation
Generalisability
Demand characteristics
Ethics
Generalisability
Asch used a biased sample 50 male students from Swarthmore College in America and Therefore, we cannot generalise the results to other populations, for example female students, and we are unable to conclude if female students would have conformed in a similar way to male students. As a result Asch’s sample lacks population validity and further research is required to determine whether males and females conform in the same way.
demand characteristics
Asch’s study may have suffered from demand characteristics. This is because Asch’s confederates were not actors, so may have acted differently to the normal participants, causing the participants to pretend to conform because they thought that that was what was expected of them in the experiment, reducing the study’s generalisability and internal validity.
Ethics
Asch’s research is ethically questionable. He broke several ethical guidelines, including: deception and protection from harm. 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 and 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.
Variables affecting conformity
Group size
Unanimity
Task difficulty
Group size?
Asch found only 3% conformity with one confederate, 13% with two confederates, and 33% with three confederates, not increasing past 33% as the group became larger.
unanimity?
If the confederate gives the right answer just before the participant’s turn to answer, conformity drops to 5.5%. This rate of conformity stayed the same even if the confederate gave a different wrong answer to the rest of the group.This may be because another person going against the majority gives the participant emotional support to dissent.
Task difficulty
Asch made the difference between the line lengths smaller, and found that conformity increased when the task was more difficult. This is the informational social influence effect.
