Aschs eval Flashcards
Ethical issues
Asch’s research increased our knowledge of why people conform, including the variables that affect the degree to which people are likely to conform (i.e. group size, unanimity, task difficulty). This knowledge could help avoid mindless destructive conformity by showing how people can be more independent in their behaviour. The knowledge gained could benefit a huge range and number of people or even society in general.
However, this knowledge was gained through deception. The participants were deceived because they believed the research concerned line length judgements when in fact it was about conformity. Also, they thought the other people in the group were participants like themselves when they were really confederates.
When participants are deceived it means they do not understand what is really involved in the research, so they cannot make an informed decision to take part. This means they could be unwittingly exposed to negative psychological effects (e.g. stress, anxiety, humiliation). Even so, the degree of any psychological harm experienced by the participants was fairly minor (mostly mild embarrassment) and dealt with by thorough debriefing.
Therefore the benefits of Asch’s research outweigh the ethical costs because the potential practical benefits are great and the stress caused to participants was minimal.
Artificial situation and task
One limitation of Asch’s research is that the task and situation were artificial.
Participants knew they were in a research study and may simply have gone along with what was expected (demand characteristics).
The task of identifying lines was relatively trivial and therefore there was really no reason not to conform. Also, according to Susan Fiske
(2014), ‘Asch’s groups were not very groupy’, i.e. they did not really resemble groups that we experience in everyday life.
This means the findings do not generalise to real-world situations, especially those where the consequences of conformity might be important.
Limited application
Another limitation is that Asch’s participants were American men.
Other research suggests that women may be more conformist, possibly because they are concerned about social relationships and being accepted (Neto 1995). Furthermore, the US is an individualist culture i.e. where people are more concerned about themselves rather than their social group). Similar conformity studies conducted in collectivist cultures (such as China where the social group is more important than the individual) have found that conformity rates are higher (Bond and Smith 1996, see page 123 for a discussion of individualist/collectivist).
This means that Asch’s findings tell us little about conformity in women and people from some cultures.
Research support
One strength of Asch’s research is support from other studies for the effects of task difficulty.
For example, Todd Lucas et al. (2006) asked their participants to solve
‘easy and ‘hard’ maths problems. Participants were given answers from three other students (not actually real). The participants conformed more often (i.e. agreed with the wrong answers) when the problems were harder.
This shows Asch was correct in claiming that task difficulty is one variable that affects conformity.
Counterpoint However, Lucas et al’s study found that conformity is more complex than Asch suggested. Participants with high confidence in their maths abilities conformed less on hard tasks than those with low confidence.
This shows that an individual-level factor can influence conformity by interacting with situational variables (e.g. task difficulty). But Asch did not research the roles of individual factors.
