Conformity

Question 1

What is Conformity?

Answer 1

A change in a person’s behaviour or opinions as a result of real or imagined pressure from a person or groups of people.

Question 2

Asch’s Research

Answer 2

• a procedure to assess to what extent people will conform to the opinion of others
• 123 American men were tested, each participant saw two white cards, the line X is the standard line. The lines A B and C are the comparison lines - one of the comparison lines are always the same size as X, participants would say out loud which line was most like X
• Groups of 6-8 and only one was a genuine participant and the others were all confederates to Asch - they all gave the same incorrect answer
• The genuine participants agreed with the confederates 36.8% of the time - there were individual differences, 25% of the participants never gave a wrong answer

Question 3

Group size

Answer 3

Asch increased the size of the group by adding more confederates, thus increasing the size of the majority. Conformity increased with the group size, but only up to a point, levelling off when the majority is greater than 3.

Question 4

Unanimity

Answer 4

The extent to which all the members of a group agree. In Asch’s studies, the majority was unanimous when all the confederates selected the same comparison line. This produced the greatest degree of conformity in the naive participants.

Question 5

Task Difficulty

Answer 5

Asch’s line-judging task is more difficult wen it becomes harder to work out the correct answer. Conformity increased because naive participants assume that the majority is more likely to be right.

Question 6

Evaluation

Answer 6

Support:
- support from other studies for the effects of task difficulty
- Todd Lucas asked their participants to solve easy and hard maths problems - participants were given answers from 3 other students - participants conformed more often when the problems were harder
- This shows Asch was correct in claiming that task difficulty is on variable that affects conformity
Contradiction:
Lucas et al’s study found that conformity is more complex than Asch suggested - participants with high confidence levels in their maths abilities conformed less on hard tasks
- This shows than an individual-level factor can influence conformity by interacting with situational variables - but Asch did not research the roles of individual factors.
Limitations:
- The task and situation was artificial - participants knew they were in a research study and may simply have gone along with what was expected (demand characteristics)
- Susan Fiske says that ‘Asch’s groups were not very groupy’ i.e. they did not really resemble groups that we experience in everyday life
- This means that the findings do not generalise the real-world situations, especially those where the consequences of conformity might be important
- Another limitation is that Asch’s participants were American men - Other research suggest that women may be more conformist possibly because they are concerned about social relationships and being accepted into society
- This means that Asch’s findings tell us little about conformity in women and people from some cultures