Conformity Flashcards
Define Social influence
Occurs when ones emotions, opinions and behaviours are affected by others
Define conformity
- When a person changes their behaviours or opinions as a result of real or imagined pressure from another person or group of people
What was Asch’s conformity study?
Asch asked student volunteers to take part in a visual discrimination task, although, unbeknown to these volunteers, all but one of the participants were really confederates (i.e., colleagues) of the investigator. The real purpose of the study was to see how the lone ‘real’ participant would react to the behaviour of the confederates.
Procedure:
In total, 123 male US undergraduates were tested. Participants were seated around a table and asked to look at three lines of different lengths. They took turns to call out which of the three lines they thought was the same length as a ‘standard’ line with the real participant always answering second to last.
Although there was always a fairly obvious solution to this task, on 12 of the 18 trials (i.e. the critical trials) the confederates were instructed to give the same incorrect answer. Asch was interested in whether the ‘real’ participants would stick to what to what they believed to be right, or cave into the pressure of the majority and go along with its decision.
What were the findings from Asch’s conformity study?
- The naïve participant gave the wrong answer 36.8% of the time.
- 75% conformed to at least one wrong answer, and 25% never conformed.
- 50% conformed on six or more of the 12 critical trials.
- 5% conformed on all 12 of the critical trials.
- The control group had an error rate of 0.04% (3 mistakes out of 720 trials), which shows how obvious the correct answers were.
Post-experiment interviews were conducted from Asch’s study & and found three reasons for conformity, what were they?
The majority of participants conformed publicly to avoid disap-proval from other group members but continued privately to trust their own perceptions and judgements.
- Some participants believed that their perception must actually be wrong and so conformed.
- Some participants had doubts concerning the accuracy of their judgements
What were the conclusions of Asch’s study?
Conclusion:
Judgements of individuals are affected by majority opinions, even when the majority are obviously wrong.
There are big individual differences in the amount to which people are affected by majority influence.
As most conformed publicly, but not privately, it suggests that they were motivated by normative social influence ( conformity to avoid rejection)
What are the three variables that Asch found affect conformity?
- Group Size
- Unanimity of the majority
- The difficulty of the task
How was group size a variable affecting conformity?
Asch found very little conformity when the majority consisted of only one or two confederates
Further increases in the size of the majority is important but onlu up to a point
How was unanimity of the majority a variable affecting conformity?
Asch wanted to know if the prescence of another, non-conforming person would affect the naive participants conformity.
To test this, intorduced a new confederate who disagreed with the others, sometimes new confederate gave correct answer & sometimes gave the wrong one
What did Asch find in the unanimity of the majority study?
Found that presence of the dissenting confederate giving the correct answer meant that conformity was reduced to 5% & 9% when dissesnting confederate gave a different wrong answer
Dissenter enabled participant to act more independently.
How did the difficulty of the task affect conformity rates?
- In one variation- Asch made differences beween the line lengths much samller (so that the ‘correct’ answer was less obvious & task much more difficult)
- Under these circumstances level of conformity increased
How did Lucas et al investigate the difficulty of the task within conformity further?
Found that influence of the task is moderated by the self efficacy (what they believe they can do/confidence)
When exposed to maths problems in an Asch type task, high self efficacy participants (ppts who were confident in their own abilities) remained more independant than low self efficacy participants
What did Lucas’s research of the difficulty of the task show?
Situational differences (task difficulty) & Individual differences (self-efficacy) are both important in determining conformity
Give one limitation of Asch’s research.
- The task & situation were artificial
- Ppts knew they were in a research study & may have simply gone along w what was expected (demand characteristics)
- The task of identifiying lines was relatively trivial & therefore there was really no reason not to conform
- Also, according to Susan Fiske (2014),
- Asch’s group was 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 to real world situations, especially those where the consequences of conformity might be important.
Give another limitation of Asch’s study.
- The ppts were American men
- Other research suggests that women may be more conformist, possible because they are concerned about social relationships & culture- (Neto 1995)
- Furthermore the USA is an individualstic 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 conformoity rates are higher (Bond & Smith 1996)
This means that Asch’s findings tell us little about in women & people from some cultures
Generalisibility is limited
