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 personal group of people

Question 2

what is a baseline study ?

Answer 2

the one against which all the later studies are compared to

Question 3

what variables did Asch investigate with his baseline study ?

Answer 3

group size
unanimity
task difficulty

Question 4

what are the details of group size being investigated by Asch ?

Answer 4

• with 3 confederates, conformity to the wrong answer rose to 31.8% however the presence of more made little difference
• suggests that most people are very sensitive to the views of others because just one or two confeds were enough to sway decision

Question 5

what are the details of unanimity being investigated by Asch ?

Answer 5

• introduced a confed who disagreed with the others
• in one he gave a correct answer, in the other he gave a different wrong one
• the genuine participant conformed less often in the presence of a dissenter
• this remained true even when the dissenter disagreed with the genuine participant
• suggests that the influence of the majority depends to a large extent on it being unanimous
• reduced 32% to 5%

Question 6

what are the details of task difficulty being investigated by Asch?

Answer 6

• increased the difficulty of the line-judging task by making the stimulus and comparison lines more similar
• became harder for the genuine participants to see the differences between the lines
• conformity increased. Situation is more ambiguous when the task is harder, unclear to participants what the right answer is
• ISI

Question 7

Evaluation - what does an artificial situation and task do to Asch’s research?

Answer 7

• participants knew they were in a research study so may have gone along with what was expected (demand characteristics)
• task of identifying lines was relatively trivial and therefore there was really no reason to not conform
• ‘Asch’s groups were not very groupy’ they did not resemble groups we see in every day life
• cannot generalise the findings to real life situations especially where conforming has important consequences

Question 8

Evaluation - what does a limited application do to Asch’s research?

Answer 8

P: cultural and gender bias
E: only American men tested
E: - other research suggests women may be more conformist bc/ they are more concerned about social relationships and being accepted
- America is an individualist culture
- similar studies in collectivist cultures found higher conformity rates
L: this means that Asch’s findings tell us little about conformity in women and people of other cultures

Question 9

Evaluation - what does research support do for Asch’s baseline study? (+counter)

Answer 9

• studies for effects of task difficulty
• asked ppts to solve ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ math problems
• ppts were given answers from three other students (not real)
• ppts conformed more (agreed w wrong answers) when problems were harder
• Asch was correct in claiming that task difficulty affects conformity
  COUNTER
• found that conformity is more complex than Asch suggested
• ppts with high confidence in their maths ability conformed less on harder tasks than those with low confidence
• shows that an individual-level factor can influence conformity by interacting with situational variables

Question 10

Evaluation - what do ethical issues do to Asch’s study?

Answer 10

• naive participants were deceived because they thought the confeds were also naive participants