Conformity- ASCH

Question 1

What did Asch do

Answer 1

(1951)
Asked participants to identify lines of the same length.
-2 were always substantially different
-1 was always clearly wrong

• 123 American male undergraduates
• naive participant wasn’t aware of confederates
• 18 trials and 12 critical trials where all confeds gave wrong answer

Question 2

What did asch find

Answer 2

Naive participant gave wrong answer 36.8% of the time.

Over all 25% of the ps did not conform to any trials.

At least 75% conformed at least once.

Ps stated that they conformed to avoid rejection (normative social influence)

Question 3

Asch variation 1. Group size

Answer 3

Found that with three confederates, conformity rose to 31.8%

Adding more confeds made little difference

Question 4

Asch variation 2. Unanimity

Answer 4

Presence of dissenter - disagreed with the confeds

Reduced conformity to 25%

Presence of dissenter allowed naive p to behave more independently

Question 5

Asch variation 3. Task difficulty

Answer 5

Conformity increased under difficult tasks

-informative social influence

Question 6

Evaluation- child of its time

Answer 6

Perrin and Spencer (1980)
Repeated it with 396 and found that less conformity.
-may just have been a more conforming society in 1950s America but also,
-students were engineering so may have been more confident

-limitation as the findings were not consistent across time

Question 7

Evaluation - artificial task and situation

Answer 7

Participants were aware they were in a research study ( demand characteristics!)

Limitation the findings do not generalise to everyday situations, where the consequences of conformity may be more important

Question 8

Evaluation- limited application of findings

Answer 8

Only men!!! Externally invalid!

Also men from individualist culture ( more concerned with their self)

Results may have been different in collectivist culture (China)

Results are not able to be generalised