Conformity: Asch’s Line Study and his variations Flashcards
what was the aim of Asch’s line study?
to find out the extent to which people would conform to an obviously wrong majority consensus.
Asch’s line study procedure
- 123 male participants were told they were taking part in a study of visual perception.
- Participants were put in groups with between 7 and 9 confederates
- Each participant completed 18 trials where they would be shown sets of lines and asked which one was closest to the original line.
- In the 12 critical trials, the confederates would all give the same wrong answer (ppt was asked last)
- The control group for this experiment consisted of 36 participants. In the control trials, participants were asked the same question as above – but this time alone.
results of Asch’s line study
*participants conformed to the incorrect group consensus 32% of the time.
*75% of participants conformed to at least one incorrect answer
*5% of participants conformed to every incorrect answer
what 3 explanations did conforming ppts give for conforming?
Distortion of perception
Distortion of judgement
Distortion of action
what is distortion of perception?
A small few subjects actually came to perceive the majority estimates as correct and were completely unaware of their mistake.
what is Distortion of judgement?
The majority of conforming subjects were aware of their mistake but did not trust their own judgement and instead decided that the majority was correct.
what is distortion of action?
These subjects were aware of – and trusted – their judgement that the majority was wrong but nevertheless gave the wrong answer so as not to stand out and be different.
evaluation point: practical applications
Asch’s experiments demonstrate the extent to which humans follow the herd. This may have practical applications. For example, understanding the influence of conformity may encourage scientific researchers to think outside of the current paradigm and come up with revolutionary discoveries.
evaluation point: lacks ecological validity
Guessing the length of lines is a specific and unusual task. So it is not clear the extent to which Asch’s findings generalise to conformity in the real world.
evaluation point: gender bias
All the participants in Asch’s study were male, so it is not clear whether the findings are valid in females as well.
evaluation point: ethical concerns
Asch told participants they were taking part in a study of visual perception, and thus did not give informed consent to the actual study
how did unanimity affect this study?
Participants’ conformity declined from 32% to 5.5% when one ‘partner’ confederate was instructed to give the correct answer and go against the incorrect answer of the majority.
how did group size affect Asch’s line study?
tended to increase conformity – up to a point. In trials with just one confederate and one participant, conformity rates were low. Increasing the number of confederates to 2 also increased conformity to 12.8% and increasing the number of confederates to 3 increased conformity even further to 32% (the same as the original study). However, adding extra confederates (4, 8, or 16) beyond this did not increase conformity.
how did task difficulty affect asch’s line study?
Increasing the difficulty of the task was also found to increase conformity. Asch adjusted the lengths of the lines in the study above to make it either more easy or more difficult to see which line was closest in length to the original line. If the difference between the incorrect answer and the correct answer was very small (and thus harder to notice), participants were more likely to conform to the incorrect answers of the majority.
