Conformity - Asch's research

Question 1

1. What is a naive participant?
2. What is a confederate?

Answer 1

1. An individual who has no previous experience of the procedure and is unaware of the research purpose.
2. An individual in an experiment who is not a real participant and has been instructed to behave a certain way by the researcher.

Question 2

What was the aim of Asch’s line study?

Answer 2

• To test the extent to which participants would conform to the majority.

Question 3

Who took part in the study?

Answer 3

• 123 White American male undergraduate university students

Question 4

What happened in the study?

Answer 4

1. Participants were shown a card with a standard line and a card with 3 comparison lines.
2. One of the 3 lines was the same length as the standard line. The other two were clearly wrong (unambiguous)
3. The participants were asked which line matched the standard line.
4. There were 18 trials altogether. During the first 6 trials, the confederates gave the right answer. After this, they all gave the same wrong answer for 12 trials.

Question 5

What were the findings of the study?

Answer 5

• Naive participants gave a wrong answer 36.8% of the time.
• 75% of participants conformed at least once
• 25% did not conform at all
• Participants revealed they conformed to avoid rejection

Question 6

Discuss Asch’s three variations:
1. Group size
2. Task difficulty
3. Unanimity (agreement by all people involved)

Answer 6

1. With 3 confederates conformity rose to 31.8% - This addition made little difference, suggesting that there is no need for a majority of more than 3 to influence others to conform.
2. Asch increased the difficulty by making the stimulus line and comparison lines similar in length. Conformity levels increased under these conditions (ISI)
3. Asch found that in the presence of a non-conformer, conformity was reduced by 25%. This enabled the naive participants to behave more independently. (suggests the influence of the majority depends to some extent on the group being unanimous)

Question 7

(AO3) What is a weakness of this study?
(1)

Answer 7

A child of its time:

-Perrin and Spencer (1980) repeated Asch’s original study with engineering students in the UK. Out of 396 trials, only one student conformed. This may be because engineering students felt more confident about measuring lines than the original sample and therefore were less conformist.

• The study was carried out in 1950s America, which was an especially conformist time, and therefore it made sense to conform to establish social norms. But society has changed a lot since then, and people are possibly less conformist today.
• This is a limitation because it means the Asch effect is not consistent across situations and may not be consistent across time, and so it is not a fundamental feature of human behaviour.

Question 8

(AO3) What is a weakness of this study?
(2)

Answer 8

Artificial situation and task:

• Participants knew they were involved in a study and may simply have gone along with the demands of the situation (demands).
• Identifying lines was a relatively trivial task and therefore the was no reason not to conform.
• Fiske (2014) said that Asch’s groups were not very groupy, therefore the participants didn’t resemble the groups that we are a part of in everyday life.
• This is a limitation because it means the findings do not generalise to everyday situations, especially where the consequences of conformity might be more important.

Question 9

(AO3) What is a weakness of this study?
(3)

Answer 9

Limited application of findings:

• Neto (1995) - Only men were tested, and other research suggests that women might be more conformist, possibly because they are more concerned about social relationships than men are.
• Bond and Smith (1996) - The men were from America, which is an individualist culture (people are more concerned about themselves rather than their social group). Similar conformity studies conducted in collectivist cultures (China) have found that conformity rates are higher, which makes sense because these cultures are more oriented to group needs.
• This shows that conformity levels are sometimes even higher than Asch found. Asch’s findings may only apply to American men because he didn’t take gender and cultural differences into account.