Conformity: Asch's Research

Question 1

Key terms:

Answer 1

Confederate = An individual in an experiment who is not a real ppt and has been instructed how to behave by the researcher.
Individualist culture = A group of people who value the rights and interests of the individual. This results in a concern for independence and self-assertiveness. People tend to live in small families unlike collectivist societies. This is typical of Western cultures, in contrast to the non-Western cultures that tend to be collectivist.
Collectivist culture = A group of people who place more value on the ‘collective’ rather than on the individual, and on interdependence rather than on independence. The opposite is true of individualist culture.

Question 2

What was the procedure?

Answer 2

Asch (1951, 1955) tested conformity by showing ppts 2 large white cards at a time. On one card was aa ‘standard line’ and on the other there were 3 comparison lines. One of the 3 lines was the same length as the standard line and the others were always substantially different. The ppt was asked which of the 3 lines matched the standard line.
The ppts in this study were 123 American male undergraduates. Each naive ppt was tested individually with a group of between 6-8 confederates. The naive ppt was not aware that the others were confederates.
On the first few trials the confederates all gave the right answers but then they started making errors. All the confederates were instructed to give the same wrong answer. Altogether each ppt took part in 18 trials and on 12 ‘critical trials’ the confederates gave the wrong answer (a trial was one occasion identifying the length of a standard line)

Question 3

What were the findings?

Answer 3

~ Ppts gave a wrong answer 36.8% of the time
~ Overall 25% of the ppts didn’t conform at all. This means that 75% did conform at least once.
~ Asch effect has been used to describe this result - the extent to which ppts conform even when the situation is unambiguous.
~ When ppts were interviewed afterwards, most said they conformed to avoid rejection (NSI).

Question 4

Asch’s variations

Answer 4

Asch was further interested in the conditions that might lead to an increase/decrease in conformity,he carried out some variations of his original procedure.

1. Group size = Asch increased the size of the group by adding more confederates, thus increasing the size of the majority. Conformity increased with group size, but only up to a point, levelling off when the majority was greater than 3 (conformity to the wrong answer was 31.8% here).
2. Unanimity = The extent to which all the members of a group agree. In Asch’s studies, the majority was unanimous when all the confederates selected the same comparison line. This produced the greatest degree of conformity in the naive ppts. When a confederate was introduced who disagreed with the others sometimes, conformity was reduced by a quarter because someone else was dissenting so the naive ppt felt they could behave more independently.
3. Task difficulty = Asch’s line-judging task is more difficult when it becomes harder to work out e correct answer. Conformity increases because naive ppts assume that the majority is more likely to be right. This suggests that ISI plays a greater role when the task becomes harder as the situation is more ambiguous.

Question 5

Evaluation of Asch’s conformity experiments

Answer 5

• Perrin & Spencer (1980) repeated Asch’s original study with engineering students in the UK. Only 1 student conformed in a total of 396 trials. It may be that engineering students felt more confident about measuring lines than the original sample and therefore less conformist. But it’s also possible that the 1950s (when Asch carried out his research) were an especially conformist time in America, so it made sense to conform to established social norms. But society has changed a great deal since then and people could possibly less conformist today. This means that the Asch effect is not consistent across situations or even time, so it isn’t a fundamental feature of human behaviour.
• Ppts knew they were in a research study and may simply have gone along with the demands of the situation (demand characteristics). The task of identifying lines was relatively trivial and therefore there was really no reason not to conform. Although ppts were part of a group, it didn’t really resemble groups that we’re part of in everyday life - according to Fiske (2014), ‘Asch’s groups were not very groupy’. The artificaial situation and task is a limitation because it means findings do not generalise to everyday situations.
• Only men were tested by Asch. Other research suggests that women might be more conformist, possibly because they’re more concerned about social relationships (and being accepted) than men are (Neto 1995). The men in Asch’s study were from the US, an individualist culture. Similar conformity studies conducted in collectivist cultures (such as China) have found that conformity rates are higher - this makes sense because such cultures are more oriented to group needs (Bond & Smith 1996). This shows that conformity levels are sometimes even higher than Asch found and Asch’s findings may only apply to American men so it can’t be applied or generalised to the wider population.
• Ethical issues such as deception.