Evaluation of explanations of conformity Flashcards
Evidence to Support Normative Social Influence
One study that supports normative social influence as explan= is Asch (1951) line experiment.
In the experiment there was an obvious answer to a line judgment task.
Asch (1951) found that the judgements of individuals are affected by majority opinions, even when the majority are obviously wrong.
Asch found a 37% conformity rate to wrong answers, with 75% of participants conforming to at least one wrong answer.
Asch interviewed participants after the experiment and asked them to explain why they agreed with the wrong answer.
Some of the participants admitted that they felt self-conscious giving the right answer and were afraid
of disapproval.
This supports normative social influence because despite knowing that the answer was incorrect, participants conformed in order to be accepted and have approval from the group – they had a desire to be liked. Also, when Asch asked the participants to write down their answers, conformity rates fell to 12.5%. As most participants performed publicly, but not privately, it suggests that they were motivated by Normative Social Influence.
Evidence to support Informational Social Influence
One strength of ISI as an explan= there is evidence from Lucas et al (2006)- asked students to give answers to mathematical problems that were either easy or difficult. The findings showed that there was greater conformity to incorrect answers with the more difficult questions, particularly with participants who rated their maths ability as poor. This supports the idea that people conform in situations where they feel they don’t
know the answer so look to other people and assume they know better than us demonstrating
the desire to be righ
Individual differences are ignored
However despite research supporting both explanations for conformity, there are limitations regarding their universality. Limitation= they do not affect everyone’s behaviour in the same way
and therefore it fails to account for individual differences. For example, in terms of
Informational Social Influence, Asch (1955) found that students were less conformist than other participants. For example, when Perrin and Spencer replicated Asch’s original study with engineering students in the UK they also found less conformity. It may be that they felt more confident in their precision of measuring lines. This suggests people who are more knowledgeable and/or more confident are less influenced by the apparently ‘right’ view of the majority. This is a limitation because there are differences in how individuals respond to Informational Social Influence and these must be taken into account in order to gain a full picture into explanations for conformity- lacks TV
