Mori and Arai (2010) Flashcards
What was the aim of Mori and Arai’s study?
To reproduce the Asch experiment without the need for confederates.
What was their procedure?
104 Japanese undergraduates were put in the same gender groups of 4. Participants sat around a table with the seat order randomised lines matched a stimulus in. The same comparison and stimulus lines were used as in Asch’s study.
Participants wore sunglasses, supposedly to prevent glare with the third participant in each group, which made them see a shorter or longer comparison line to the other three participants on 12 out 18 ‘critical’ trials. The other 6 trials were neutral where participants all saw the same thing.
Participants then answered a questionnaire containing 22 questions taken from the interview Asch used with his participants. Among the questions were ones asking the participants if they were suspicious about any part of the research process and whether they were influenced by other answers if not confident in their own judgements.
What were the findings of this study?
The majority participants who saw the correct sized comparison lines answered incorrectly 8.2% of the time with no significant gender differences.
The 26 minority participants who saw the different sized comparisons answered incorrectly 19.6% of the time.
However, female minority participants answered incorrectly 28.6% of the time while for males it was only 5% of the time.
With females, the results were similar to Asch’s with the minority conforming to wrong answers on the 12 critical trials on average 4.41 times but male conformity was not noticeable. This is noteworthy as in Asch’s study, all the participants were male.
Why is this study important?
Normative social influence - why do people conform to an answer when they know it is wrong.
