social influence Flashcards
what is meant by conformity?
- a change in a persons behaviour or opinions as a result of real or imagined pressure from a person or group of people
what is a confederate?
- an individual in a study who is not a real participant and has been instructed how to behave by the researcher
what were the aims and background of Solomon Asch’s baseline (original) procedure?
- Solomon Asch (1951) devised a procedure to measure the extent that people conformed to the opinions of others, even in situations when the other answers were clearly wrong
what was Asch’s procedure?
- he used 123 American male undergraduates that were tested individually, sitting last or next to last in a group of 6-8 confederates
- they were shown two large cards, on one was a ‘standard line’ and the other 3 were comparison lines, with one of the lines matching the ‘standard line’ and the other 2 being different
- each group member stated which of the 3 lines they thought matched the standard
- there were 18 trials involving different pairs of cards
- on 12 of these trials the confederates all gave the same clearly wrong answer
what were the findings of the baseline study?
- he found that the naïve participants conformed 36.8% of the time, showing a high level of conformity when the situation is unambiguous (simple)
- there were individual differences, 25% of the ppts never gave a wrong answers
- 75% conformed at least once
what other variables did Asch investigate?
- group size
- unanimity
- task difficulty
what was the procedure and findings for the size of the group?
procedure- Asch varied the number of confederates in each group between 1 and 15 (total group size being 2 and 16)
findings- if there were 2 confederates, conformity to the wrong answer was 13.6%, when there were 3 confederates conformity rose to 31.8%
- above 3 confederates, conformity rate levelled off, adding more than three confederates made little difference
what was the procedure and findings for unanimity?
procedure- Asch introduced a dissenting confederate- sometimes they gave the correct answer and sometimes a different wrong answer (but always disagreed with majority)
findings- in the presence of a dissenter, conformity reduced on average to less than a quarter of the level it was when the majority was unanimous
- conformity reduced if dissenter gave right or wrong answer
explanation- having a dissenter enabled the naïve ppts to behave more independently
what was the procedure and findings for the task difficulty?
procedure- Asch made the line-judging task harder harder by making stimulus line and comparison lines more similar in length
- thus it was difficult to see differences between the lines
findings- conformity increased
explanation- the situation is more ambiguous, so we are more likely to look to others for guidance and to assume they are right and we are wrong
what is one strength of Asch’s procedure?
P- Easy to replicate
E- Asch’s use of a lab experiment and simple tasks has made the study easy to repeat over the next 75 years
E- even though modern society has changed a lot since the 1950’s, the replicability of the study allows this change to be documented
what is another strength of his procedure?
P- one strength is that there is other evidence to support Asch’s findings
E- Lucas et al (2006) asked ppts to solve easy and hard maths problems, ppts were given answers that were falsely claimed to be from 3 other students
E- this shows Asch was correct that task difficulty is one variable affecting conformity
- the ppts conformed more often (agreed with the wrong answers), when the problems were harder
what is one limitation of his procedure?
P- one limitation is that the situation and task was artificial
E- ppts knew they were in a research study (demand characteristics), the task was trivial and there was no reason not to conform
E- this means the findings do not generalise to everyday life
what is another limitation of his procedure?
P- one limitation is that the procedure cannot be generalised
E- this is because Asch carried out his study with 123 American males and it was conducted in the year 1955
E- this means that the findings cannot have temporal and population generalisability as it cannot be generalised to females or more modern times
