social influence - asch

Question 1

What was the aim of Asch’s conformity experiment?

Answer 1

to see if people will conform to a majority, even with an obvious answer.

Question 2

Outline the procedure of Asch’s conformity experiment

Answer 2

• 1950s
• 50 American males took part.
• Participants were tested in groups of 6 to 8
• Each group was presented with a standard line and three comparison lines
• Participants had to say aloud which comparison line matched the standard line in length
• In each group there was only one genuine (naive) participant the remaining were
  confederates
• The genuine participant was seated second to last and did not know the other participants were fake participants
• The fake confederate participants all gave the same incorrect answer
• Confederates were told to give the incorrect answer on 12 out of 18 trails

Question 3

Outline the findings of Asch’s conformity experiment

Answer 3

36.8% of the answers given by the participants were conforming answers. 75% of participants conformed at least once. 5% conformed every time.
Asch also used a control group, in which one real participant completed the same experiment without any confederates. He found that less than 1% of the participants gave an incorrect answer.

Question 4

What was the conclusion of Asch’s conformity experiment?

Answer 4

People will conform to a majority, even if that majority is obviously wrong.
Afterwards, participants said they conformed in order to fit in, which is an example of normative social influence.

Question 5

Outline the group size variation findings of Asch’s conformity experiment

Answer 5

Asch found that a majority of 3 (e.g. 4 against 1) causes conformity to rise significantly, to around 30%. Adding people onto the majority did not make much difference.

Question 6

Outline the unanimity variation findings of Asch’s conformity experiment

Answer 6

Asch found that introducing a dissenting confederate, who disagreed with the others and gave the right answer, caused conformity to drop to 5%. This freed the participants from the pressure to conform. Furthermore, in another variation, one of the confederates gave a different incorrect answer to the majority. In this variation conformity still dropped significantly, by this time to 9%.

Question 7

Evaluate Asch’s conformity experiment - ecological validity

Answer 7

The task Asch used was insignificant (judging line lengths) and not a reflection of real-life conformity, so there were no real consequences of disagreeing with the group. This does not tell us much about conformity in everyday situations (lacks external/ecological validity- how far the research task and results can be applied to real life)

Question 8

Evaluate Asch’s conformity experiment - population validity

Answer 8

Asch only tested American men of undergraduate age, so it is hard to generalise the results to other populations, including women and people from countries with different values to America (lacks population validity)

Question 9

Evaluate Asch’s conformity experiment - temporal validity

Answer 9

The results may be specific to that era- 1950s USA may have been more conformist due to the fear of communist spies (it was the height of the Cold War, McCarthyism) , so people did not want to appear different. The results may be different if the study was repeated today (lacks temporal/historical validity).

Question 10

What sort of experiment was Asch’s study?

Answer 10

Lab

Question 11

Outline the task difficulty variation of Asch’s experiment

Answer 11

In Asch’s original experiment, the correct answer was always obvious. In one his variations he made the task more difficult, by making the difference between the line lengths significantly smaller. In this variation Asch found the rate of conformity increased, although he didn’t report the percentage. This is likely to be the result of informational social influence, as individuals look to another for guidance when completing the task.

Question 12

Evaluate Asch’s conformity experiment - research support

Answer 12

One strength of Asch’s research is it has been supported by other studies.

Lucas et al (2006) asked participants to solve easy and hard maths problems and found participants conformed to the wrong answer more often when the problems were hard.

This supports Asch’s claim that task difficulty is one variable that effects conformity