Social influence (Asch-1951) Flashcards
What was Asch’s goal in the conformity experiment?
His goal was to discover whether social influence can conform someone to matching a social norm
How was the experiment set up?
Asch’s had created a vision test where participants were to compare line lengths. Asch chose 50 male college students to participate. However, he had put confederates (actors), who had already submitted their answer in advance, in the sample of students to test whether the real participants would conform to the majority voted answer, even if it was wrong. The real participant would vote their answer 2nd to last and each participant would say their answer out loud.
What were Asch’s results?
Asch had recorded that the real participant had conformed to the incorrect answer on 32% of the critical trials, 74% conformed on at least 1 of the critical trials while 26% never conformed.
What were Asch’s conclusions?
He concluded that the real particpants would conform to the majority vote as they may have not wanted to stand out. He later interviewed the real participants that had conformed and they had said they knew their answer was wrong but they wanted to fit in and not be ridiculed.
How can we evaluate Asch’s experiment?
An assessment of how biased or immoral or reliable, etc, the experiment was. For instance, Asch had used a biased sample of 50 male college students, therefore we cannot generalise this to the rest of the world, e.g. would this apply for female students and to what extent would they conform. This experiment used by Asch does not reflect everydaylife choices questioning its reliability. Finally, Asch’s experiment can be seen as morrally questionable as the real participants are bening unvoluntarily decieved, however, this was necessary to conduct the test.
