Social influence- Asch essay plan Flashcards
Who did Asch conduct his study on and what did he tell them they were doing?
-123 male college students from 3 US colleges
-A vision test
What did Asch do to test conformity?
-A line judgement test
-He placed a naive participant in a room with 7-9 Confederates
-The naive participant was deceived
-Each person had to say what they thought the answer was out loud
What was the aim of Asch’s study?
-He wanted to see if the real participant would conform to the majority even when the answer was incorrect
What were the results?
-Real conformed to incorrect answers- 27%
-All participants conformed at least once- 74%
-Never confirmed- 26%
Why did Asch interview the participants after?
-To find out why they conformed
-Most said they knew their answers were incorrect but wanted to fit in (NSI)
Define Normative social influence
-Conforming so you feel accepted in a group and avoid punishment
Explain why a lack of population validity is a limitation
P- lack of population validity
Was not representative of the entire population as they only used American male college students
L- Findings cannot be generalised to women and they may not conform in the same way men do
L- More research would need to be carried out to find out if they do or not
Explain why the study having a low ecological validity is a limitation
P- Low ecological validity
E- Artificial task to measure conformity
E- Judging line length is not a task people do every day
L- Problematic because resulst cannot be generelized to other real-life situations involving conformity, if the study was done using a more realistic situation the results may have been different
Why was the study being unethical a limitation?
P- Unethical
E- The study was conducted in 1951, ethical guidelines were introduced in 1953 and it would have broken these guidelines
E- Did not respect the volunteers as he deceived them
L-Participants were not protected from psychological
harm as they may have been stressed about disagreeing with the majority
Counter- However, deception was necessary to produce valid results
Why was supporting research a strength of Asch’s study?
P-Supporting study
E-Lucas et al (2006)- asked participants to solve asy+hard math problems and found that people conformed to the wrong answer when it was hard
L- Supports Asch’s claim that task difficulty is one variable that affects conformity
Counter- However, he found that conformity is also more complex, Individual factors such as ability influence conformity
-Something Asch did not research
How many trials were there in total?
18
What was a critical trial and how many were there?
-When the Confederates gave the wrong answer
-12
What were the variables that affected conformity?
-Group size- An increase in group size does not mean an increase in conformity, the size of the majority is only important up until a certain point
-The unanimity of the majority- breaking the group’s unanimous position was a major factor in conformity reduction
-Task difficulty- situational differences (task differences )
and individual differences are both important in determining conformity
