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
-Correct answers was always clear
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 participants 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
When did Asch conduct his study?
1951
What did Asch conclude?
-People will conform to the majority even when the situation is unambiguous
-people conform due to NSI (fitting in with the group) and ISI (because they believe the group is better informed than they are)
-conformity to the majority is common but not inevitable 25% of participants did not conform on any of the trials, i.e. they showed resistance to social influence in the form of group pressure
How did Asch investigate the variable of group size?
-With one confederate, conformity dropped to 3% of the critical trials
-With two confederates, conformity was 12.8%
-With three confederates, conformity rose to 31.8% which shows that conformity peaks at 3 once majority pressure is established
How did asch investigate unanimity?
-one of the confederates to give the correct answer (i.e. the non-conforming answer) throughout, resulting in conformity dropping to 5%
-This finding shows that support from another person makes it easier to resist the pressure to conform to the majority
-In another variation, one of the confederates gave a different incorrect answer to the majority, resulting in conformity dropping to 9%
-Disrupting group unanimity is therefore one way to reduce conformity
How did Asch investigate task difficulty?
-ask was made more difficult by minimising the difference between the length of the lines (task becomes more ambiguous)
-rate of conformity when faced with the ambiguous task increased
-when a task is difficult (ambiguous) and people conform to the incorrect answer, it can be explained by ISI
-hen a task is easy (unambiguous) and people conform to the incorrect answer, it can be explained by NSI
