social influence - Asch research Flashcards
what was Asch’s sample
122 male student participants from America
What was Asch’s aim
He wanted to examine the extent to which social pressure from a majority, could affect a person to conform.
outline Asch’s method
Asch used a line judgement task, where he placed on real naïve participants in a room with seven confederates (actors), who had agreed their answers in advance. The real participant was deceived and was led to believe that the other seven people were also real participants in a vision test. The real participant always sat second to last.
In turn, each person had to say out loud which line (A, B or C) was most like the target line in length.
how many trials were there in total?
18
how many trials did the confederates give the wrong answer to - what were these trials called
12 critical trials
on average, what % did the real pps conform to the incorrect answer during the critical trials
36.8%
what % of pps conformed at least once during the critical trials
75%
what % never conformed during the critical trials
25%
what control group did Asch use and what were the findings
control group where one real pps gave an answer without any confederates, found less than 1% gave an incorrect answer.
what did Asch find when he interviewed the pps after the study
most pps knew their answer was incorrect, but went along with the group to fit in
what could Asch conclude was the reason why pps conformed
normative social influence - in order to be accepted and avoid rejection.
what was a limitation of Asch’s sample
Asch used a biased sample of 123 male students from America. Therefore, we cannot generalise the results to other populations, for example female students, and we are unable to conclude if female students would have conformed in a similar way to male students. As a result Asch’s sample lacks population validity and further research is required to determine whether males and females conform differently
How is Asch’s study low in external validity
Asch’s experiment has low levels of ecological validity. Asch’s test of conformity, a line judgement task, is an artificial task, which does not reflect conformity in everyday life. Consequently, we are unable to generalise the results of Asch to other real life situations, such as why people may start smoking or drinking around friends, and therefore these results are limited in their application to everyday life.
in the group size variation, what was the minimum number of confederates needed for conformity, and what did conformity rise to
3, 31.8%
in the writing answers variation what % did conformity fall to
12.5%
