Social Influence (Asch's Line Experiment) Flashcards
Who did Asch’s Line Experiment and in what year??🖇️
Solomon Asch in 1951
Summarise Asch’s Line Experiment!
- One naive ppt in a group of confederates
- Ppts given 4 lines. 3 of which were comparison lines and 1 a stimulus line
- Ppts told to guess which of the 3 was the same length as the one of the left.
- Line lengths were very clearly different
- Confederates told to deliberately answer wrong
- Due to group pressure, naïve ppt would occasionally answer wrong due to conformity
What’s the main statistic that came from Asch’s Line Experiment??🔢
75% of ppts answered wrong atleast once
Discuss the generalisability and reliability of Asch’s Line Experiment!
Not generalisable (all ppts white American males in high school)
Nelo (1995) -> Women are more conformist as they’re more concerned about social relationships & perceptions than men
High reliability (Controlled environment so can be replicated)
Describe the Application and Validity of Asch’s Line Experiment!
Low application (task wasn’t representative of real-life situations & group wasn’t representative of who we’d be around irl)
Internal validity (Controlled conditions)
Discuss the Ethics of Asch’s Line Experiment!
Deception (given wrong aim that it was a vision test)
Privacy & Confidentiality
Protection & Harm (subject to embarrassment)
What type of bias is Asch’s Line Experiment subject to??📄
Culture bias -> done with a collectivist culture (they do everything together so are more likely to conform)
What were Asch’s 3 variables??
- Group size
- Unanimity
- Task difficulty
What did Asch do to reduce unanimity (agreed by everyone) to the group as one of his variables??
He added a dissenter which reduced conformity to less than a quarter of the original level
How did group size impact the conformity??
2 confederates made it 13.6% and 3 confederates rose it to 31.8% of conformity to the wrong answer
What is the evidence for Asch’s experiment being low application??
Neto (1995) suggested that women might be more conformist due to possibly being more concerned about social relationships.
What is a strength of Asch’s experiment??
Asch was correct about task difficulty impacting conformity:
Lucas et al (2006): Students were given math problems ranging in difficulty and conformed more to wrong answers when the questions were harder
What is a counterpoint of Lucas et al (2006) supporting Asch’s experiment??
It showed that conformity was related to confidence (high confidence = low conformity)
Shows that individual-level factors interact with situational ones but Asch didn’t investigate individual factors.
