Social Influence : Asch’s Research Of Conformity

Question 1

Why is the lack of ecological validity a limitation of Asch’s research?

Answer 1

Since Asch’s experiment took part in a laboratory and required his participants to make judgment on lengths of lines in front of a group of strangers, both the task and the research setting were highly artificial. The participants may be unrepresentative of how people naturally behave outside of the lab. Moreover, Asch’s confederates are not trained actors, giving the investigation an artificial setting. If the participants guess correctly as to what the confederates are they are more likely to change their behaviour and guess the aim of the experiment. This means Asch’s research could have been undermined by demand characteristics, which presents an additional issue for the study’s ecological validity.

Question 2

What is a limitation of Asch’s research?

Answer 2

Temporal validity is a limitation of Asch’s research. When Perrin and Spencer replicated the experiment 30 years later, using engineering students, only one student conformed in a total of 396 trials. The inability to replicate this experiment suggests Asch’s research may have only been applicable in his time. This means that the high level of conformity in Asch’s original experiment was most likely consequences of the cultural context in the 1950s, as the pressure for conformity was much higher, in opposition to in 1980s where individualism was preferable.

Question 3

What is an advantage of Asch’s method?

Answer 3

It provided an effective way of investigating if and why people will conform in unambiguous situations. Asch’s argued that the problem with ambiguous tasks could be the result of participants conforming because they were genuinely uncertain therefore look to others for guidance, this is ISI. The conformity Asch observed was therefore the result of the influence of others because of the difficulty of the task. Asch made the line judgement task to represent an unambiguous situation, which is evident due to the low rate of incorrect answers in the control condition. Therefore conformity in his task was a result of the influence of others and not because of the challenge of the task. Supported by interviews with participants agreeing with this prediction. This suggests the participants were influenced by NSI as they conformed in order to be like the group not because the group was right. Moreover because Asch’s study was conducted in a laboratory with a clear operationlized procedure, it was replicable with many participants giving him significant amounts of data on conformity in unambiguous situations. This experiment gave Asch a “baseline” measure of conformity which meant Asch was then free to manipulate other variables like group size and task difficulty.

Question 4

Outline the procedure of Asch’s original experiment.

Answer 4

The line judgement task. Requires participants to make a simple perceptual judgement, where they were asked to compare a single line with a group of three lines and decide which of the three was closest in size to the single line.

Question 5

What were the two conditions Asch investigated on in the procedure?

Answer 5

1. Control conditions= participants were asked to complete the line judgement by themselves.
2. Experimental control= participants were asked to complete the trial with a group of 7 other confederates (pretending to participate)

Question 6

What was the main findings from Asch’s experiment?

Answer 6

The main finding was that in the control condition, less than 1% of responses were incorrect but this number rose to 36.8% in the experimental condition. Asch concluded that the much higher error in experimental control was due to the judgement of other “participants” (I.e. confederates) in the game. At least 75% of people conformed at least once, 25% didn’t conform at all. 95% gave different responses to confederates at least once.

Question 7

What is another conclusion of Asch’s experiment?

Answer 7

Overall 75% of the participants conformed at least once but 25% never conformed . Therefore 95% of the participants gave a different response to the confederates, suggesting that although conformity had an impact it was not overwhelmingly powerful.

Question 8

What THREE variables did Asch measure?

Answer 8

1. Unanimity
2. Task Difficulty
3. Group Size