Social influence - conforminty Flashcards
What does confomity mean?
A change in a persons behaviour or opinions as a result of real or imagined pressure from a person or group of people
What did Asch do to group size and why? What was the result of doing this?
Asch increased the size of the group by adding more confederates, thus increasing the size of the majority. Conformity increased with group size, but only up to a point, leveling of when the majority was greater than three.
What is unanimity?
The extent to which all members of a group agree.
In Asch’s studies, the majority was unanimous when all the confederates selected the same comparison line.
This produced the greatest degree of conformityin the naive participants.
What was task difficulty in Asch’s research and what happened to conformity due to this?
Asch’s line-judging task is more difficult when it becomes harder to work out the correct answer.
Conformity increased because naive participants assume that the majority is more likely to be right.
What does the specification say about conformity?
Variables affecting conformity including group size, unanimity and task difficulty as investigated by Asch.
What did we learn from Soloman Asch’s research 1951?
Soloman Asch’s research has had a considerable impact on our understanding of conformity.
We often ‘go along’ with other people in our everyday social lives.
We agree with their opinions and change our behaviour to ‘fit in’ with theirs.
What was Asch’s procedure for his baseline test 1951?
123 American men were tested, each one in a group with other participants.
Each participant saw two large white cards on each trial.
The line X on the left-hand card is the standard line.
The lines A, B and C are the three comparison lines.
One of the comparison line sis always clearly the same length as x, the pther two are substantially different.
On each trial the participants had to say (out loud) whcih of the comparison lines was the same as x.
What was the psychical arrangement of the participants in the study by Asch 1951?
The participants were tested in groups of 6 to .
Only one was a genuine (naive) participant, always seated either last or next to last in the group.
The others were all confederates of Asch - that is, they all have the same (incorrect) scripted answers each time.
The genuine participant did not know the others were ‘fake’ participants.
What were the baseline findings of Asch’s comparison line research 1951?
On average, the genuine participant agreed with the confederates incorrect answers 36.6% of the time.
There were individual defferences, 25% of the participants never gave a wrong answer.
What was the point of Asch’s baseline procedure 1951?
To asses to what extent people will conform to the opinions of others, even in a situation where the answer is certain.
What did Asch do to his study in 1955?
Asch 1955 extended his baseline test to investigate the variables that might lead to an increase or decrease in conformity.
What did Asch want to know about group size and what did he find out?
Asch wanted to know weather the size of the group would be more important than the agreement of the group.
To test this he varied the number of confederates from one to 15.
Asch found a curvilinear relationship between group size and conformity rate.
Conformity increased with group size But only up to a point.
This suggests that most people are very sensitive to the views of others because just one or two confederates was enough to sway opinion.
What did Asch find out about the presence of a non-conforming person?
He introduced a confederate who disagreed with the other confederates.
In one variation of the study this person gave the correct answer and in another variation he gave a different wrong one.
The genuine participant conformed less often in the presence of a dissenter.
The rate decreased to less than a quater of the level it was when the majority was unanimous.
The presence of of a dissenter appeared to free the naive participant to behave more independently.
Asch wanted to know wheather making the task harder would affect the degree of conformity how did he do this and whatwas the result?
He increased the difficulty of the line-judging task by making the the stimulus line and the comparison lines more similar to each other in length.
This meant it became harder for the genuine participants to see the differences between the lines.
Asch found that conformity increased.
It may be that the situation is more ambiguous when the task becomes harder - it is unclear tot he participants what the right answer is.
In these circumstances, it is natural to look to other people for assistance
What was one limitation of Asch’s research?
One limitation of Asch’s reserach is that the task and situation were artificial
What could have happened with the participants in Asch’s investigation that would have been a limitation?
Participants knew they were in a research study and may simply have gone along with what was expected (demand characteristics)
What did Susan Fiske say about Asch’s research in 2014?
According to Susan Fiske 2014 ‘Aschs groups were not very groupy’ eg they did not really resemble groups that we experience in everyday life.
This means the findings do not generalise to real-world situations, especially those where the consequences of conformity might be important.
What was another limitation of Asch’s research? (About Americans)
Another limitation is that Asch’s participants were American men.
Other researchers suggest that women may be more conformist, possibly because they are concerned about social relationships and being accepted.
What typre of culture are Americans that makes limitations for Asch’s study?
The US is an individualist culture ie were more concerened about themselves rather than their social group.
Similar studies conducted in other cultures such as what where the social group is what?
Similar conformity studies conducted in collectivist cultures such as china where the social group is more important than the individual.
What is one strength of Asch’s1951 study (to do with support)? Give one example and how it showed Asch was correct.
One strength of Aschs research is support from other studies for the effects of task difficulty.
Eg Todd Lucas et al, 2006 asked their participants to solve ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ maths problems.
Participants were given answers from three other students (not real) The participants conformed more often (ie agreed with the wrong answers) when the problems were harder.
This shows Asch was correct in claiming that task difficulty is one variable that effects conformity.
What did Lucas et al’s study find that didn’t support Asch’s study?
However Lucas et al’s study found that conformity is more complex than Asch suggested.
Participants with high confidence in their maths abilities conformed less on hard tasks than those with low confidence.
This shows that an individual-level factor can influence conformity by interacting with situational variables (eg task difficulty).
But Asch did not research the roles of individual factors.
