Social Influence - Variables Affecting Conformity Flashcards
Explain the key study for variables affecting conformity.
Procedure + Findings
Asch (1956):
Asch asked student volunteers to take part in a visual discrimination task, although, unbeknown to these volunteers, all but one of the participants were really confederates.
Procedure:
In total, 123 male US undergraduates were tested. Participants were seated around a table and asked to look at three lines of different lengths. They took turns to call out which of the three lines they thought was the same length as a ‘standard’ line, with the real participant always answering second to last.
Findings:
On the 12 critical trials, the average conformity rate was 33%.
Asch also discovered individual differences in conformity rates. 25% never conformed on any of the critical trials, 50% conformed on six or more of the critical trials and 5% conformed on all of the critical trials.
To make sure the lines were unambiguous, Asch conducted a control condition without the distraction of confederates giving wrong answers. He found that participants made mistakes about 1% of the time, although this cold not explain the relatively high levels of conformity in the main study.
When Asch interviewed his participants afterwards, he discovered that the majority of participants who conformed had continued privately to trust their own perceptions and judgements, but changed their public behaviour, giving incorrect answers to avoid disapproval from other group members (i.e. they showed compliance).
What are the three variables affecting conformity?
Group size:
Asch found that there was very little conformity when the majority consisted of just one or two confederates.
However, under the pressure of a majority of three confederates, the proportion of conforming responses jumped up to about 30%.
Further increases in the size of the majority did not increase this level of conformity substantially, indicating that the size of the majority is important but only up to a point.
Unanimity of the majority:
The confederates unanimously gave the same wrong answer. When the real participant was given the support of either another real participant or a confederate who had been instructed to give the right answers throughout, conformity levels dropped significantly, reducing the percentage of wrong answers from 33% to 5.5%.
If the lone ‘dissenter’ gave an answer that was both different from the majority and different from the true answer, conformity rates dropped to 9%, nearly as much of a fall when the dissenter gave the same as the participant.
This led Asch to conclude that it was breaking the group’s unanimous position that was the major factor in conformity reduction.
The Difficulty of the Task:
In one variation, Asch made the differences between the line lengths much smaller (so that the ‘correct’ answer was less obvious and the task much more difficult). Under these circumstances, the level of conformity increased.
Lucas et al (2006) investigated this further and found that the influence of ask difficulty is moderated by the self-efficacy of the individual. When exposed to maths problems in an Asch-type task, high self-efficacy participants remained more independent than low-efficacy participants, even in high-difficulty tasks.
This shows that situational differences (task difficulty) and individual differences (self-efficacy) are both important in determining conformity.
Evaluation / Discussion of Asch’s study
PROBLEMS WITH DETERMINING THE EFFECT OF GROUP SIZE:
Bond (2005) suggests a limitation of research in conformity is that studies have used only a limited range of majority sizes.
Asch had concluded that a majority size of three was a sufficient number for maximal influence and therefore most subsequent studies using the Asch procedure have used three as the majority size. Bond points out that no studies other than Asch have used a majority size greater than nine, and in other studies of conformity the range of majority sizes used is much narrower, typically between two and four.
Bond suggests this means we know very little about the effect of larger majority sizes on conformity levels.
INDEPENDENT BEHAVIOUR RATHER THAN CONFORMITY:
In Asch’s study, only a third of trials where the majority unanimously gave the same wrong answer produced a conforming response.
So in two thirds of these trials the participants resolutely stuck to their original judgement despite being faced with an overwhelming majority expressing a totally different view.
Asch believed that, rather than showing human beings to be overly conformist, his study had actually demonstrated a commendable tendency for participants to stick to what they believed to be the correct judgement, i.e. to show independent behaviour.
CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN CONFORMITY:
Research suggests that there are important cultural differences in conformity, and we might therefore expect different results dependent on the culture in which a study takes place.
Smith et al (2006) analysis the results of Asch-type studies across a number of different cultures. The average conformity rate across the different cultures was 31%. What was interesting was that the average conformity rate for individualist cultures (e.g. in Europe and the US) was about 25%, whereas for collectivist cultures in Africa, Asia and South America it was much higher at 37%.
Markus and Kitayama (1991) suggest that the reason that a higher level conformity arises in collectivist cultures is because it is viewed more favourably, a form of ‘social glue’ that binds communities together.
