Variables Affecting Confomity

Question 1

Describe the Asch experiment.

Answer 1

• Asch placed a naïve participant in a group with several confederates.
• The group was asked to look at a ‘standard line’ and then decide individually which of three other ‘test lines’ was the same length as the standard line, without discussing it with one another.
• They then gave their responses one at a time out loud. The answer was obvious; however, the confederates gave the wrong answer on 12 of the 18 trials.
• The naïve participant was the last, or second to last, one to give their response so they heard the rest of the groups’ responses before giving their own.

Question 2

Give some statistics / percentages about the Asch experiment.

Answer 2

• The chance of making a genuine mistake on this task was only 1% but 33% of the responses given by participants were incorrect.
• 75% of participants conformed on at least one of the 18 trials. 5% of participants conformed on every trial but 25% did not conform on any trial.

Question 3

What were the reasons given by the participants at the end of the experiment?

Answer 3

The majority of participants who had conformed had continued to trust their own judgment but gave the same answer as the group to avoid disapproval (normative social influence).

Question 4

How did group size affect conformity? Give statistics.

Answer 4

Asch changed the sizes of the groups:

• Groups with one confederate had a conformity rate of 3%.
• Groups with two confederates had a conformity rate of 13%.
• With three confederates conformity rose significantly to 32%.

It appears that we can resist the influence of two people fairly easily, but three people are much harder to resist. However, there was little change to conformity once groups have reached four confederates. Group size only has an effect up to a certain point, because conformity does not seem to increase in groups larger than four, this is considered the optimal group size for conformity.

Question 5

How did task difficulty affect conformity?

Answer 5

• Asch made the test lines more similar in length and so it was much harder to judge the correct answer than it was in the original study.
• Under these circumstances the level of conformity increased, possibly because informational social influence was starting to have an impact.
• This is because when we are uncertain, we look to others for confirmation. The more difficult the task became the greater the informational social influence and the conformity.

Question 6

How did unanimity affect conformity?

Answer 6

• When the group was unanimous conformity increased.
• However, when only one other person in the group gave a different answer from the others, meaning that the group was not unanimous, conformity dropped.
• Asch found that even the presence of just one confederate who went against the majority reduced conformity from 33% to 5%.
• Even when the confederate gave the wrong answer conformity dropped to 9%.
• If there is somebody else who refuses to conform, it makes it easier for us to resist conformity.

Question 7

What are the advantages of the Asch experiment?

Answer 7

+ Other research supports the findings of Asch (1956). Tanford and Penrod (1986) discovered that in the 95% of cases they looked at the vote of the first member of a jury matched the final outcome of the case. This strongly indicates that conformity is affecting the decisions reached by juries.

+ Another study that supports Asch (1956) is Linkenbach and Perkins (2003). They found that adolescents exposed to the simple message that the majority of their peers did not smoke were subsequently less likely to take up smoking.

+ Asch (1956) methodology was a laboratory experiment. This means his study was very well controlled and so extraneous variables (any variable other than the independent variable which affects the dependant variable) would not have affected the validity (whether or not the study measures what it intends to measure) of the study.

Question 8

What are the negatives to the Asch experiment?

Answer 8

• The task given to the participants, to match line lengths, is artificial and unlikely to occur in real life. Conformity usually takes place in a social context, often with people we know rather than strangers. The study therefore lacks mundane realism (it does not reflect real life) and ecological validity (cannot be generalised to real life).
• This study has gender bias because the sample only contained males, this means that the study may not represent female behaviour.
• The study was conducted 80 years ago and it is possible that people may have been more conformist then. Post-war attitudes that people should work together and consent rather than dissent may have affected the results. Perrin and Spencer (1980) repeated the Asch (1951) study in the UK using engineering students. They only got one conforming result out of 396.